June 2007 Archives

I installed an AppleTV yesterday and I thought I'd share some of my initial impressions.

The design of the AppleTV is very much like that of a MacMini, with the same footprint, but about half the height (no DVD/CD-ROM on the TV). It's small and quiet, but it does get hot. I hooked it into my 1080i HD TV via a connection from the HDMI port on the AppleTV to the DVI port on the TV. I used a DVI cable to do this with an HDMI/DVI adapter. Since the DVI (unlike HDMI) doesn't do audio, a simple audio patch cord was needed for the audio. Your other choices are component video and audio and/or optical audio.

The system disk is 40GB, and after system/OS, it has a capacity of just under 33GB to store movies, audio, podcasts, and photos among others. It connects to your home network wirelessly (it has built in 802.11b/g/n and the radio seems pretty good) or 10/100Mb wired Ethernet. If you use g or n wireless network, you have sufficient speed to stream media to/from it.

I have an 1080i HD TV and the AppleTV supports 1080i HD or 480p resolutions (i is for interlaced and p is for progressive). I used it in 1080i mode. The picture was very good and I didn't have to do any of the tweaking that the TV can do.

Once installed with the picture setup, I sync'd it with iTunes on my laptop. You need at least iTunes version 7.1 to do this. I was very happy that when the AppleTV tried to attach itself to my laptop, my laptop's firewall alerted me and told me how to allow it. Once you do that you enter a code from your TV and the AppleTV shows up just like an iPod does in your iTunes.

I thought the interface to iPhoto was really good and it was quite easy to select individual albums/slidesows or "sync" a whole iPhoto library.

The remote is almost the size of an iPod Nano with TV remote like buttons. I found myself trying to "dial" the remote just like I would the click wheel on an iPod (see later).

Boos and hisses:

1. The network installation didn't go as well as I think it should have. I route out through another machine rather than my wireless switch/router, so I had to go into the TCP/IP configuration. This involves using a remote control to "dial" the IP address. When I entered one that's a standard Private Internet address, unlike most OSes, it didn't guess the standard (geekspeak -- Class C) netmask, rather it came up 000.000.000.000. Once I put the proper netmask on (255.255.255.0), it didn't guess that the router was on that network. Not a big deal, but even Windows Me does that.
2. While the interface clearly makes a distinction between music and podcasts, apparently the slide show does not, so part way through the slideshow, a podcast started playing.
3. The index to the songs doesn't take advantage of the screen size with cascading menues.
4. With many songs it is a little hard to go from top to bottom (scrolling through each song). Maybe it should have an alphabetical index too. This is also where a click wheel iPod interface would help.

Features for version 2.0

Here's what I'd like to see in version 2.0 of the hardware:

• A coax connection with a tuner and/or place for a CableCARD
• a digital video recorder (DVR)
• a DVD

Obviously, one of Apple's goals is to sell iTunes "Movie" content rather than letting me load a DVD or tune my cable through it with DVR capability. I understand that, but I expected the AppleTV to be much more like a cable box than a sort of an iPod interface for your TV. I really consider version 1.0 of this product iPodTV rather than AppleTV.

My overall grade for the AppleTV version 1.0 would be an "I" for incomplete -- elegant design, but it needs more features.

* The AppleTV package does include the warning that the "TV is not included."

Last week, Cole Camplese and I presented version 2.0 of our Web 2.0 and HigherEd talk. As we did last year, we tried to make it as informative and entertaining as possible. The short synopsis of this year's talk is that Penn State has a much better Web 2.0 story one year later. We reused some of the slides from last year, but found that Web2.0 required far less explanation than our previous talk. This gave us more opportunity to do a progress report.

We updated the status of blogging, podcasting, and wikis. We also included discussions of some of the social networks that students are using, e.g., Facebook and mySpace, and ones that "adults" are using like LinkedIn, gather.com, and Meetup.com. We spoke about the social phenomenon of flickr and twitter and jaiku. This year, in addition to talking about del.icio.us social bookmarking, I spoke a little about my Penn State social bookmarking prototype, which I call PawMarks (see me if you'd like access). One of the really cool Web 2.0 concepts that Cole spoke about was the community support sites or hubs (e.g. those for podcasting at Penn State or blogging at Penn State). These leverage the collective intelligence of the user communities in very Web 2.0 ways.

