Author: rakesh

This weekend, I set my sister up with some whole home audio courtesy of her iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and a couple of Airport Expresses (Lifehacker’s how to).  One Airport Express and speaker pair went in the kitchen but the cables were a huge mess:

• the Airport Express and speakers each needed power
• there was the cable connecting the speakers together
• there was the cable connecting the speakers to the Airport Express
• add to that the existing power cords for a digital photo frame and a cordless phone charger power cord

This is a good time to explain this particular sister of mine: I call her the Indian Martha Stewart (before Martha Stewart went to jail — ie when she was just known for being an freakishly obssessive homemaker). Yup, that’s an accurate description of my sister. So I knew that left alone, the mess of cables wasn’t going to survive more than a few days.

I found a solution in a wicker basket.  Here were the ingredients for my solution:

• squid power supply (Amazon link)
• a wicker basket (for some reason, my sister has a cabinet full of these things)
• some hefty scissors
• a bunch of cable ties

1. First, this particular wicker basket had a bunch of internal compartments.  I remove most of the walls that created these compartments with the scissors.  

2. Removing the compartments made it so I could rest the squid power supply inside the thing. The tentacles plugs were essential — with them, I could bend the outlets around the inside of the basket.

3. I cut square openings (about 1.5″ by 1.5″) on the left, right and back of the wicker basket.

4. Then I positioned everything inside and outside the basket and cable-tied all the loose cables, plugged everything in, and pushed everything inside the basket as low-down as possible.  Done!

The Container Store should be making and selling this thing!

Photographs of the final product:

 

I think it helped that the wicker basket I had stuffed all the cables inside of had this steel frame.  Here’s a shot inside the basket…

 

One of the square openings I made on the left side of the basket:

And the one on the left side of the basket:

Visiting my sister, I noticed that all their icons had disappeared from the dock on their iMac.  I asked what had happened, and my brother-in-law said, “That Mac is just strange!”

After thinking about it for a bit I figured it out: one of my sister’s children drags the icons off the dock because of the very cool poof-of-smoke sound and animation.  Ha!

Since he just giggled when I asked him to stop doing it, I figured I needed a way to actually lock the dock.  It turns out that this is possible with OS X’s parental controls, BUT you can’t apply parental controls to the admin account.  And of course, switching between users being what it is in OS X, creating an another account wasn’t likely to work for my sister’s family.

So I found a useful piece of software called SuperDocker by Ed Shiro that has a simple checkbox to lock the dock. Works perfectly!

In short, I’m not surprised at all.

I’ve had several e-mail exchanges in the last month regarding Boxee and what I consider to be the market’s second attempt at digital media adapters (the first was marked by devices from companies like BroadQ, Digital 5, Mediabolic, Oregan Networks).  And in those e-mails, I pretty much anticipated what’s happening now between Hulu and Boxee (Hulu’s blog post, Boxee’s blog post).  Things I’ve had to say:

“Generally, I think 3rd parties like Boxee that are trying to channel content from sites like Hulu to the TV without deals in place with those sites are headed for trouble.  I think the Hulus of the world are going to really want to tightly control how they get delivered on the TV (and in some cases, they won’t want to see their content delivered on TVs).  I think the way Roku and Netflix are working together is probably a model for partnerships like this.”

In an e-mail exchange with Brent Evans (author of the GeekTonic blog):

“What is Boxee’s value add?  They are essentially a user interface wrapper to a bunch of online services.  Eventually, I think those services (Hulu, ABC, etc.) will own their own living room user interfaces.  Maybe Boxee will goad the market into getting to that point…”

And in another e-mail exchange:

“The more a company can cut real bonafide deals with these content sources (like Roku has done with Netflix), the more successful they’ll be.  Most of these devices just scrape sites like Hulu and somehow display their flash player content on the television — ie Hulu, CBS, etc (the content publishers) can easily break all these devices that don’t have real partnerships.  That I can tell, they aren’t doing anything illegal per se, but it’s more that Hulu will eventually want to control and dictate the business terms of Hulu content on the television.”

So I wasn’t at all surprised by Hulu’s announcement that they had asked Boxee to remove them.  Not that I think it’s a BAD idea for Boxee to channel Hulu’s content… As long as Hulu’s ads are being displayed, it doesn’t break their business model so they should eventually be open to this kind of syndication.

So why does Hulu want to cut-off Boxee (who, according to the Boxee blog post, drove 100,000 views on Hulu last week)?  My guesses:

• Officially or unofficially, Hulu’s content licenses may limit them to delivering content on a traditional PC with keyboard and mouse.  Getting onto the TV might be make Hulu a threat to existing revenue streams created by the same content on the traditional TV. And Hulu may not be delivering as much money per “view” (or whatever metric) as those existing revenue streams deliver.
• Hulu just may want to control their TV experience themselves.  They have been very purposeful in the design of their website.  Why wouldn’t they want to be similiarly purposeful in the design of their user interface on a television?  Or if it’s not UI design, they may just not want Boxee to get too powerful at this early stage in the game.

