Category: Uncategorized

File this one under solutions to random things that could make you pull your hair out…

If Windows 7 thinks it’s smarter than you and keeps telling you “The best driver software for your device is already installed” when you’re trying to update a device driver to something you KNOW is a better driver, here’s how to get around Windows 7’s “smarts”…

What lead me into this situation is:
1) I chose “Update Driver Software” from Device Manager (in my case, my a monitor that was showing up as “Generic Non-PNP Monitor”)
2) Then I chose “Browse my computer for driver software”
3) Then I chose the directory with the CORRECT driver and
4) Finally I’d get the message “The best driver software for your device is already installed”.

Argh! After doing this a bunch of times, I figured out the right way to address this… It’s actually pretty simple.

1) Choose “Update Driver Software” (SAME as above)
2) Choose “Browse my computer for driver software” (SAME as above)
3) Choose “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer” (DIFFERENT!)
4) Click “Have Disk” button (DIFFERENT!)
5) Select the directory with the correct drivers and then select the monitor make/model
6) You’re done! Congrats, you’ve outsmarted Windows 7! 🙂

In the last few weeks, I haven’t dialed a single phone number and I love it! So how am I making phone calls? Using:
1) Google Voice account
2) Google Chrome, and
3) the Google Voice Add-on for Google Chrome.

Here’s how to set it all up:

1. Create yourself a Google Voice account
• Sign into your google account and then visit http://voice.google.com/
2. Add your phone numbers (mobile, office, home, etc) to your Google Voice account
3. Install the Google Voice Extension for Google Chrome, available here in the Chrome web store: http://goo.gl/TidpC
4. Now, anytime Chrome sees a phone number in your browser, it’ll become a link. When you click, it’ll ask you where you want to take the call and it’ll call you there, and when you pick-up, it’ll connect you to the number you clicked on.
5. No more finger dialing!

I often find myself describing what I’ve observed and learned about Montessori education so I liked the summary of Montessori in this Harvard Business Review article (“Montessori Builds Innovators”) taken from Wikipedia:

• mixed-age classrooms, with classrooms for children aged 2½-or-3 to 6 by far the most common,
• student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options,
• uninterrupted blocks of work time,
• a Constructivist or “discovery” model, in which students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction, and
• specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators.

First congratulations to SageTV for being acquired by Google!

SageTV is a company I’ve followed closely — my company, SnapStream, and SageTV were direct competitors in the “consumer DIY home theater PC” market until we shifted our focus to TV search instead.

Here are some of my opinions on this deal…

1. It’s NOT about turning Google TV into a DVR

I consider it impossible that Google acquired SageTV so they could add native DVR capabilities to Google TV (remember, Google already manages the program guide, channel changing, and even automating your native DVR). I recently read “In the Plex” by Steven Levy and it gives a glimpse of how Google thinks — and for Google, the future is all about the Internet and the cloud. For example, this is the company that declared the filesystem dead when they designed their recently released ChromeOS: “I don’t think we need files anymore” (from here in the book). And Googlers evidently joke that their product-focused co-founder and CEO, Larry Page, “went to the future and came back to tell us about it.”

DVR is too complicated to setup and it’s complicated to use (which is easier: schedule a recording and then watch it after it’s been broadcast vs. “click here to watch”???). DVR is a technology that bolts onto a broadcast medium and makes it “on-demand”…sort of. So it’s no surprise that aftermarket DVRs have NOT been a huge success (see TiVo) while online video (like Hulu, Netflix) HAS been hugely successful.

I just don’t think DVR is what Google envisions for the future of the home theater and living room entertainment.

2. Maybe it’s to accelerate cheaper Google TV hardware

One of the things SageTV had done was port the SageTV user interface to a Sigma reference design set-top box (I know their first generation set-top box — I think they called it an “extender” — was Sigma-based, but I’m not sure if the second generation set-top box was or not?).

Google TV’s 1.0 launch seems to have been commercially weak with low unit sales numbers from Logitech and Sony and, in both cases, significant price decreases (And immediate commercial success may not even have been a goal of Google TV v1– Google probably got what they wanted out of v1, which was a lot of instructive user testing and market feedback).

