Short Order Techout here there be geeks

Well, this weeks follow Friday entry is unfortunately flat.  I spent most of my week bringing two new domains online and starting two new blogs.  As a result of this, I spent all week in Wordpress Private Server Bootcamp and haven’t had time for much else.  I am really impressed with Wordpress so far and have really enjoyed getting it installed and working in the cloud on my hosted domains.  You are welcome to go check them out, I got www.bushwilliams.com which is basically just a personal portal to all my social networks as well as an infrequently updated personal blog.  The other is my new project which is www.fit.bushwilliams.com.  I am using this subdomain to track a new fitness project where I am gunning to lose 30+ pounds.  I have dubbed it “Project Porkins”, and have really enjoyed keeping it up to date over the last week.  Okay, so on to what I have managed to glean from the Tech world over the week in between wrestling with Wordpress:

1. Twitterrific for the iPhone was re-released, and its amazing!  I switched out tweetdeck for it on both my iPhone and my Desktop, and am glad to be back with a program that remembers where I left off.  There is a free version with add support or the pro version for $3.99.  If you are a tweetaholic like myself and haven’t tried it, go do yourself a favor.
2. Facebook 3.0 is still not out, and the die hard Facebookers are frothing at the mouth about it.
3. I scooped up a new Camera this week and found a great site for cheap batteries for your various devices.  I haven’t had a change to review them yet as they should be arriving today, but look for a review of my experience with www.BestBatt.com later this week.
4. In the iTunes world, I have been using Handbrake to back up my Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs.  This project has been blood, sweat, and optical media as a couple of episode just will not display on my AppleTV no matter how I try to rip them.  I even went so far as to rip those titles with Mac the Ripper and then try and use handbrake to convert from a Video_TS folder.  I have used Quicktime pro to export the files to Apple TV, and had all but thrown up my hands.  That is, until I made a last ditch effort and clicked “Make Version for AppleTV” in iTunes.  I didn’t expect much as I figured this was the same as Quicktime but lo and behold, it worked.  iTunes, boldly converting where no converter has been able to before.
5. In other Geek news, Gene Roddenberry would have celebrated a birthday this week.  I honored his name day by sitting down with a “Tribute to Gene Roddenberry” documentary followed by a viewing of the STTNG episode “Hero Worship” which was the show being shot the day he passed away.  Happy Birthday Gene, your the man.
6. In short cut land, I found that CMD+F will pop up a “Find” window that you can use to search for specific words in a text document or webpage.  Thats good stuff.

Finally I would like to go on record for Apple prediction number two:  While the idea of a shiny new product line from Apple seems exciting and excellent and why wouldn’t I want whatever it is?  Eh, I have been wracking my brain on this whole tablet thing and it just doesn’t make any sense.  I think its a little too novelty for Apple and am now staking my claim that the Apple Tablet is not going to happen.  Instead, let cross our fingers for something much more practical such as oooh I dunno, an open format Apple TV with built in tuner, DVR software, and a subscription to the iTunes store?  See you all next week, hopefully from our first “Follow Friday” post on Snow Leopard.  Have a good weekend.

Its Friday, August the 14th and this is the first of a series of weekly Follow Friday posts where I will give a few quick nods at the things I learned this week in the Tech World or thought worthy of a mention.  So, here goes nothing:

