Matt Van Stone

Late last year I decided that I wanted to start getting movies and TV shows more legitimately. I decided to get an Apple TV so that I could have access to all of the movies and TV shows on iTunes directly from my couch. Until this past weekend I hadn’t yet rented anything, but I’m happy to report that my first experience with rentals was great.

My wife and I decided to rent the movie Orphan in HD. After purchasing the movie, it took about 30 seconds to a minute to buffer enough before we could begin watching. Our internet connection is the standard 7.5Mbps from Shaw in Calgary. We watched the entire 2 hour movie without any glitches. At no point did it need to pause to buffer.

Video and sound quality was quite good. To me the HD video clearly wasn’t Blu-Ray quality, but I would say that it was better than the HD movies I have watched on Shaw HD. I can’t make a comparison to an SD iTunes movie though because I have not rented one.

The next day I purchased a few episodes of The Office. I purchased both HD and SD episodes. I was very pleased with the SD quality but I didn’t feel that the HD episode I purchased brought enough increase in quality to justify the extra dollar.

Overall I am really pleased with how the Apple TV performed for renting and purchasing. I am going to need to start budgeting for monthly iTunes gift cards though.

Do you use an Apple TV for renting Movies? Do you like it? Hate it?

I use up to three different computers on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Sometimes I come across a site that I don’t need right away, but I want to save for later, so I bookmark it. The problem is, if I bookmark it on my work computer and then want to look at it from home the bookmark is pretty useless.

Well I just found this plug-in for Firefox called Foxmarks. It syncs your bookmarks to a server so that you always have the same set of bookmarks no matter which computer you are on. The plug-in will merge your computer’s bookmarks with the version you stored online. Another great thing about it is your bookmarks are always sorted in the same order across every computer. This is a great convenience.

But what if I’m visiting a friend and I want to show them a site I bookmarked on my computer? You dont want to be installing software on your friends computer, so just go to my.foxmarks.com and login with your Foxmarks account. You’ll be presented with an AJAX web page of your last synced bookmarks. Pretty sweet.

If you are concerned with privacy, fear not, you can choose to backup your bookmarks to your own server instead of the Foxmarks servers. I see they also have a version for IE in beta, but if you are still using IE you have bigger problems than out of sync bookmarks. Yeah. I went there.

I have been riding the train a lot lately and I am really growing sick of sitting there in silence. Since I had to give up the iPod that was never really mine when I left my last job I have been MP3 playerless. I purchased a RAZR V3i for it’s music capability, but the DAP on the phone really sucks. It is very picky about bitrates of MP3s and it has failed reading most of the songs I have put on it. Plus the sound quality really blows.

I have recently become addicted to reading Engadget and Gizmodo. These sites fuel some kind of sick addiction that people have with you guessed it, gadgets. The sites give the world up to the minute news on all sorts of fresh gadgets as well as specs, rumors, and reviews.

The Sansa Connect player has been on the headlines a lot over the past few weeks. It is a new wifi player that allows you to stream internet radio from Yahoo Launch right to the player from wherever there is an open wifi signal. Although I wasn’t interested in paying the premium for wifi, the regular Sansa e280 (8GB) looked pretty good to me. It’s the same price roughly as a 4GB Nano (if you find the Sansa on sale) and it supports FM Radio, voice and FM recording, and even does video playback. Plus the screen is bigger. This player looks nice, but then I found the iRiver Clix2.

Here’s a video of the Clix2 functioning.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t know the basic rules of soldering, don’t try to mod your Wii. It’s not easy. Follow the link below for more pics and how this botched mod job was actually salvaged.

How not to mod your Wii

Programmers have already figured out how to bypass the HD-DVD DRM and have begun extracting HD-DVD movies and putting them on bit torrent.

Right now if you search for HD DVD on thepiratebay you will see a few titles at the top including Pitch Black, Batman Begins and The Chronicles of Riddick all in their 1080p glory.

Each torrent is about 20GB and as far as I know the only way to play them is using PowerDVD on a computer. That is unless you have an HD-DVD burner, which you do not.

I would like to download one and try it on xbmc, but I’m pretty sure xbmc’s 700MHZ processor is not powerful enough to playback HD content.

I think that this along with the porn industry adopting HD-DVD as their main standard has pretty much destroyed any hopes BR had of surviving.

I’m hoping that maybe now we will start seeing some 1.4GB HD-DVDRip XviD files popping up. I wonder how a 4GB HD-DVDRip XviD file would compare to a 4GB DVD?

I obviously do not like vibe at all… todays hottest music? not for me. However, they have this VIP club that you can collect points for if you listen for bonus codes at 4 different times throughout the day. My girlfriend Tanya collects them. You can use them on the Vibe website to bid on auctions or to enter contests.

Anyway, the only reason I’m talking about it is I beat the system. With a combination of Windows Scheduled Tasks and VLC player I setup 4 schedules to record the web broadcast for about 8 minutes. I record at 7:30, 11:30, 5:30, and 8:30. This way she can get all of the bonus codes without even having to listen at those times.

So suck that Vibe. I win, you lose.

Here’s John C. Dvorak’s views on Senator John Stevens’ speech.

Net Neutrality Has a Spokesperson

My previous post: The Internets are Too Slow.

What? Are you crazy? Two posts in one day? Yeah, thats right. I did it.

I just had to post this story though. It’s almost as gold as when GWB said he heard there were rumors on the “internets”.

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the net neutraility amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

“I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?”

Seriously, read it. It’s gold.
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/?entry_id=1512499

Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Windows and Mac, but there is no sign of a release for Linux which is still stuck on version 7. What up with that? How is it that developers of applications like VLC and aMSN can release software for virtually every current OS, yet a for profit company like Adobe cannot?

I mean even Mozilla releases its products on Windows, OS X, and Linux at the same time. I was always under the impression that if you are using smart programming techniques this is not all that difficult. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it is absurd. Neglecting the Linux desktop community is just as bad as neglecting the Mac community would be.

I downloaded Kubuntu Linux 6.06 for my PC last night and installed it this morning dual boot with Windows XP. It took me a long time to figure out the partitions and then when it booted up I was just getting a blank screen. I figured out I had to also install the nvidia driver. Once I got it going it pretty much sucked. So I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu Linux for PowerPC and installed it on a 1.25 G4 eMac. Thats right, Linux on a Mac.

Ubuntu is waaay better than Kubuntu. It just has a better software package. Basically it just comes with Firefox instead of Konqueror for a browser. Only drawback that I am discovering is a lot of software isn’t written for PPC Linux. Basically I just tried to install the flash plug-in so that the YouTube videos on my blog would work and I discovered there wasn’t one. So that is sort of a disappointment.

Anyway, I am pretty excited about getting into Ubuntu, my only concern is that maybe I am so used to XP that I would miss it. I have been using XP almost exclusively for over 5 years now and I know it inside and out. Although Windows has never been considered much of a “user friendly” OS, it is something you grow used to. Although I do want to learn Linux more, but I don’t want to have to do research every time I want to install a new piece of software or hardware. I think I’ll give Ubuntu a chance in a dual boot setup on my PC for a while and see if I can get to a point where I’m not using Windows. I may also look into using Wine for any Windows apps that I cant find a Linux replacement for.

On a side note, I’m also thinking of installing The PPC server version of Ununtu on my Mac Mini. Does anyone have any cool ideas for what I could use a Linux server for in my house? Or even on the net, I do have 80k up speeds that mostly go unused.