iPod Touch Problems!

Where are the updates for the iPod Touch. I haven't seen ANY coverage other than comments! The only mention of the Touch problem on any of the major Mac fan sites are about the iPhone problems and that they are fixed.

What about the TOUCH its bad enough that we don't get any love from Apple...hello $10 charge. But the fact that NONE of the major apple sites are covering it is even worse!

Get off your asses MAC media and cover the iPod Touch problems!

TiVo HD vs. AppleTV Take2

In the past the comparison of TiVo and AppleTV was considered an apple to oranges comparison. However, now with the AppleTV Take2 and iTunes Movie Rental announcements at last weeks MacWorld the comparison is now much more valid. Both offer online download and rental of movies and television shows. Both can act as media servers and with TivoToGo back in play both can send media to portable players and laptops.

I have only been an Apple user for a few months and I must admit that I am slowly being assimilated. However, I am also long time Tivo evangelist. I purchase my first TiVo when they were sold on late night/Saturday infomercials. I did recently lose my faith when I moved to the FiOs DVR. If technology was a religion and for many it is I would be facing quite the spiritual delema. Thankfully after a little bit of research I have determined that I worship at both great technological churches. However, this harmony may be short lived. Battle lines are being drawn. Amazon UnBoxed and iTunes are going a war and to the victor will go dominance of the digital living room.

Feature Comparison of TivoHD and Apple Take2

Once upon a time there rumors ran rampant that Apple was going to purchase TiVo. Many in the Tivo community dreamed of the day and believe that they would be a perfect match. However with the events of the past year I think it is safe to say that though Tivo and Apple may have flirted they ultimately will never tie the note.

TiVo has hitched its wagon to the Amazon Unboxed. Since this deal last year user TiVo owners have been able to download standard definition movies and TV shows from their computers or directly from the TiVo box. These downloads are for “rent” or for “own.” The programs can be watched on a computer or TiVo or both. With the recent update to TiVoDesktop/Tivo2Go application users can copy recorded shows to any of a number of portable devices including laptops and iPods. The Tivo box can also access videos, pictures, and music from networked machines that are running TiVoDesktop. At this time Amazon Unbox does not offer HD content for download or rent.

AppleTV has the iTunes Store. Almost nothing else needs to be said. When the Take2 upgrade is pushed out AppleTV owners will be able to download and rent movies and television programs from the iTunes store without a computer. Of course they can also download or rent the movies and television programs form their computers via the iTunes on their computers. The AppleTV has always functioned as a great media server for bringing pictures, music, and video to the living room. Also, the AppleTV is going to work seamlessly with the iPod/iPhone universe. Apple has a significant advantage in that will have HD content available for rent in the iTunes Store starting in February.

Here is the problem. The pricing of the two products are out of synch. When you take storage capacity into account, the AppleTV 160GB and the TivoHD are the most similar. The TiVo HD is 299.99 on the TiVo site and 259.00 on Amazon. The Apple TV 160GB is 329.00 period. Heck if you take HD out of the mix you can get an TiVo Series 2 for about 99.99.

So what is a guy like me to do. As much as Iove my Apple MacBook and FrontRow I honestly think that there is greater value for me in the TiVo. I am not ready to give up my television connection (cable/FiOs). I believe that the vast majority people are feel the same way.

With the TiVo HD I’ll get my HD from FiOs and I can do my downloading from Amazon Unbox. Given the battle lines currently drawn, HD content can not be far away for Amazon Unbox. I can also use TivoDesktop Plus to get content onto my my ipod and macbook.

MacBook here I come!

Over the past year I have mulled over my next PC purchase. I had never considered going to a Mac because they just seemed too expensive to risk. So what has changed?

First, I am older and make more money than in my Win Intel hobbyist days. Second, the switch to Intel chips and the subsequent advent of Boot Camp, Parallels, and Fusion mitigated much of the “risk.” I don’t have to abandon Windows completely. Third, I now have a wife and three children. I don’t have the time to do incremental hardware upgrades to my computers anymore, nor spend a lot of time troubleshooting problems. I just want it to work and I want photo and video editing to be as easy as possible. The biggest reason I am moving to a Mac is for iLife. Editing video using MovieMaker and/or Pinnacle is painful. The easiest thing I have found is iMovie/iDVD.

Finally, I got an iPod! I was blow away when I first opened the box. The packaging was as beautiful as the device and the user interface. The iPod lead me to podcasts. I have become addicted to podcasts and videocasts and from those have heard a lot about Macs and OSX. I have to admit that most podcasters have taken up residence in the Steve Jobs distortion field and drink the Apple Kool-Aid by the gallon. However, I think that I have with your help maintained an objective opinion of Apple up to this point. Suffice to say this experience, if nothing else served to educate me about Apple, Mac, and OSX.

I was fortunate to come into the market for a PC when Leopard was delayed last spring and the Vista problems were at there worst. I figured I would wait and see what Leopard would bring to Apple and how Vista would shake out. While I was waiting new iMacs came out and I learned more about Leopard. I also got my first experience with Vista when I helped setup my brother-in-law’s new Vista machine. It was not a bad experience. However, I almost ordered an iMac the day it came out but my wife reminded me how much I had been talking about a laptop. So I waited for a Leopard and a MacBook update.

Yesterday, I ordered my new 2.2Ghz Santa Rosa MacBook. I will keep my Windows XP desktop for my wife and will move all of my stuff onto the Mac. I don’t plan on installing XP or Vista immediately but it is nice to know that I have that option as a safety net. For work all I need is Citrix and VNC. The one thing I am not overly happy about with the MacBook is the white…200 bucks for a black case is crazy.