1. The Apple Caps Lock Key: You have to apply some pressure for it to activate, a quick tap wont turn it on.  This was designed so you can avoid taking your mild mannered blog post and turning it into an UNINTENTIONAL RANT…  Trivially brilliant.
2. Adjust your Macs volume the @TCHughes way.  Hold down Shift while you work the volume up and down keys and the accompanying bubble popping sound will be silenced.
3. This one will likely showcase that I am indeed still a Newb in many regards, but holding down CMD+SHIFT+A will open your Applications folder.
4. Techzilla Daily for 8/12/09 highlighted my favorite new feature, the quick Application close.  When using CMD+TAB to switch between Apps, you can let off the TAB key and hit Q (so thats CMD+Q) to close the App you have highlighted.  Very schnazzy.
5. Snow Leopard did not stealth ship, despite my best efforts at uncovering a global plot to bring happiness to the front door of millions.
6. @TCHughes pointed me to GDGT.com and cost me two good hours.  (Softcore Geeks need not follow link)
7. Now for a couple of App Mentions and we are outta here:
   1. The TWiT App is another brilliant find by @TCHughes this week.  Bring the TWiT.tv network to your iPhone with live streaming, chat room integration, and On-Demand play back of previous shows. Video quality of the streams is excellent.  Being a TWiT fan boy, this is probably my favorite new App at my favorite price, free. 
   2. Doom for iPhone drops from $9.99 to $2.99
   3. Star Defense for iPhone drops from $2.99 to $.99
   And thats all folks.  Thanks for checking out my first Follow Friday installment, see you next week.  If ever so inclined, feel free to leave the useful bits you picked up this week in the comments section or send them to @shortordertech on twitter or Friendfeed.  /Cheers!

Not to succumb to wild speculation but I just so happened to be checking my bank statement online and noticed a pending charge from Apple for $10.65.  Having only bought a $4.99 App this week, I found this unusual and then it hit me… Two months ago I bought my Mac Mini shortly after WWDC and ended up qualifying for the $10.00 upgrade price for Snow Leopard.  I went and applied for it immediately, June 18th to be exact and sure enough, having gone back to my account on Apple.com I found the following:

Notice the charge is for $10.65?  Could it be that Snow Leopard is about to ship, or are they just charging me early?  Either way, a good conspiracy theory is hard to find so humor me here.

Alright, I just completed my first round of Civ on the iPhone, and although it was a shameful mop up on the Chieftan difficulty, it was still a brilliant waste of 1.5 hours.  I have been a Civ junkie from the original all the way through Civ4, with only a brief side step of the Xbox version and a somewhat rocky relationship with “Call to Power”.  This is Civ in your pocket and its excellent.  The game is on sale through the end of the day for $4.99 at which time it will jump back to its full price of $9.99.  If in doubt, get it now, its absolutely fantastic!  The only thing that could possibly make this better would be the Leonard Nimoy voice overs.  Even without the green blooded bastards words of wisdom, it would still be illogical not to grab this App, which can be found here.

Earlier this evening I received an IM to let me know that an old friend of mine that I haven’t seen in years has released a new season of shorts on his website. After reviewing several of them, most of which I enjoyed very much, I thought I would link him through.  I have no idea what he is shooting with, but I somehow feel like it would be okay to part with a kidney to get one. Anyhow, go check out season three at http://www.andrewsamuel.com/html/season_3.html 

Good luck Andrew and congrats on the new season.

 I know the real Geeks among us will truely appreciate the milestone
that is my first whiteboard. Glorious isn’t it?

I have been waiting for what seems like weeks for the final few gigs of my Drobo’s third Terabyte to fill up so that I could do a live expansion of the volume.  Well, tonight was finally the night.  I have been working on a video project that is one hundred gigs in size and while copying those files over to the Drobo, the “time to expand” indicator light came on.  Having purchased the Drobo with three Terabytes, I haven’t performed a live expansion.  I figure if all of my live data is either going to expand gracefully or crash and burn before my very eyes I should at least get a video and share the experience.   Without further delay, here are the results:

So, the Drobo expanded with ease.  I have been impressed with this product since the day I unboxed it and couldn’t recommend having one more.  I am currently streaming 600+ DVDs, 1000+ TV shows, and 12,000+ songs off the Drobo to three Macs and three Apple TVs, and have never experienced an availability or performance issue.  I have been fortunate not to have a drive failure so far, but with everything backed up at work, I am almost hopeful that I get to deal with one just to see if its as easy as tonight’s expansion.  I even got an e-mail from the Drobo letting me know that it had detected a new HDD.  All in all, you just can’t beat it.

