TiVo releases 9.4 software update

My Series3 box upgraded to the new 9.4 software release yesterday. The Summer 2008 Service Update is for Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs only and includes the following new features:

  • the ability to play (or delete) an entire folder at once (which is helpful if you want to queue up a bunch of SpongeBob for the kids)
  • the on-screen Guide is now available even when you’re watching a recording (before, if you pressed Guide while watching a recording it would dump you out to Live TV)
  • you can jump forward and back 24 hours in the Guide by using the Instant Replay and Skip-to-Tick buttons on the remote
  • there’s now a “search by callsign” option in the Guide as well (if, for some reason, you can remember your FOX affiliate’s callsign, but not the channel number, I guess)
  • one-click closed captioning toggle from the channel banner (my personal favorite new feature!)
  • your Thumbs Ratings can now be refined via a separate screen under TiVo Suggestions

This update also added a new application to stream YouTube videos to television through the TiVo. It’s been known for a while that the decoder in the S3 and THD boxes supported H.264, but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that functionality has been used. Work is already underway in the community to reverse engineer this so that H.264 video can be sent directly back to the TiVo without the need to transcode it into MPEG-2 first.

The discussion thread about 9.4 on TCF is here, and the pyTivo folks are talking about the H.264 stuff here.

Know Your Stuff – inventory your home

For years I’ve used the home inventory feature of Microsoft Money to track important items in the house, along with purchase dates, replacement amounts, serial numbers, etc. Even when, starting with Money 2005, it was no longer a supported piece of the application, I continued to use it just because I had so much information in there (and there was no easy way to get it out).

This week I came across a post on Lifehacker pointing to the Insurance Information Institute’s free Know Your Stuff home inventory application and decided to give it a shot. I liked what I saw, so I began the laborious process of manually re-entering all of my home inventory information into Know Your Stuff, copy/pasting from MS Money … but I think it was worth it.

KYS organizes your items by rooms: first you create the rooms of your house, then create the items in those rooms. You enter basic information like the item name, location (room), category, purchase date and price, serial number, descriptive information, etc. You can also attach a photo and/or receipt. Once you’ve done all the data entry, you can generate reports, or even export the data to Excel (in CSV format). If you want a secure, offsite backup solution for your inventory data, KYS integrates with Vault24.

Overall, I like the organization aspect of KYS. It has the flexibility to let me create my own rooms, and even asset types. I like how you can attach multiple photos of a room, but am a little frustrated you can only attach a single picture to an item. Also, for the receipt field, only images are allowed (no PDFs, which would seem to make more sense, especially for multi-page documents). The search function is a bit limited too, allowing you only to search on the item name (instead of say, Make or Model). As for secure backup, I’ll just put a copy of my inventory file in my Amazon S3 account for a lot cheaper than the $15/year fee for storing a single inventory file on Vault24. 😛

At least now I’ve got all of that information out of MS Money and into a separate application where I can do better reporting and easier updating.

I love my iPod. I #$%@ HATE iTunes!

I love my 30gb iPod Video … I really do. The interface is simple and elegant; the hardware is a marvel; its changed how I listen to music, and what I listen to: I don’t listen to radio at all anymore, I listen to podcasts (or when the podcasts run out, music!).

So why, why, WHY does Apple ruin such a perfect device with the millstone-around-the-neck that is iTunes? Where do I start?

  • iTunes is slow: my main desktop that I use for iTunes is a 3.0GHz P4 with 2gb of RAM running Vista Home Premium. Ok, yes, it’s a few years old and doesn’t have dual cores, but it’s not exactly slow. And yet iTunes runs like molasses: switching between views in the library is slow, typing into the search box is slow, right-clicking on my iPod under Devices to get to the context menu is slow. The entire thing is just sloooooow.
  • iTunes is bloated: why do I have a Apple TV tab in my iTunes preferences when I don’t have an Apple TV? Why does it install the Apple Mobile Device Support service and the Syncing tab under Preferences when I don’t have an iPhone?
  • iTunes is broken: this drives me nuts … I update the tags on my MP3s, add album art, etc. Then I’ll notice, while a track is playing on my iPod, that the cover art is gone. I check iTunes, and sure enough, the art has been removed. Sometimes it even seems to update the Album Artist tag for me. I’ve spent a lot of time tagging everything the way I want it … don’t mess with my tags! (And before you ask, yes, I have “automatically download missing album artwork” turned off).
  • iTunes is sneaky: remember a few months ago when Apple tried to slip in their Safari browser through their Windows updater? Well, if you’ve upgraded to iTunes 7.7 recently, you’ll find a new MobileMe icon in your control panel! Yep, they did it again. I’m not going to use MobileMe, don’t mess around and put icons for stuff I don’t want on my PC (for steps on how to remove it, see here).

There are a few things I like about iTunes: the podcatcher functionality, Smart Playlists, the ability to organize my music library hierarchy on my PC, etc. I only use it, though, because I have to. I stopped buying tracks from the iTunes Music Store once Amazon launched their DRM-free music store so I don’t need it for that. If you know of a good iTunes replacement that will work with my iPod, please let me know!

A new music player for TiVo: Harmonium

I’ve been using Galleon for a long time (since its JavaHMO roots) to play my music library on my TiVos. Now there’s nothing wrong with it, but development has pretty much come to a complete halt.

Enter a new HME music application: Harmonium by Charles Perry. It’s still in early beta (only up to version 0.3.1) but shows promise. It has a sharp, high-definition interface, allows creation of playlists on-the-fly, is easy to use, and its free.

For now, I’ve shut off my Galleon music applications and am checking out Harmonium. I’ve run into a few snags and one thing it’s missing is the ability to parse my iTunes library directly (which means not having to export playlists into separate files) but like I said, it’s still an early beta. Now that it’s up and running my next mini-project will be to get it to run through Galleon so I don’t have two separate java processes hogging resources on my Ubuntu server (they both use the java service wrapper, so this should be possible). Stay tuned.

WarGames 25th Anniversary

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie “WarGames” it’s showing in select theaters tonight at 7:30pm! You can use the event locator to see if it’s playing near you.

Unfortunately I just found out about this today and have prior plans so I can’t go … but I totally would if I could. As I mentioned two weeks ago when I was reunited with my old Atari 800XL, “WarGames” was the movie that really piqued my interest in computers and got me started down the technology path.

This is also a promotional event since the new sequel, “WarGames: The Dead Code” is being released on DVD next week.