In any case, part of their go-to-market strategy for version 2 could be to make cheap reference designs available to anyone who wants to ship Google TV, either standalone or as a part of their device (ie on their TV, optical media player, satellite receiver, etc). And the SageTV team could accelerate this for Google TV, with their experience writing set-top box “middleware.” A healthy partnership with a lot of different hardware manufacturers (HTC, Motorola, Samsung) is a big part of how Android succeeded and continues to succeed in mobile.

3. What about Avtrex?

A company that came to mind when I read about Google acquiring SageTV was one that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of: Avtrex. I don’t know a lot about them, but I met with them once and have loosely followed them over the years. They’re an OEM-only digital home entertainment software company– that I know of, all the software they’ve written has been in Linux and has been written with various embedded hardware system platforms in mind (Broadcom, Philips, ATI/AMD, etc). I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s interesting to ask the question of why Google would have bought SageTV over, say, Avtrex? Or, who knows, maybe we’ll see Avtrex get acquired by Google too?

Update, 1:50pm, Monday June 20, 2011:

• GigaOM writer Janko Roettgers agrees with me but “bets his money” that Google’s going to integrate SageTV’s place-shifting technology into Google TV. My response from the comments there: I doubt it’s the placeshifting thing. In the same way that DVRs require hard drives, placeshifting requires hardware to transcode from the source format to the target format and bit-rate that the audio/video get streamed out in. And I think one of the things that Google will react to in Google TV 2.0 is the high cost of Google TV 1.0 devices (Logitech Revue was originally $400 and the least expensive Sony TV with Google TV is $600 today and was more at launch). And plus, if DVR is relatively difficult to use (as I argue it is), place-shifting is probably 10 times more difficult to setup and get running.
• Correction: Two commenters pointed out that DVRs have in fact been very successful (40% attach rate in the United States) — they just haven’t been successful in the after market (ie TIVO). I stand corrected, they’re both right, I really meant “aftermarket DVRs” (and I’ve updated the post to reflect this). But my argument still stands, DVR just doesn’t fit the mold of big ideas that Google goes after from what I’ve seen of the company myself and from what I’ve read/heard.
• For fun (!), here’s my parsing of the note posted on their site: “And as the media landscape continues to evolve [Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!], we think it’s time our vision of entertainment management grows as well [by joining Google, we’re ceding our vision to Google’s larger vision]. By teaming up with Google, we believe our ideas will reach an even larger audience of users worldwide on many different products, platforms and services [We’ve been acq-hired! There’s a lot of different stuff we’ll be working on at Google, applying our expertise to Google digital home efforts]” 🙂
• One last thing… how many people do others think work at SageTV? I never got the impression that they were more than 6 or 7 people. Anyone else have any other ideas? Did they take outside investment? I’d love to hear if people have a sense of either of these things.
• Brent Evans “partially agrees” with me but says I’m missing the complete picture of SageTV’s value. I’d love to hear more!

Google announced user managed storage today. “Hallelujah!” I told my IT manager.

But WAIT, extra storage can’t be applied to a user’s email account?! This is totally puzzling. Is it because one of the primary differences (and drivers for upgrades) between Google Apps Premier and the free version is email storage capacity? Fine, then limit storage upgrades to premier edition customers (who are already paying) and let them expand _their_ email storage.

This is huge pain for us, with 5-10 users who are constantly hitting 100%, whose email accounts then need to be thinned out using various annoying and tedious techniques.

Wasn’t the gmail promise that we’d never have to delete emails?

This weekend, I replaced my home thermostats with two wifi thermostats made by 3M and sold at Home Depot (Model #3M-50). Now I can control my home’s heating and cooling from anywhere inside our home or when I’m out of the house, simply by firing up an iPhone app!

Setup was _almost_ as easy as it could have been. The one thing 3M could have done better was make clear that unit requires _wired_ power because of the wifi. Incidentally, getting power to the 3M unit wasn’t hard– they have a video on their site that explains it really well. You simply take one of the unused wires in the bundle of A/C control cables that run from your A/C’s “computer” to your thermostat and you connect it to the power terminals on both ends.