I think the state of Web 2.0 at Penn State is much better than it was last year and I think both Cole and I see HigherEd coming around and embracing Web 2.0. It was great to see the conference itself supporting notions of Web 2.0 with a conference blog site and a conference "tag." Overall, I think our talk went pretty well and we've received some very good feedback on it. It is always a pleasure to present with Cole.

Don Herbert, better known as "Mr. Wizard" died on Tuesday, June 12 at the age of 89. As the character "Mr. Wizard" he used the medium of television to bring science into our homes with balloons, eggs, soda bottles, and cryogenically frozen bananas. Although Mr. Wizard hasn't been on TV for a while, he was the pioneer. Carl Sagan, Bill Nye "the Science Guy", and even Neil deGrasse Tyson all owe their success indirectly to him. I first watched the show when it was revived on Canadian TV in the 1970's. I'd occasionally catch the show on Nick when I was in college and he was a guest on Letterman more than a few times.

Bill Nye wrote a nice piece about him in the Los Angeles Times. To echo the Science Guy:

Thanks, Don; you changed the world

You certainly changed it for me...

In an interesting ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a panel of judges said that broadcasting unscripted expletives does not violate decency standards. Ruling in favor of Fox and its affiliates, the majority said:

We find that the FCC's new policy regarding 'fleeting expletives' fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency's established practice...

In light of the Janet Jackson SuperBowl "thing," Congress increased per incident fines, and with the FCC changes in enforcement, comments at "live" events had generated some hefty fines for broadcast networks and their affiliates. More importantly, it had a "chilling" effect on the broadcast of events like "Saving Private Ryan" where profanity and the harshness of war is part of the script.

While I hope this doesn't increase the incidents of "fleeting expletives" on broadcast television, I agree with the court (but remember IANAL!).

My favorite part of the Reuters article was the description of the "oral" arguments:

Both sides presented oral arguments to the appeals court in December 2006, an unusual proceeding that featured the expletives uttered aloud by the Fox lawyer and the judges themselves in discussing the case.

Make your own joke -- just keep it clean!

I'm doing a review for WPSU-FM's Bookmark show next week about A Perfect Mess. Here's the text of my review:

As soon as I picked up A Perfect Mess, I couldn't put it down.. Of course, if I did, someone would probably trip over it. You see, A Perfect Mess is my life's anthem.

The authors seem highly qualified. Eric Abrahamson is a professor of management at Columbia Business School. David Freedman is the technology columnist at Inc. magazine. They’ve given the book two subtitles--probably to make its library catalog entry messier. The first is "The Hidden Benefits of Disorder"; the second is the very optimistic, "How crammed closets, cluttered offices, and on-the-fly planning make the world a better place."

Messiness makes "the world a better place?" The authors are quick to say, this does NOT give you a free pass to be a total slob. That's what I wanted when I picked up the book. They define messiness as “moderate disorganization,” not pathological sloppiness. A Perfect Mess describes practices, people, and organizations that work better because they tolerate moderate messiness.

Meanwhile, the world is biased towards neatness. That's why we have closet organizers. That's why we think someone with a messy desk is "probably a failure" in other aspects of his life. Such bias is a mistake, the authors contend, because a certain amount of messiness allows for adaptability and creativity. In fact they consider creativity a by-product of mess.

The book is laced with examples. One Japanese innovation is called the Noguchi filing system. As new papers come into your office, you put them in envelopes, label them, and stack them on edge on a shelf. Whenever you use something from an envelope, you return the envelope to the far left side of the stack. Soon, the most used stuff is on the left and the least used stuff is on the right. Brilliant! Of course, if you turn this "organization" 90 degrees and put the envelopes flat on your desk, you’ve got the average "messy" desk.

As a newfound disciple, I'll add my favorite example from personal experience -- my e-mail inbox. Most people painstakingly file e-mail messages in folders. That's great until they can't find the message in the folder they thought they put it in.

I never file mail. Computers are fast enough and storage is plentiful enough that I can instantly find a message based on sender, subject, or date. Filing stuff ensures I’ll never find it. By the way, several of my co-workers have adopted my model--including my boss

The authors do fall flat when they try to categorize messiness. But doesn’t that defy the premise of their book? Overall, though, I enjoyed this book so much I gave to my Mom for Mothers' Day. It's not a reflection on you, Mom. It’s just how I think.