I Watch Too Much TV (or Consuming Media In 2011 By a Techie Dork With Too Much Time)

 Apple, iPad, iPhone, Movies, Television  No Responses »
Jan 152011
 

For Christmas, I’d been saving up some money and splurged on a new TV. My previous TV was an 8 year old read projected HDTV. It still worked great (and has since become the bedroom TV), but had problems with glare — it was unwatchable during sunny afternoons (which ruined many an afternoon of college football). It was also enormous.

My new TV is the same size, but it’s a nice flat, LED LCD TV. It’ll use less power, it’s small and is nicely mounted on the wall rather than taking up half of the living room, and does not have the glare problems the previous TV did. Oh, and it does the fun modern stuff like use HDMI and stream Pandora and all that jazz.

So, for a little bit of money, I was able to upgrade my TV, regain a bunch of space in my living room, clean up my entertainment center from 5 or 6 sets of component and optical cables, to a nice and tidy few feet of real estate, less cables, and a very different way of watching TV.

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Let’s set aside the easy stuff. Hooked up via component cables to my TV are the Xbox 360 and Wii. My Xbox 360 is an old model that doesn’t support HDMI (which would have reduce yet another set of cables). The Xbox 360 used to be my streaming Netflix player and DVD player, which for any of you who have one, know that you get great picture and sound, balanced with a ridiculously loud fan noise.

Next up is the new Blu-ray player (which I got cheap with my TV). As someone who just didn’t think it mattered enough for me to go to Blu-ray, I was mostly wrong. It’s a remarkably better picture than DVD, but I’m not sure, in the long run, that it matters …

… because of the interwebs and cable.

The other two items hooked into my TV are the Comcast HD DVR (HDMI) and the nice, new Apple TV (a Christmas gift from my wonderful girlfriend, also hooked up via HDMI).

The DVR is pretty self-explanatory. We pay too much for cable, but in return, we have a ton of HD programming. It’s basically the live sports, network TV, and occasional cable movie player. Live, we really only watch sports. Celtics/Sox/Pats — stuff you can’t watch streaming (at least not legally, or in good quality). Recorded, we watch a bunch of shows (How I Met Your Mother, Parks & Recreation, Community, etc). And, occasionally, we record a movie off of HBO or watch one on On Demand.

The Apple TV is basically the streaming Netflix player. It’s so tiny, and so quiet, and has a much easier to navigate Netflix experience than the Xbox. At this point, I think 90% of our Netflix movies are TV or movies we stream, rather than the physical DVDs (which let me downgrade to the 2-out plan, upgrade to Blu-ray, and reduce our overall bill).

But, the other thing the Apple TV lets me do is take advantage of all of the DVDs I’ve amassed over the 12 years or so that I’ve had a device that would play DVDs. I’ve got a full bookshelf of TV shows and movies that, by and large, site unwatched unless we get the urge to run through a series of Veronica Mars or Buffy. The real reason that we don’t watch move of them is purely that it’s a pain in the ass. You’ve got to go grab the DVD (and if it’s a TV season, all 6 of them), throw them in the DVD player, sit through the menus, watch a few episodes, switch discs, sit through more ads and menus, etc.

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The Apple TV obviates that. It’s not perfect, but with a spare computer, and a bit of time, you can make your own On Demand service. I’ve slowly been ripping TV shows and movies from my collection, throwing them onto some storage, and then using the Apple TV to stream them. Want to watch a particular episode of The Simpsons? Just turn on the Apple TV (which takes zero time), click it, and seconds later you’re watching it.

If you’re a media-holic like I am, it’s pretty close to life-changing. When Netflix movies show up now (on DVD), I’m more likely to throw it in the computer, rip it, and then watch it on the Apple TV. Why? One, I can get that done while I’m watching a bit of TV, or eating dinner. When it’s done ripping, I don’t have to sit through any of the stupid ads or menus. I can just watch the movie. And, if I get tired, I just pause it, go to bed, and can pick it up in the same exact spot tomorrow. (Better yet, if I grab another $100 Apple TV, I can pick up streaming it in the bedroom.)

All the pluses, the sunshine, puppy dogs, and happiness in mind, the ripping process isn’t easy. And it’s time-consuming. And, depending on your view of things, not strictly legal. (In my mind, this is pretty much fair-use. I either own or rent the movie. If I own it, I can do what I please. If I rent it, I don’t keep it. I watch it and delete it.)

Someone smart will combine Handbrake and MetaX or Subler into a nice app that rips, tags, and sticks your content right into iTunes. Today, it’s pretty ugly, especially for TV shows.

But, if you’ve got that spare computer and some hard disk space, it’s worth it. You just do it as a background process, throwing a DVD (or ripping a few to your drive), compressing them, and sticking them into iTunes. You can watch them on your TV, sync them to your iPad/iPhone, and slowly work your way towards cutting the cord with the cable company.

