The Screaming Viking

I’ve had my tivo for just over a month now.  I think that’s enough time to give it a proper shake down and for me to pin point a lot of the quirks and bugs (with the assistance of the wife and kid of course).  Over all it works pretty good.  I upgraded the hd and there have been no problems.  I picked up a drive that some sites said was a little louder than another option…but I don’t even hear the thing spin.  If you have the t.v. on, I’m not sure how you would.  Maybe if someone was sleeping with their ear on top of the tivo they would notice it?  dunno…but there do not seem to be any problems.  I haven’t checked to see how much heat it generates but it’s in an open and well vented area…I don’t expect that to be a problem.  We’re recording everything we can in HD and I haven’t seen double digits in space used.  There isn’t the mass amount of crap on there that the old one had…yet, but I’m sure soon their will be.  There was one functional problem with it that was beginning to get pretty huge though…

The HD tivo has a new interface.  When you hit the tivo button it brings up the main menu and puts what you were watching into a small square in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  You still see what is going on…this is semi handy.  It also puts “advertisements” for lack of a better word, across the top of the screen.  It’s advertisements for t.v. shows and movies though.  It amounts to a bunch of “movie posters” across the top 1/8 of the screen.  Each of the shows you have recorded are listed by show name and episode name.  When you select one of these shows it brings you to another screen that has the promotional picture associated with the show as well as your options for the episode.  I’m not sure if the movie/show ads across the top change at this point…I expect they might.  From here you do what you want with the show.

HD Menu

At first glance this doesn’t seem like a problem and sounds pretty cool.  The problem is all this information requires bandwidth…from what I’ve been able to gather…it requires quite a bit.  There were a couple of times where the network has dropped at the house, and the tivo will flash the “device has lost connection…” notification across the top of the screen.  For the most part this could be ignored until it’s time to address it…but moving from show to show or even playing one becomes an agonizingly slow process at this point…we’re talking minutes not seconds to move around.

This seemed kinda strange to me, but I never really had time to think about it until last night.  As I’m sitting there screwing around I saw -something- change…I don’t remember right now what it was.  It dawned on me that the device must be pulling this information via internet connection.  For whatever reason I assumed the ads across the top were randomly shown and updated at off times, and the extra information that showed up with the T.V. show was somehow tagged in the file when it was saved.  Clearly this thing is pulling down quite a bit of information as you move around.  I was looking around to try and find a setting to turn off this information.  I found an option under settings to go from classic tivo to hd tivo menus.  I switched it back to classic and she’s snappy as ever.

Classic Menu

Granted now I don’t get all the eye candy that I got with the HD version…but in a month of using the thing I wasn’t interested in any of the ads anyhow..they just got in the way when I pushed a button too many times on the remote.  The shows are still recorded in HD and look quite good.  The interface looks like it is an SD feed blown up to 42″ to accommodate my T.V.  It’s still really easy to read so there aren’t any concerns there.  I’m assuming there is some logic built in to the device somewhere that targets these ads according to what show you are watching or searching for.  Since no ads show up now there is lots of horse power for the device to act like a regular tivo now instead of some kind of ad box.

I wouldn’t’ mind the ads really if it wasn’t part of the reason the tivo was sluggish.  They might be helpful in finding new shows I hadn’t thought of before.  As long as they aren’t pimpin’ tide or something across there I don’t care.  I know the issue is somewhat related to bandwidth because at the time I noticed it I was choking my down stream, but it also takes some equipment horse power to push all this stuff through.  This also has the added benefit of making the “stop” button work more like the wife likes.  Before it would take you back to the main tivo menu instead of the “show’s” menu where you could delete the episode or whatever.  It caused a bit more button pushing and was a bit inconvenient.  It looks like this should now be resolved.

The last thing I have to do with my HD setup is find a suitable HD replacement for my xbox.  I’m trying to get something on the cheap, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out.  There are some Acer Revo small form factor desktops that make really sweet XBMC machines.  Acer stopped pushing out the low end ones and is only making the 300+ models.  The enthusiast market caught on to the low end ones and now on ebay they are going for more than they sold for new.

I meant to type something up about this while I was doing it or shortly there after and I completely forgot about it.  I did this about a month ago now…

After the old man died, it dawned on me that if I wanted to continue to enjoy the various delicacies he produced I would need to learn how to do it myself.  It took him several years to hone his talents…and if he wasn’t an expert no one is.  His recipes are written down, but to say he followed them loosely is an understatement.  There was always an adjustment here or there that had to be made…nothing was ever the same twice.  More often than not it was a success, but there were some failures.  I think it was the epic failure that was the “wine summer sausage incident” that resulted in me only now being able to try home made summer sausage.  I figured the best place to start was with a smoked turkey.  I chose a turkey as my first “on my own” attempt for a couple of reasons.  It’s easy to go to the store and pick one up.  There would be no time spent grinding and stuffing anything…I wouldn’t need to let anything hang for too long…and I really like cured/smoked turkey.