I have been using an Airport Extreme at the house for a while now. Its dual band 2.4Ghz and 5.0Ghz transmission, 802.11 Wireless N, a USB port for sharing printers and hard drives, and the convenience of the Airport Utility made it a must buy for me. I currently have a four port USB HUB plugged into the USB port that I use to hang two HDDs and a printer off the Airport.  All of these devices auto mount and require no magic or voodoo to access even right after a reboot.  If this sounds appealing, its about to be even more so… last night Apple silently upgraded the Time Capsule and dropped its price.

The Time Capsule is essentially an Airport Extreme with a built in HDD for network storage or commonly, Time Machine backups. The previously priced 1TB model has been dropped to a very reasonable $299 with a new 2TB model available for $499.  Sadly, the 500GB model is no more. So, is $299 reasonable for a wireless N router with a 1TB HDD built in? Well, lets add it up:

A Wireless N router / print server @ $150.00 + 1TB HDD @ $70.00 + and enclosure for it @ $50.00 – the ease of use you get from an Airport Extreme & Airport Utility = a deal if you ask me. The new Time Capsules are available immediately from the Apple Store and can be found here.  Its never been a better time to make a brilliant infrastructure upgrade.

I suppose this entry couldn’t be more poorly timed as it is on the heels of this months Wired Magazine.  The August issue features Brad Pitt on the cover wearing his own earpiece with the caption “Ditch the headset he can barely pull it off and you are not him.”  While this sort of puts the kibosh on some of the major points your going to read in post, I have faith in the geeks out there that we still don’t really care if we partake in the “pure douchebaggery” of wearing the “Ear Mullet” as described in the August 2009 Wired Magazine Article “New Rules for the Digital Gentleman“, Page 90.  (Great article by the way)

Wow, what a lead in, for the two guys in coordinating Data and Lore T-Shirts and my wife (thanks Dear) still left in the room out of pure politeness, lets move on to the review.  Take a step back to the iPhone 3.0 keynote at WWDC.  There was a quick nod at the fact that 3.0 added support for A2DP Stereo Bluetooth an addition that, to this day, is still widely overlooked.  Well, I would like to take a minute to shine a light back on this feature and talk about why I love it.  

For the most part, before I got my headset, I didn’t listen to content on my iPhone unless driving, it just wasn’t convenient.  I am one of those people who, regardless of how hard I tried, always managed to snag the corner of a table, catch a hinge, grab the doorknob, etc. with my earphones.  I usually couldn’t even manage to mow the yard without yanking one of them out of my ear because the cord wasn’t long enough.  Then on top of all of this, with the exception of mass transit, or if your under the age of 18, you likely don’t want to be in public sporting your noise canceling headphones.  I may be misguided, but I believe that in general, while in public, people find it useful to hear things like car horns, announcements,  fire alarms, and gunshots.  Finally, nine times out of ten, I really didn’t want to convey to the rest of the world that I had my “do not disturb” sign out when walking around the Home Depot with my earbuds in.  ”Checking out” in this fashion wasn’t a luxury I found available often enough to even carry earbuds around with me.  Well, that all changed last Father’s Day when I got a Plantronics Voyager 885

The Voyager 885 is your mild mannered “Ear Mullet” with a catch.  It supports full A2DP stereo bluetooth.  This little convertible will allow you to listen to your music or podcasts while on the go all while keeping you firmly anchored to the world around you.  Finally I can cruise the Home Depot or Bed, Bath, and Beyond (if there is time) while TWiT, The Mac Observer, or my favorite tunes are pumping into a single ear, all while under the guise of someone walking around with a low profile earpiece in, waiting for a call.  When Sunday rolls around and its time to mow, or if I have that rare break where I can fully “check out”, I can pop on the included stereo adapter that runs a short cord around the back of my neck so that I get full stereo in both ears.   I can even answer calls and start talking or hear if I get an e-mail or text should I not want a total departure.  All in all, this is a brilliant product that has doubled my capacity for listening to podcasts and audio books which in turn, makes me a happy Geek.  Did I mention it also links right up to your Mac should you need a wireless headset for communication software?  This little guy delivers very good sound reproduction, infrequent cut outs for a bluetooth headset, when used with both ears, the noise canceling is fantastic, it can be worn comfortably over long periods of time, and digital douchebaggery be damned, for $40.00 shipped, this is a no brainer to anyone who can identify with this post.  Do you have an A2DP device you would like to recommend?  Now that I am converted I want to start collecting and trying out as many as possible so please, comment or leave feedback and let us know!

