SlingPlayer for iPad — don’t buy it.

I have to say, when I finally got a chance to get the SlingPlayer Mobile app for my iPhone, I was quite upset to find that they were charging $30 for it — more than 5x the price of any other app I have purchased for that platform. On top of that, after using it … Continue reading “SlingPlayer for iPad — don’t buy it.”

I have to say, when I finally got a chance to get the SlingPlayer Mobile app for my iPhone, I was quite upset to find that they were charging $30 for it — more than 5x the price of any other app I have purchased for that platform.

On top of that, after using it for a while, I can honestly say that it was not worth the price. The control scheme is unwieldy (to say the last); the actual interactions with the PVR are unresponsive to the point of being nearly useless; and the picture quality is poor (even with the latest 2.0 version).

Essentially, it’s a tech demo: I have never used it for anything other than explaining to people what is possible on the iPhone.

I’m an optimist though, so when the iPad version of SlingPlayer came out, I thought maybe they will have made use of the improved screen real estate and horsepower to provide a better experience, so I’ll just go to the App Store and… WHAT?!?!?! Another 30 dollars!!!!

Um… In a word, no.

Even for an iPad app, that price is off by (at least) a factor of two, and they simply haven’t demonstrated that they can deliver an experience that justifies that cost. Hey, SlingMedia, take a look at StreamToMe it’s one tenth the price and offers a streaming media experience (albeit a simpler one) that is significantly better than SlingPlayer.

Happy Anniversary…

… to us! Yes, today is the 25’th anniversary of the day Deb and I got married. Wow, it hasn’t been that long has it? Let’s see, there was the time we bought a house, and then Dennis was born, and then suddenliy he was old enough to be left at home while we went … Continue reading “Happy Anniversary…”

… to us! Yes, today is the 25’th anniversary of the day Deb and I got married. Wow, it hasn’t been that long has it? Let’s see, there was the time we bought a house, and then Dennis was born, and then suddenliy he was old enough to be left at home while we went to Halifax for a week. 25 years. Really?

Speaking of Halifax, we’ve been having tons of fun so far. Yesterday we managed to see a mix of sights we had seen last time we were here and a couple of new ones: the Public Gardens and the Natural History museum.

I will try to post more pictures when I get home, but it’s quite difficult to get them from the iPad (I’m using to write this) to my home server. Just to prove that it is possible, here’s a photo I took at the Citadel yesterday:


A picture of the Halifax Citedal grounds

Today we’re off to see “Pier 21” the immigration museum and hopefully a Mac store, then maybe some time by the pool and dinner at a fancy restaurant. Ah the life of the idle rich. 😉

Afghanada

I continue to be thankful that we are lucky enough, as Canadians, to have access to the best-of-breed, thought provoking, genuinely compelling content from CBC Radio One. I have talked about their shows both positively (e.g. Ideas) and negatively (e.g. Wiretap) before, and now I’d like to draw another excellent program to your attention: Afghanada. … Continue reading “Afghanada”

I continue to be thankful that we are lucky enough, as Canadians, to have access to the best-of-breed, thought provoking, genuinely compelling content from CBC Radio One. I have talked about their shows both positively (e.g. Ideas) and negatively (e.g. Wiretap) before, and now I’d like to draw another excellent program to your attention: Afghanada.

Afghanada is a radio drama series about the day-to-day life of a small group of Canadian soldiers stationed in Kandahar Province. The writing is strong, with a cast of characters that truly feel like living, breathing individuals put in frequently hellish situations. Having never been a soldier, I cannot say whether the portrayal of these people’s lives is accurate, but I can say that the power of this show has made me feel more compassion for the individuals in our armed forces than all of the traditional news reporting put together.

I am particularly pleased that you can now get all three seasons worth of Episodes of Afghanada via iTunes. Season one is an awesome deal, at $12 for 22(!) half hour episodes.

I highly recommend this series to anyone who enjoys well acted, radio programming.

(and say “Hi” to Coach for me)

Fly Fusion Pentop

So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens … Continue reading “Fly Fusion Pentop”

So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens had stickers that said $20 on them, did nothing to convince me otherwise.

But I figured that for $20, it might be an interesting toy, so I grabbed one, along with a couple of pads of paper and a new memory card, for a total (according to the sticker prices) of about $40. Of course, I had to by the extra stuff too, because it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to get it later (if the company was gone).

Anyway, I took it all to the cash, and low and behold, it was being offered at a further 50% discount, so I ended up walking away with the whole load for $20. Cool.