The first step in this process was to find myself a turkey.  It was around thanksgiving time so turkeys were on sale.  I grabbed 3 of them in case I screwed up too bad on the first one.  I had thought I would do two at the same time, but being my first solo flight I decided to just do one of them…I didn’t want 2 messed up birds.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hitachi is launching a 7200 rpm 3tb enterprise level drive.  It’s pretty amazing to me how large these drive have gotten.  It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago when I built the server I currently use at the crib.  At the time, the best price/gb was 400gig drives.  I picked up 4 of them for around 100 each.  Looking on newegg you can now get 2tb drives for around 100 bucks.  I have a lot of crap on my server…but I still only burn up about 500sih gig or so.

I’ve had this thing for a few weeks now and have given it a pretty thorough shake down.  For all the good stuff I’ve said about it, the little sucker has a few problems…

First and foremost is the proprietary connection it uses.  I don’t know why they couldn’t just go with a standard micro usb connector for charging and data transfer.  Maybe they thought it would generate some additional revenue for them if they made it proprietary?  I dunno.  It’s the same shape as a micro usb…you can shove a micro usb in the slot…but it won’t charge or make sufficient connection for a PC.  This connection is also fragile and in a poor spot.  It’s directly at the bottom of the nook.  If I’m reading…with the device plugged in…what are the odds of me bumping this connection against my chest, stomach, or whatever?  Pretty good…i’ve done it a few times.  It also bends -really- easy and the end coming off the cable isn’t of the best quality.  I’ve harped on the kid to be extremely careful with it…but I can see us buying another cable for her pretty soon.  I’d like another for myself, one to have connected to the computer permanently and one that I use to charge it (usually in the bedroom).  The connection was poorly thought out.

That’s the main hardware problem I have with the device.  A buddy has complained about the battery life, and it’s true it goes dead a lot faster than other readers that seem to last months on a charge.  Getting 8 hours out of a tablet though doesn’t seem all that bad to me.  I guess I still view this thing as a tablet and less as a book reader.  If a guy is going to do a lot of traveling (hours on the plane, hours waiting, hours traveling from/to the airport) yeah it might die in there somewhere.  I’m not sure what the screen limitations are…but it would be pretty cool if this thing had a “book mode” or something where it goes into an extremely low battery usage level.  Maybe something like that is possible with a software update…but most likely another hardware revision would be necessary.  I doubt it’s a high priority…but it would be awfully handy.

The next problems I have with it are software problems.  I’m not sure if they could “easily” be fixed…but they could certainly be addressed.

Currently, there is no way to push your own content to the device via wireless.  Maybe that’s by design.  It is very easy to download books from B&N…get magazines and so forth.  Maybe the idea of having to hook it up, download to a pc then push to the device is something the designers knew would be a little cumbersome and would push people to the B&N store.  If that’s the case…that’s fine.  I don’t have a problem with a company trying to make money via something like this.  It’s unfortunate and I believe it can be remedied by jail breaking the device.

The last problem I have with it goes to core functionality and something I don’t think anyone really tested.  It’s a pain to manage a large number of books on the device.  I’m not sure what the lowest number to put on there and still be a pain is exactly, but I know for sure that 200+ suck bad.  The device has something called a “shelf” built in to it, and you can put one book on multiple shelves…the problem with this is I have to manually do that on the device itself.  For just a few books it’s not a problem…but then for a few books is this really necessary?  But to go through and manually do this “shelf” process for 100′s of books is a tedious and dare I say approaching impossible task.  It would be nice to see some sort of management type software on the PC to push these books to the device.  Calibre fills some of this need, but it doesn’t sort the books on the device in any discernible manner.

In an earlier blog I said “it might be easier to keep just a few books on the device” but after some discussion with a buddy that’s not really what I want.  I have this device with 5 or so gig of free internal memory and an add-on card with whatever you want to buy (I have an additional 16gig)…why can’t I store all my books on there?  I should be able to some how store thousands of books on this device and not have to manually sort each one of them.  They should be in categories by default.  I’m waiting for my plane and I finish up “Game of Thrones” for example…when I’m on the plane I decide I want something from the sports genre…whatever I have on there that fits this criteria should already be on that “shelf” so I can easily browse it.  I shouldn’t have to search through thousands of books.  Beyond that, they should also be categorized by author, title, series, publisher, year…etc etc etc.  Any sort of relevant meta data that can be tagged on these files should be there.  The device should read all of this in the background.  When I hit the library button I should get the options: Browse by (title, author, series….) and a free form search window.  The search is already there…and from what I understand you can search by author and tittle.  What If I just want to look around?

I’m sure the thought behind this is “why would you have a book on the device you don’t know about?”  There might be a little validity to that…but lets be real here…the device is setup so you can push your own files to it.  Given the proper meta-data it should automatically sort on this information without me having to manually do it.  If the device could sort by these fields, calibre would be able to handle the PC side just fine.

Those problems can be solved via software updates…and hopefully B&N, after having this thing in the wild for a while, sees some value in these features.  I’m still a fan of the device.  I think it’s very versatile and with some access to the app store it will be a pretty good little device.  A little better browser would rock, and when netflix gets their droid client out to the public this sucker will be pretty sweet.  The child uses her’s quite a bit to read, mess around on facebook (including real time chat) and listen to pandora.