Setting up the first unit, without breaks, probably took an hour and fifteen minutes. The second unit was done in under 30 minutes (because I knew exactly what I was doing).

In general, the unit works really well. Connectivity was one of my concerns because I’ve seen wifi devices that frequently lose connection– but so far it’s worked just fine whether I’m in the house on the wireless LAN or out of the house on another LAN or on my cell phone’s 3G connection. There’s an almost negligible lag time (less than 1s?) from making a setting change on your iPhone to having it show up on the corresponding thermostat.

Only complaint, so far: the physical thermostat device could be more user friendly. The main complaint here is that they stuck an important button (the “mode” button) on the right _side_ of the thermostat. So 1) it’s not self-evident how to toggle the mode (from HEAT to COOL to OFF), I think most people (like me) will have to spend a moment figuring out where it is and 2) once you know where the button is, you still have to check around the side to make sure you’re pressing the right one.

But overall, this product looks like it’ll be a winner at our house. I’m hoping to see a reduction in our gas and electrical bills because this will make it easier to turn down/off the A/C or heating when we go out of the house. We’ll see! I’ll post more as we continue to use this thing.

My old Honeywell thermostat



The 3M-50 wifi thermostat that I bought at Home Depot for $100 each



Here's the 3M-50 Wifi thermostat installed



Here's the 3M-50 wifi thermostat close-up



And finally, the reason I did all this, the iPhone app I can use to control my A/C and heating– here it’s showing the current configuration for my upstairs and downstairs iPhone apps

Food

• Barock – Food was good, but the whole thing was overpriced, and that was me eating the less expensive vegetarian dishes. No drinks (except sparkling water), a tomata caprese salad and a risotto chantrelles was $50 USD.
• Bohemia Bagels – low rating on this place. The bagel was stale, the cream cheese was dry and crumbly. And the capuccino was really terrible (they were trying to re-use the ground??). They have Internet, but it’s costs 1 CZK per minute. So that’s $4 / hour. Which is fine I guess, but plenty of places offer faster Internet connections at a better price… ie FREE.
• Starbucks – Almost all of them have fast and free Internet connections. I had pristine Skype phone calls from two of them and even FaceTime’ed with my daughters from one of them (the staff and others at Starbucks got a real kick out of seeing that). One of these Starbucks is right off the old town square, in front of the astronomical clock. The other was right over the Charles Bridge, on the castle side of the river.
• Bake shop – Great cappucino and fresh baked goods. Everything tasted fresh, yummy. Nice staff. I paid about $15 for a cappucino, a croissant and two small chocolate cookies (I know, not a very healthy breakfast).
• Al Dente – Nice Italian place. Also somewhat pricey ($40 / head) but we had a lot to eat. No selection of salads, though they did bring us mixed green salads when we asked for them (which were exactly that — a bunch of mixed greens and nothing else). The entrees were great, fresh. I had one of their pizzas (gorgonzola + pear) and it was really tasty. For some reason, the pizza took longer to bring out. My dinner companions were halfway through their pasta dishes before my pizza got to the table (and that was after they waited for a few minutes, after I told them to go ahead). The staff were apologetic for this.

Other stuff

• The lookout from the top of the astronomical clock tower was worth it (100 CZH = $6 USD), it afforded a nice 360 degree view of Prague.


From the lookout

• The astronomical clock was… meh. Maybe it’s more exciting if you’re into medivial astronomy?


Evidently, I’m not a clock geek
• One of the more interesting things to see at the astronomical clock were the weddings. They must have weddings scheduled there back to back to back. Some in parallel I think (they must have more than one chapel?). On the Saturday that I was near the astronomical clock, I saw at least 3 couples come out married. One of the grooms came out and had a yoke put around his neck to mark the occasion. 🙂



• The castle itself (on the other side of the river) is a huge complex and a nice place to roam around. It was a good walk to get there from the old town. Depending on how you go, it can be very steep or a more reasonable grade. I made my way up there from the Charles Bridge and I thought the grade was pretty reasonable. The highlight for me was the Vitus Cathedral there. There are lots of other attractions on the premises including convents, castles, palaces, art, and gardens.


