Apple

Apple / Development / Talk & Rantings / Technology — 1 Comment
27
Nov 09

New Macbook Pro!

I ordered a new Macbook Pro this morning! Thanks to the sale that Apple has going for ‘Black Friday’ which is actually more of an American thing, but it seems to have infiltrated Canadian consumer culture as well! Wahoo!

I haven’t had an actual computer available to me at home for a few months now – i’ve been working from the office a LOT – so this will be a nice change for me, being able to get stuff done from home, instead of having to be in the office every waking moment – not that its so horrible.

I’m looking forward to the 7hr battery life (supposedly), and also the SD card slot that has been integrated into the body of the Macbook Pro’s.

I’ll try and post a review once I get it – i’ve also got to catch up on some blogs about my new Guitar!

Happy black friday everyone!

Apple / Boxee / Playstation 3 / Talk & Rantings / Technology — 4 Comments
9
Nov 09

HTPC Update! (Bye bye ATV)

I thought i’d break the apparent silence i’ve had on this blog (aside from Twitter updates) to post a quick update on my Home Theatre setup!

I’m quite (nerdly) excited about it – having finally moved from an AppleTv as my primary source for video, to a MacMini that I won from an Ebay Auction last week – which incidentally was a local sale, so I was able to pick it up, and not pay shipping charges. Nice.

Obviously, my media software of choice is Boxee, and was the first piece of software that I installed on it. Right now, here’s what my setup looks like (i’ll illustrate it a little better in a coming post):

32″ Toshiba LCD – wall mounted (mounted on the wall makes me feel fancy)
Dlink DNS323 – as my primary harddrive (networked)
Dlink DIR-615 – as our router in the house (its a cheap router, but has wireless N, which is nice)
PS3 – Gaming system, though, i’m wondering if I even need it anymore
Apple MacMini – An older 1.83 GHz Core2Duo machine, w/1gb Ram & 80Gb HD
Various Cables, power bar, etc etc.

I’m going to be picking up a Logitech DiNovo Mini as a keyboard/mouse controller, but for the time being, i’m just using my iPhone connected to the network, using Air Mouse. Thus far, its been fine.

I’m also considering picking up a Sony HT-CT100 3.1 Soundbar Surround system – perhaps when my next paycheck comes in!

I’ll post some photos of the setup in a day or so.

Apple / Boxee / Talk & Rantings — No Comments
24
Jun 09

Latest Boxee Build: Jump in the right direction

You can read about it here but I just wanted to throw out madd props to the Boxee Dev team for all their hard work on their latest release that coincided with a meetup in San Francisco. This latest version includes many enhancements, bug fixes, and just all around good stuff that lets us know that the development of this (currently) free piece of awesome software is very much alive in development.

Back a few months ago when I bought an Apple TV to be able to play with this little app that needed to be hacked onto the Apple TV, I didn’t even know that I would enjoy it so much. Since then, its cut my TV watching in half, and well, we don’t even subscribe to Cable services anymore. If this is a glimpse at what is coming in the future for the television industry, I like it.

If I were to give any advice to the big TV networks – i’d say that they should jump on the bandwagon and find a way to work with these people, because THIS is where television is going. I’d hate to make this parallel, but I’ve got a feeling that this whole TV On demand thing could potentially be the next Napster/Mp3 revolution. Lets learn from past mistakes, and take the right steps.

Thanks again to the Boxee team!!

Talk & Rantings / Technology / iPhone — No Comments
23
Jun 09

Beejive + Push = A Happy Mikey

So, after a long while, and trying out a bunch of different IM clients for the iPhone, I finally settled on the BeeJive software (only during a special price promotion they were offering). It was a long time coming, and I was being relatively stubborn about putting out the extra money for this type of program, hoping that one of the free ones would be able to cover all the features I wanted.

One feature that NONE of them covered was Push – until last night – when BeeJive’s most recent iPhone app update was released. It was music to my ears when I saw on Twitter my friend Cristina posted that the update was available.

I updated almost instantaneously – and have not been disappointed. This app is fantastic and I highly suggest you purchase it if you’re looking for a solid IM app for the iPhone, that has push support.

Click here to buy.

Boxee / Technology — No Comments
6
Jan 09

Apple TV + Boxee = My new god

picture-1If you follow me on Twitter, Facebook or know me in real life, you’ve probably heard me ranting about my new Apple TV box. I bought it just before Christmas and have been using it along with my wonderful Christmas gift from my parents – a 32″ Toshiba (1080i) LCD HDTV.

Can I just say, that it has basically completely changed the way that I watch tv – and the best part is that it has so much incredible potential to be so much more – This little box paired with the Boxee software creates this incredible social media, music media playing, podcast playing, streaming internet video playing, downloading, wonderfully…… and so on.

I think the best part about it is that it automatically indexes and finds media that is stored on your networked drives. So in my case, i’ve got a pretty basic network consisting of a modem, a wireless N router, and a NAS drive. I keep all of my media on the NAS drive (that could be RAIDed for security), and boxee knows to keep an eye on the files that are on the NAS drive – so whenever I upload a new file to the NAS (usually through finder), Boxee often automatically finds it, and makes it best guess as to what the movie, or tv show is called (sometimes its wrong, but its super easy to change the name, and give it the right data – it IS getting much better at identifying content though).

I highly suggest that if you haven’t already tried the alpha, that you give it a whirl. It runs on Windows, OSX, Linux and Apple TV and is relatively easy to install, and if you get into a bind, they’ve got a really great development team, and also a very active forum – someone is always available to help.

Check it out at boxee.tv

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