From my 4 year old daughter:

Her: Knock knock

Me: Who’s there?

Her: Banana

Me: Banana who?

 

Her: Knock knock

Me: Who’s there?

Her: Banana

Me: Banana who? 

 

Her: Knock knock

Me: Who’s there?

Her: Orange

Me: Orange who?

Her: Orange you glad I didn’t say Banana?

[laughter]

Transcript from a chat with a “friend” earlier this morning:

Matt

hi

whats up?

7:20amMatt

hi

whats up?

7:20amRakesh

Hi Matt

Everything OK?

7:21amMatt

well,im really stuck here in london

i had to visit a resort here in london and i got robbed at the hotel im staying

7:22amRakesh

ack… that’s terrible. Sorry to hear it.

7:22amMatt

yeah,thanks

we just want some helo flying back home

7:23amRakesh

So why are you stuck there?’

7:23amMatt

all my money to get a ticket back home got stolen

7:25amRakesh

I didn’t understand this “we just want some helo flying back home”

7:25amMatt

help*

actually i got some money wired to me to catch a flight back home

but we still need $800 more to complete our ticket fee and fly back home

7:26amRakesh

good

Honestly, it sounds like someone’s hacked your Facebook account and is using it to defraud your friends.

7:26amMatt

i have the money in my checking acct,i cant just access it from here

this really me

Lauren is here with me

and my kids

7:28amRakesh

your wife’s name is on your profile page

7:28amMatt

what about my kids name?

7:28amRakesh

in photos?

how do we know each other? when did we meet?

7:29amMatt

from school

 

I do not know this guy from “school”… So when I responded and he figured out that I was on to him, he blocked me, etc.  I tried emailing Matt at his e-mail address, but who knows if that address was his real address or not…

One of the smartest elements of Palm’s design for the original smartphone was the hardware switch toggle sound on and off… you could call it the “shut up” switch:

And, of course, Apple stole this feature on the iPhone:

This thing is so useful! There are so many situations where you want your device to be quiet:

• In bed, at night, surfing the web on your iPhone while your significant other (or your infant daughter) is sleeping next to you.
• In a talk or a presentation that you don’t want disrupt with a ringing phone
• While you’re on a conference call and you don’t want to be distracted by your phone.

So how is that more laptop makers don’t have hard sound on/off toggles on their devices?

Until laptop makers figure this out, maybe someone could create a simple headphone jack gizmo I could shove into my laptop’s headphone connector and have it prevent sound from coming out of my laptop’s speakers? (kind of how my laptop’s speakers go “off” when I have headphones connected… except this would just be a headphone jack port of the headphones — no wires, no headphones.)

(and while we’re at it, hey Windows, would you stop making so many sounds? I don’t need a sound at login. I don’t need a sound at shutdown. I don’t need a sound when switching users. Be invisible!)

One day, our wallets will be digital (or maybe our wallets will be replaced by our “smart phones”… I tend to think the former is more likely), but until then, this is a great tip:

Buy a little, thin USB flash drive and keep it in your wallet’s change pocket. This way, since everyone almost always carries their wallet with the, you’ll always have a little bit of storage with you. I keep frequently used software on mine (Firefox, Picasa for the Mac and Windows, Chrome, Synergy, etc) and I use it to move data around.

One thing to watch out for, with this thing being so small, is it’s easy to forget it in someone else’s USB port!

Personally, I carry the Sony Micro Vault in my wallet (but I don’t think I paid $50 for it!), but I think a lot of manufacturers have the same type of flash drive.

I was at a Blockbuster earlier tonight and we were wondering what the Rotten Tomatoes scores were for a few movies that looked interesting.

I pulled out my iPhone, did a Google search, clicked on the Rotten Tomatoes page and waited. And waited. About 5 minutes later, the page had loaded up. 5 minutes!

It was worth the wait — it prevented us from renting Lions with Lambs. But I still had to do a couple more searches and waiting 5 minutes each time wasn’t going to work. Briefly I wished the iPhone had a text-only browser (and I kind still wish it did) for heavier sites.

But then I figured out something that made accessing Rotten Tomatoes on my iPhone a little bit easier.

I simply accessed the cached version of the page through the Google search results page. On three subsequent visits to Rotten Tomates, I found the page loaded in a minute or so — 5x faster than accessing it directly.

So if you run into a slow site, try loading it up cached from Google and it might speed things up for you.

(And if you’re curious, we ended up renting Burn After Reading and Iron Man.)

Here’s the finished product… I am very happy with the result. (I wrote yesterday about how I found Craig at Monarch Trophy to do this laser-etching for me)