 Well, here we are at the third and final installment of our posts on how to create an Apple Home Theater System of your very own. In our last segment we discussed the Apple TV. We dubbed it the simpler solution to extend the iTunes store to the big screen, watch your ripped DVD collection, and bring all of your music and photos to the living room as well. Not wanting to dismiss the Apple TV as entry level and simple, we also mentioned a hack that would allow more file formats and various sources of streamed internet video to play by installing Boxee. Having now discussed the Apple TV in full, we can move on to our final option. This option being for those of us who need to, for better or worse, take it to the next level. The few masochistic geeks who want to toil over a project every bit as much as enjoy the final result. Ladies and Gentlemen, that option is the Mac Mini Home Theater.

Nearly eight months into using the Apple TV as my main home theater solution, a friend of mine purchased a Mac Mini and loaded it up with a program called Plex to serve as his media extender. I sat quietly for a few weeks to allow him enough time to really get some use out of it, occasionally dropping a “Hey, hows that Mini working out for you?” and always receiving words of praise in return. Well, after about six weeks and hearing the subject come up several times on Macbreak Weekly, I decided to take the plunge. Please note that when I say plunge, I mean it. The Apple TV is a stand alone product that once hooked up, for the most part, just works. The Mac Mini is a computer that requires all of the attention any computer would and uses third party software which opens the doors for extra variables, and the potential for extra frustration. On the plus side, it also allows total freedom of how your media is presented, the formats available for playback, as well as many other perks. With a Mac Mini as your media extender you will be able to surf the net on your TV, have access to any of your programs be they Photo, Video, Games, etc. This option is robust and the sky is the limit, so long as our willing to pay the occasional price. What is that price you ask? Well, inevitably software will freeze, you’ll need reboots, programs will require updates, and worst of all, your family will definately be calling you while your busy at work to help them figure out whats wrong with it. Its just the way it is, its going to happen. Heed my warnings now and mull them over carefully. I will expand on this a bit more in my conclusion.

Now, perhaps I got a bit ahead of myself. We still need to buy ourselves a Mini right? Well, we have to consider that out of the gate, there are a couple of hardware options available at the time of purchase. I chose to buy the barebones standard model from Apple and perform my own RAM upgrade. I however, am one of those masochistic geeks who enjoy inflicting unnecessary pain on myself. So, if like me, the idea of getting a putty knife to pop open the Mini, removing tiny little screws, a few pieces of tape, the WiFi antennas, the DVD assembly, the old memory, and then putting it all back together doesn’t sound like your bag, just buy it outright with four gigs of RAM. It is absolutely imperative to have four gigs of RAM on the Mini if using it for a home theater because this will bump your shared video memory from 128 Megs to 256, and provide a much cleaner picture.I am including a video from my favorite after market Mac supplier OWC or “Other World Computing” below that demonstrates this process, only you can decide if its worth the extra hundred bucks. Having gone through the process, I would likely say yes, but this wasn’t my first rodeo and if I had never seen the inside of a computer before I would have been crying crocodile tears on my huge pilla. As for processor and hard drive, its all in what you want to spend and / or upgrade third party. I went with the smallest of each as I plan to store my media externally to the Mini and even at 2.0Ghz, the processing power is plenty to playback video.