I’ve reached the point where, I think, if NESN or Comcast SportsNet were available outside of the cable company, I could cut the cord. ESPN streams over the Xbox (though not everything); most network shows are on Netflix or via the iTunes Store; almost all movies are covered via Netflix, the iTunes Store, or VUDU (the HD streaming service that syncs right to my TV and looks damn good).

If Hulu Plus were to come to Apple TV (or do AirPlay via the iPad), I could replace the $100+ cable bill with $25-30 of Hulu/Netflix/occasional iTunes purchases and watch everything I watch today. That’s probably where we’re headed, and the media companies are going to have to do it right, or they’ll lose like the record companies did.

In any event, I’m pretty happy with the way things ended up, and can’t recommend the Apple TV enough, even if you just want a small, quiet, streaming Netflix player.

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 12:03 pm

Getting Organized with OmniFocus

 Apple, General, iPad, iPhone  No Responses »
Aug 242010
 

My job tends to be a little … disorganized. It’s incredibly interrupt driven (we’re an internet company, and I end up working on projects that are either very time-sensitive from a “need to get this done now” perspective or from a “uh oh, many many customers are in need of a fix” perspective.

In both cases, that means whatever I was working on gets dropped, back-burnered, ignored, whatever. I used to deal with that by leaving emails flagged in my inbox, writing emails or post-its to myself, or, wellll … just forgetting what I was working on before.

In any event, it was not a particularly good way to manage my time.

People have been hyping the “Getting Things Done” methodology for the last few years; it’s been almost impossible to avoid the hype in the tech corners of the internet. It seems to be a pretty good philosophy for keeping track of what you’re working on and working on the right stuff. In a nutshell, you either:

  • Do it right now
  • Ignore it completely
  • Put it somewhere that you’ll know to do it later
  • Make someone else do it

Nothing groundbreaking, but a good framework.

The problem was, I was doing that all through email, which meant that (on good days) my inbox would be flooded with 10 or 12 flagged items (reminders to do stuff), with more stuff piling on top. Manageable, but not a particularly good way to do stuff (and it ensured that certain things would never get done until someone came and bitched at me).

Then OmniFocus came out for the iPad and I saw some videos and I said “a-ha!” This is what I need to manage all of the crap that flows into my inbox. I grabbed the Mac download and tried it out for two weeks. I spent a couple of hours on a Saturday morning throwing a bunch of my to-do items into the inbox, organizing them, setting up projects, and adding due dates.

It took a week or so to get the hang of it.

And that’s what the folks at The Omni Group expect. They give you a two week trial so that you’ll dump your life into it, get the hang of it, and then need to pay them a reasonably high price (but, so far, worth it) to keep it going.

Now, every morning, I run through my to-dos for the day. Anything that isn’t pressing, I’ll either take the due date off of completely (so that it’s not in my face), or I’ll push it back to an appropriate day. As stuff pops up in my inbox, I grab it and throw it into OmniFocus and then clear it out of my email.

It’s a nice system.

It goes a lot deeper than that, but even if you just use it for breaking down your tasks, that’s probably worth it.

Rather than having 20 flagged emails in my inbox, I head to work and look at my work to-do list, and I’ve got the list of things that are past due, due today, and due over the next few days. When someone asks me “hey, do you have time to work on X“, I can give them a quick rundown of what’s on my plate and ask them which stuff can get pushed off.

Throw in the fact that I’m also managing all of my personal tasks (buying groceries, remembering to clean the kitchen floor, calling to get my wisdom teeth out), and you can pretty quickly see how the value adds up. Oh, and fun stuff like recurring tasks … say, posting to a blog that you’ve left wilting on the vine.

OmniFocus just happens to be the app I ended up on. There are others out there (as well as a million and one ways to do it using Outlook, Gmail, text files, etc).

This tutorial is what got me hooked. If you have 30 minutes, see if the philosophy at least makes sense.

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 7:54 am

Travel With the iPad – 10 Days On The Road

 Apple, iPad  No Responses »
May 012010
 

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago — I just hadn’t had a chance to edit it until now.

Sitting about 6 miles above the Earth in a cramped airplane seat, I’m banging out a summary of my experience traveling with the iPad. This is the wifi-only iPad, one that I’ve had since day 1. I’m using the Apple bluetooth keyboard, which makes typing something a bit longer like this significantly easier.

The Ugly

  • Oleophobic, my ass. The screen, because of it’s size and how often you’re touching it, picks up fingerprints like crazy. Since it’s bigger than the iPhone, you can’t just run your sleeve across it to clean it. You best get used to the screen being covered in fingerprints (it’s really ok) or you better bring a cloth.
  • The Apple Case. I actually like the Apple case more than most. It’s small and lets you prop up the iPad in the different ways you might want to use it. However, it collects dirt and grime like a vacuum. It’s horrific.