St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague at Sunset

• Cannabis: it would seem that cannabis (aka marijuana) is legal here? I saw places that advertised the sale of cannabis and one place that was even selling cannabis flavored ice cream!

Cannabis, cannabis, everywhere!




• I had been warned about pick-pockets and accordingly was more aware of my wallet than I would normally have been. I kept it in my front pocket on the day that I spent criss-crossing Prague on foot. In the end, I never felt at risk on this — even in busy crowds I found myself in (and there were several such occasions because I was here on the weekend and by all accounts, I was here when the weather was perfect.)


A sign on the subway in Prague. I had been warned about pickpockets, but never had any problems and never felt at risk.

• The Old Town: This is one of the popular places to walk around… it’s where the astronomical clock is located and it’s always full of people and surrounded my shops. Here’s a panoromic photo of the place at night, taken on my iPhone and stitched together with AutoStitch.



• Palladium: local mall, 200 shops. Nice place, but do you really need to shop at another Sephora? But I enjoy visiting places like this that are more of local venues vs. another tourist destination. A cone of ice cream was 25 CZH ($1.5) while throughout most of the old city, the same cone was more like 80 CZH ($5). The mall had a few grocery stores and drug stores. I picked up a nail cutter I needed to buy and a large bottle of water to carry around with me.
• Narodni: seemed like a better street for shopping and experiencing more of the local life than the old town square and the streets that emanate out of there. It’s a block or two over from the old town square and I saw some really good coffee and chocolate shops while walking down this street. There are also a few squares off of this street that looked fun.
• Running: I went running twice while I was in Prague, both times in a park over the river and up the hill from my hotel. So I ran from Parizka, over the Cechuv bridge and then there was a steep uphill (either a ramp or stairs — I took the ramp). Once at the top, there was a park whose exterior made a roughly 5 km (3 mile) loop. The park itself is really nice. It was a playground for children, lots of paths leading in different directions. A lot of locals out rollerblading, cycling. One side of the park leads into the castle complex (so there are some slight upward grades within the park itself). Off of one of the park paths, I found a stadium and an outdoor game field where a bunch of school girls were playing after school lacross or at least something that resembled lacrosse.


My running trail in Prague.

• Walking: I did a lot of walking while I was in Prague. The cobblestone will tire your feet about, but I love walking so I just walked and walked while I was there. Houston’s not much of a walking city between the lack of walking paths in most parts of town, drivers that don’t understand pedestrians and weather that’s not so walker friendly.
• Shopping: I’m a terrible shopper. I did get some recommendations on places to buy good quality crystal/porcelain (which is something Prague is evidently famous for) but never made it out to these places.
• Getting to the town center from the airport: I ended up getting a cab. It cost about 500CZH or $30. I got some cash from a Unicard ATM (known as a “Bankomat” in Czech) at the airport so paying the driver once I got to the hotel was easy.

For a while now, I’ve been in search of an easy way to browse my Picasaweb albums on the big screen television in my living room. Little did I know that the answer was right under my nose… or under my television, to be more precise!

First some background: I organize all the photographs I take using Google’s Picasa for Windows. And then I upload them to Picasa’s online photo sharing service called Picasa Web Albums (aka Picasaweb). I upload most of my albums with Picasa’s “Anyone with the link” sharing option.

So I’ve had a Roku box for, oh, maybe a year now? When they first added the ability for developers to build their own channels, I was disappointed to see that there wasn’t a Picasa “channel” for the device…. but sometime between then and now, someone added one! Specifically, this guy, Chris Hoffman, appears to be the man behind the Picasa Channel for Roku.

hoffmancs’s Picasa plug-in for Roku on my Roku’s main menu (yes, the plasma is badly burned in)

Setup: the way it works is pretty simple: you first install the Roku channel and then when you go to access it, you’re given an access code to enter in on this page:
http://roku.chrishoffman.org/picasa

You pull up this page on your laptop/netbook/desktop/whatever and then you enter your “claim code”.