With that little adventure behind me, I used the included mini display port to DVI connection to run a DVI -> HDMI cable from my Mini to my receiver, got a bluetooth mouse and keyboard ready, and fired the little guy up. If you are not using HDMI to deliver audio and video, you will still want to run a DVI -> HDMI cable from the Mini into your TV and then purchase a TOSLINK cable (I prefer Monoprice.com) to send the digital audio to your receiver. Congratulations, at this point, you are up and running with a Mac Mini in 720 or 1080P video depending on your TV, as well as digital sound. Now its time to choose your preferred method of remote control and your presentation software. I personally use a Logitech Harmony 890for remote control and find it to be easy to use, reliable, and something the whole Family can master quickly. I find the $20.00 Apple Remote to be a nice little gadget, but as it wont change inputs and adjust volume, its a hard sell. For the iPhone / iPod Touch users in the crowd, I highly suggest “Snatch” for the iPhone. This App will allow you to download or create your own remote control interfaces as well as close and launch programs (very handy if they are locked up) and provides a keyboard and touchpad interface. Its pretty brilliant to be able to launch Snatch on your iDevice, browse your content as if your device was a remote control, and then close your media program, open up your browser, and have full mouse and keyboard support in the same App to control web surfing. In fact, I just removed the mouse and keyboard after about a week and used Snatch inclusively to control the entire experience. At $3.99 its a steal.

So now that you have your Mac Mini pumping through your stereo and displaying to the big screen in full HD, its time to drop in all of your content, locate a carbonated beverage, and bust out the Hot Tamales. But what are we going to use to present all of our content? Well, I chose Plex. I know Boxee is another popular option, but I haven’t had enough exposure with it to include it in this post. I will say that Plex is basically built off the same platform and my sole decision to try it first is how beautifully and clever it presents your content. I plan to write up a full review on Plex and Boxee in a sort of a head to head in the very near future, so I am not going to go too far into their inner workings now. The important thing is that prior to even considering a Mac Mini as a home theater I would download both of these programs (did I mention they are free?), load in your media, get a remote control working, and simulate the experience on your Macbook, iMac, or Mac Pro first. The Mini is going to set you back nearly six hundred more than an Apple TV before its all said and done and you can very cheaply and easily mock up the experience before shelling out the cash.

To conclude, I will give you my thoughts on the Mini vs. the Apple TV from first hand experience. Regardless of if you are new to Mac or know them inside and out, the fact is that the Mini is never going to be as stable as the Apple TV. True, the Apple TV can loose sync, needs an occasional reboot, and is generally at the mercy of another Mac to supply its content, but by the by, if something goes South, correcting it is fairly straight forward. You either reboot the Apple TV, or your open and close iTunes on the host Mac. Thats basically it for troubleshooting and unless you have some freak malfunction that requires using the warranty, those simple steps will fix it every time. The Mini on the other hand, while a joy to use, is subject to a third party program like Plex to present your media, which in my experience, isn’t stable enough to be left running all the time. So why not close it when I am done? Well, realistically that is not going to happen. I expect a solution rounding on $1000.00 to work when I want it to work yet inevitably two or three times a week I would get a call from the Family stating that they couldn’t watch movies. Luckily I could remote into the Mini from work and sure enough, Plex would be frozen and I would have to close it and re-launch. I am not trying to sound like I am dumping on Plex here, because its a fantastic program, but the fact is that its not designed to run 24/7 without intervention and in the end, thats what I expect from my media extension appliance. It is for this reason that I have moved my Mac Mini into my office and now use it as the media server rather than extender for our house. In its place I have added our third Apple TV much to the relief of the rest of my Family.

If you are on the fence between these two products, my final conclusion is to buy the Apple TV. If you are emerging into Mac or want a little enthusiast machine on the cheap, the Mac Mini is the coolest little computer I have ever owned. Its sitting beside me right now, serving up two iTunes libraries to our Apple TVs and managing all of our media via FW800 off my Drobo. I route all of my downloads through it, host my iPhoto library from it, and all the while it operates cool, silent, and without fuss, 24/7.Should the day arise that I want to try the Mini as my media extender solution again, its here waiting for me, but for now you will have to excuse me. I just downloaded the pilot of Warehouse 13 and the Apple TV awaits. Hope you have enjoyed this series and found them useful, as always we look forward to your feedback and questions. By the way, the technical specs for the Mini can be found here.