The Bad

  • No multitasking. Now, while this gets resolved this fall, it is a bit of a pain. It’s not really a huge pain in the ass, like you might guess. It’s just an annoyance. You’re watching a movie and want to pop over and check some email–you have to change apps. Can’t just let the movie’s audio play in the background. Want to click visit a site or search for something you saw in Twitteriffic or NetNewsWire? Have to stop using the app, switch over, then switch back. It’s not great. But, it only affects you maybe 5% of the time. The rest of the time you’re happily watching a movie or reading a book and not planning to do many things at once.
  • No wireless podcatching. This, to me, has been the far more egregious failure than the lack of multitasking across the iPhone and iPad. The iPad (as I’ll get to later) has really proven to be ideal for travel: listening to podcasts while reading a book or reading some downloaded feeds. Except, after 24 hours of flying to Australia, I’ve listened to my podcasts. Over the next few days, if I’m lucky enough to find a wifi signal, I want to grab some updated podcasts to listen to on the plane home. Does iTunes know my podcasts and automatically sync them? No. I have to manually search through the iTunes Store looking for the ones I want to listen to, find the new episode, and download it. Why can’t the iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) be smart enough to know what podcasts I listen to (it can get the list from my iTunes when I cable-sync), give me an option to update those, and download 4 or 5? For a device that’s so wonderful to use, this is one of the worst experiences on the iPad.
  • App pricing. I’m not sure how I feel on app pricing, quite frankly. I don’t mind paying a bit more for an iPad app than it’s iPhone counterpart. But some of the new apps (non-universal) are just money grabs (ahem, SplashID). There’s no new functionality. In some cases, it’s just a layout change. Paying 2 or 3x as much to have a second iPad-only app is something I think we’ll see die over time. When that happens, I think app pricing will move off of the “naughty” list onto the “nice” list.
  • Really poor cookie retention. I tend to use reasonably secure passwords, and I’ve relied on PwdHash in my browser to make that easy. But, once I get the password in there, it’s nice for the browser to keep me logged in. Safari on the iPad seems to expire cookies really fast. Though maybe I’m dumb and missed a setting somewhere

The Good

  • The battery life. Holy Jebus. A computer that–using it off-and-on to watch movies, read books, read downloaded feeds, play games–lasts an entire trip to Australia. Literally. I watched two episodes of Doctor Who (love the new Doctor, by the way), read most of War of the Worlds, watched a movie and a half, played a bunch of Enigmo, and read through about 2000 synced articles in NetNewsWire. Most of that while listening to music or podcasts. And I arrived in Australia (a 5 hour flight from Boston to Dallas, 4 hour flight Dallas to LA, and 16 hour flight from LA to Melbourne) with about 20% of my battery remaining. On the flights back I’ve read through another 2000 articles, watched another movie, read through the NY Times articles, and now typed this out. The battery is currently at 56%. Unbelievable.
  • The size. It’s small enough that I just through the iPad and bluetooth keyboard in my carry-on. No laptop bag. It hung out with my water bottle and sweatshirt. No special case. Didn’t have to take it out for security (except in Sydney, I think, where they might not have known what it was). Popped it up on my lap comfortably. Used it in a sleeping back propped on it’s side to watch half of a movie when I was still on East Coast time and everyone else was asleep. Read through a couple of books in iBooks the same way. Just really, really easy to bring around. I would have hated bring my laptop (or a netbook and it’s power adapter) to a place like Wilson’s Promontory in Australia. The iPad was perfect.
  • The screen. As bad as the screen is at picking up fingerprints, it really does shine for video. I’d ripped some of my own movies that I had gotten recently and not watched yet — watching them on the iPad was almost as good (especially from 18 inches away) as watching them on the big screen. Certainly a better screen than the one sitting in the seat-back in front of me.

    Now, I’ve had a couple of bad screen experiences (sitting in bright sunlight, you’re screwed due to reflections and due to the fact the iPad will heat up too much to use). That’s going to make beach going a challenge for most folks. (though I’m pasty white and spend 99% of my time under a parasol, so maybe not for me …)

  • iBooks. You know, I didn’t really think I’d do much with it. I’d been reading Sherlock Holmes in Stanza on the iPhone. I grabbed it and War of the Worlds in iBooks, and it was just a great way to kill time when trying to adjust to a 14 hour time difference. It’s also pretty much the one app were portrait mode is far better than landscape. If I’d ever really found a reliable wifi signal in Australia (poor Aussies and their horrible broadband), I probably would have grabbed a new release book and read that. But then I wouldn’t be typing this.
  • The interface. There’s no mistakes. There’s no lost keystrokes or misinterpreted mouse clicks. Never has the interface lagged behind what I am trying to do, or never have I waited while an hourglass or beach ball spun and the UI tried to catch up. You don’t know how big that is until you realize you’ve spent your entire trip doing stuff, rather than waiting for stuff.

In the end, the iPad is just a phenomenal travel tool because of the convenience. Everything about it (well, except the fingerprint magnet of a screen and the dust magnet of a case) is design to make it easy to bring with you and do whatever. You never need to charge it (I charged it twice in 10 days). You can get through airport security without unpacking it (generally). You can watch TV, movies, read a book … basically whatever you want. If you have wifi (or the new 3G model), you can do even more. (Or, when someone figures out how to tether it to an non-jailbroken iPhone.)

 Posted by Ryan Toohil at 6:50 pm
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