Then you’re asked to link the Picasa Roku Channel with one of your Google Accounts, via OAuth (which is much more secure than the Picasa channel asking you to give it your Google username and password).

Then, that’s it as far as setup goes!

Using it: From here, using this Picasa channel, you can:
– browse your albums
– browse your tags
– browse by some other things (that I don’t remember)

Albums menu option in hoffmancs’s Picasa channel for Roku

Some notes from my using it about 30-40 times now:

• I mostly use the “browse by albums” screen to choose an album and then start playing it back.
• Playback is automatically in “slideshow” mode, with the default delay being 3 seconds. You can change this on the settings screen.
• The Roku plug-in also seems to pre-cache four or five photographs — that’s the number of photographs I can quickly clickthrough before the app forces me to wait so it can load another photograph.
• It displays the entire photograph on your TV screen, so if it’s a portrait photograph, you’ll have large black areas to it’s left and right (which is the right thing for any slideshow viewer to do by default).
• Assuming you have your Roku hooked up to an HDTV and you have the Roku configured for 720p mode, it displays your photographs in beautiful high-definition (subject, I’m sure to whatever resolution you uploaded them at).
• It handles video: The Picasa channel for Roku also handle videos you’ve uploaded. Assuming you have an album that includes videos, when you choose that albums, you’re presented with a sub-menu of viewing the photographs in that album or the videos in that album. If you choose to view the videos, you are presented with a list of the vidoes and when you choose one, it buffers it and starts playing. I was surprised at how good the videos looked when played back through the app!

Bottom line? The Picasa channel for Roku is a big winner. The quality of the photographs is great. It handles videos. It nails my core use-cases. I’m already using this thing all the time, sharing photographs I’ve taken with my family, with friends that have come over. It’s great! I’m surprised that this thing hasn’t gotten more attention — the only really relevant google search result for “Roku Picasa Channel” is this thread in the Roku forums.

But like any good early adopter, I have my wish list of things that I wish this app handled:

1) multiple picasa account support: I wish this thing supported multiple accounts. In our family, my father and I take all the photographs — he uploads his to his own Picasa account and I upload to mine. Switching between accounts is a big pain right now (ie I’d have to go through the whole setup process described above). I wish I could configure one account and then another and then have it interleave the albums or even just let me then pick one account or the other. BTW, I noticed that the Picasa Web Albums viewer in Google TV (from when I tried out one of Sony’s new Google TV devices) supports multiple accounts.

2) album & photograph search: I don’t think the app supports searching my albums at this point. I have several years of photographs in Picasa Web Albums so going back to one from say 3 years ago involves my scrolling through a very long list of albums (they’re presented in reverse chronological order).

3) better “browse photographs in album” support: right now, I’m able to browse through photographs in an album, but the interface is a horizontal ribbon of all my photographs. Like Picasa’s web-based interface, I wish I would get a grid of photographs and then choose from a grid. When I have a large album (say 500+ photographs of a family trip to Europe), I may want to jump to a particular part of the album and doing that now, like browsing for an album from a while ago, is painful.

4) more robust account linking: I don’t know if I’ll see this happen again, but for some reason the Roku at my parents house loses it’s connection to the house wifi every so often. If you’re disconnected from WiFi (and Roku doesn’t give you a very good notification of this) and you try to access the Picasa Web channel, it fails and appears to disconnect you from your Picasa Web Albums account. Once you reconnect the Roku, you have to go through the setup process again.

5) better caching of photographs: like I mentioned above, the app appears to cache a handful of photographs but when you get to the end of that cache, which in my case happens after I click quickly through four or five photographs, then it stalls without any feedback that it’s loading the next photograph(s). I’ve figured this out, but I can guarantee this would confuse my Dad.

6) support for viewing other picasa web albums: Other people occasionally share picasa albums with me. I wish I could somehow take an e-mail with a link to a picasa web album and pull that up album up on my TV. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, but it would be useful and handy.

Anyhow, most importantly, thanks hoffmancs for the great Roku app, I’m using it all the time!

Update: here’s a slideshow of a lot of the screens (I took ’em using my iPhone’s camera):