Now, unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse.

I brought it all home, took out the install CD and stuck it in my Mac… Nope, no mac version of the software… Ugh.

“Ok”, I think, “I’ve got my Vista gaming PC, I’ll try it in there.”… Stick the CD in, try to install, CD decides it needs to get a newer version off the net… Download fails. But I’m a stubborn cuss, so I try it again… Nope, download fails again. Ok, one more time… Yes! Everything downloads and installs correctly.

Starting the software showed it to be one of those crappy, fixed size UIs built with Flash or VisualBasic or whatever, with no apparent way to proceed. Wait! It says it will only recognize the pen if it’s plugged in and turned on. Alrighty! Plug the pen into a USB port, turn it on and…

Get the driver search dialog. Nope, no Vista drivers available from Windows Download. Offers to look on the CD… Nope, no drivers on CD. (Which clown thought it meant it made sense to ship a Windows device without drivers. Ugh.)

Check their support site, which is singularly unhelpful…

Ok, now I’m getting frustrated. Then it comes to me: I’ve got a netbook that runs XP, maybe it will work with XP. Hook up an external USB CD drive to the netbook, stick the CD in, download the new version of the software (again), start it up and… Nope, the bloody fixed size UI is too big for the netbook screen!

God, talk about ways to suck the enthusiasm right out of ya.

One. more. try… Hook the external monitor out from the netbook to another display, and sure enough, I can finally run the software. Now, just 15 more minutes of randomly filling in stuff and connecting to a website, and creating both an admin and a user account(!), and leaving personal data that I really should not have to, and…

I get a page that shows I haven’t done anything with the pen yet.

Now, all I have to do is charge it up, and I can actually try it.

*sigh*.

NAS

I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but… both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 ) … Continue reading “NAS”

I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but…

  1. both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 )
  2. The NSLU-2 (commonly known as a “slug”) has been very slow to access from XP with the latest service pack — Dennis and Deb were both hit by this.
  3. I wanted more storage space. No, I didn’t actually need it yet, but I was down to my last 150Gig or so.

Given all this, it seemed like it was probably time to look for a new network attached storage (“NAS”) box. After a certain amount of wandering around on the web, I narrowed the choices down to three boxes, each of which provides two internal drive bays:

Linksys NAS-200
Somewhere around $150 locally in Ottawa; comes with 2 USB ports that would allow me to plug in my existing drives; but by all accounts the slowest of any of the available devices
D-Link DNS-323
Approximately the same prices as the NAS-200, but significantly faster; only 1 USB port which can be used to control a printer or UPS, but not a drive
Synology Disk Station DS207+
Faster and more powerful than either of the others; around $400 in Ottawa.

Now, you know that I would normally go for the most powerful box, even though it was more expensive, but my normal dealer, PC Cyber [“Hey, man, you got da stuff?”], did not have any in stock, so I ended up getting the DNS-323 and one 1 terabyte drive. (I actually picked up the DNS-323 at Best Buy, because I had been given a gift certificate there for my birthday.)

Installing the drive was trivial — no screwdrivers or wiring required. Just lift up on the front cover and pop it off, slide the drive into the bay, close the lid. Booting, formatting the drive, and configuring it with separate storage areas for Deb, Dennis and I all went without a hitch.

I then started copying everything from the drives on the slug to the DNS-323, whereupon I learned two interesting lessons:

  1. Copying files between two fileservers by transferring them back-and-forth across a network with a wireless-N bridge in the middle of it, is somewhere between 4 and 5 times slower than doing it on the other side of the bridge. I learned this when I mounted both servers on my G5, dragged a massive backup directory from one to the other and had it say “estimated time to completion: 29 hours“!
  2. The slug is really slow. I didn’t do a lot of testing, but by my count, copying from an internal drive on a Mac to the DNS-323 was >10x faster than copying the same file off the slug.

Everything is now copied across to its new home. Deb is happy because I removed three devices, each with a power brick, plus a power bar from her study, and replaced it all with one; I’m happy because we now have more than double the storage we had and can access it much more quickly; and Dennis is happy… Well, actually Dennis isn’t happy because next week is exam week, but that’s another story.

Rosco!!!

Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco: At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!? I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop … Continue reading “Rosco!!!”

Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco:



At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!?

I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop moving long enough.

GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, … Continue reading “GUI Bloopers: Paste Special”

So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

Paste Special

The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

Match Styles

… which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.