There are a few things that make me apprehensive about moving to Mac. First, I don’t think that AppleTV is going to be the IPTV device I was hoping for and a Windows Media Center/Extender may have been a better choice from a media perspective. Second, I really think the Zune2 is attractive now that it supports podcasts and wi-fi synching. However, next year when I am ready to retire my iPod for an iPod touch this may be a wash. Also since I still have a perfectly good XP machine I could still get Zune2. Thankfully when I ripped all my CDs I did it in mp3 format and I have resisted the temptation to by music through iTunes so all of my music is portable to another platform or will work just fine with the Apple universe.

FiOS TV 2.0 hits Northern Virginia!

Well I now have the new Interactive Media Guide (aka FiOS TV 2.0). My inital impressions are that it looks great but is basically the same interface as before just a little prettier. It appears that they used a "blade" style interface a la the XBox 360. The interface is definately one of the nicest DVR interfaces, outside the TiVo. However, it does suffer from some rather annoying deficiencies. Ironically many of these are things lost from the old Interactive Media Guide (1.0).

1. No way to limit the Channels in the Guide: With Tivo and IMG 1.0 you could turn of channels you don't want to see in the channel listing. I typically turn off the foreign language channels, shopping channels, and music channels I don't care for. However, I have not been able to find out how to remove channels. There are some nice pre-defined filters: All Channels, HD Channels, and Favorites. Removing u nwanted channels also helps shrink the database and makes searching much faster and reduces mistakes when selecting programs to records. Its much harder to accidentally record the spanish version of the Discovery channel.

2. The filters are crippled: You can not modify the filters and the HD Channels filter is broken. When you select the HD Channel filter it does not show the local channels.

3. The Favorites feature is now annoying and not useful. When I first realized that I couldn't turn a channel off my first instinct was to just make all the channels I want my favorites and they always use the Favorites filter. Heck there is even a "Favorites" button one the remote. However I eventually figured out that if you pick the english TLC as a favorite you automatically get the spanish TLC as a favorite. I don't speak spanish, so I don't want to have to scroll through those channels in my guide!

4. HD Channel and Favorites Filter jump you to the beginning: Another annoying thing about the "Favorites" Filter is that it jumps you to the beginning of the guide and not the channel you are on! The HD Channel Filter also suffers from this problem but since there aren't that many channels its not as annoying.

5. HD Channel and Favorites Filter don't wrap around. Since these filters jump you to the beginning of the guide, ie lowest channel number, you would think that you could just go up and the channels will wrap around and you will be at the highest number but ohhh no! That would make way to much since.

I have only had the new IMG 2.0 for a few days so I'm sure I'll find more to like and dislike so I will continue to post on this topic. In this post I have focused on what I don't like. In my next post I will try and focus on what I do. There is a lot to the new IMG 2.0 and much of the good stuff is pretty deep in the UI. I personally think that the UI is too deep an needs to be simplified. In my opinion that is the key to TiVo's success.

Google Moving into Healthcare

I recieved my masters degree in Health Systems Management, specializing in IT, from George Mason University last year. During my studies I spent a considerable amout of time studying Electronic Health Records, Electronic Medical Records, and the proposed "National Health Record."

Lets just say the problem is how do we effectively gather, protect, and distribute electronic healthcare information that is useful to clinicians, public health officials, scientists, and patients. At the same time insuring that the most personal of all our information is protected and used against us by the government, corporations, insurance carriers, and society. And, please don't get me started on the potiential "nanny state" implications around electronic health information.

While I was a Mason I heard rumors about Google getting into health care. Soon after I graduated I read and digged an article in eWeek about google getting into the health care space.

The latest which I found on ValleyWag is some screen shots of Google Health, code named Weaver. The interesting thing is that Googles greatest asset in this space is also its greatest weakness. If anyone can lick the electronic health information portability problem Google can. However most people are not real keen on the idea of Google having access to their health information, in addition to our email, browsing history, and shopping habits.

Googles stated goal of indexing the worlds information will come up squarely against there mission to "do no evil." With this much information about individuals the tempation to take advantage of all of that data will be impossible to resist. The results range from the horrorifyingly scarry to the humorously scarry. I have heard fears range from Google putting health information to potential employeers and insurance carriers to a person with Herpes getting Adsense adds for medication during a presentation using Google docs.

On the positive side the benefits to healthcare and science are also staggering. Giving scientists "agregated" data stripped of Personally Health Information (PHI) in a large scale along with the aggregated browsing, shopping, and email habits would be enormous. Think of the connections that could be made: "Porn site visitors have an 80% increase risk of suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome." Turns out it isn't the keyboards at work that is the problem its the porn on the computer!

Then I read another Valley Wag post by, Owen Thomas, that brought me a completely new perspective. His theory is that Microsoft and Google's entry into healthcare is just a expensive busy work project for executives they can not afford to get rid of. Though I tend to agree with one of the commenter's who said that Google and Microsoft's entry is great if nothing else they will shake up the establishment.

If you think Google and Microsoft are errogant in their business practices you haven't seen the heavy weights of healthcare IT. Nothing says closed, proprietary, legacy like GE, Phillips, 3M, and Siemens. Google and Microsoft will be a big threat to them and that will be a battle of biblical proportions that might actually do some good once the dust settles. The scarry thing again is, this is healthcare and thus human lives that are at risk.

FiOS is Kryponite for DirectTV and Cable

In the first 90 days of the FiOS availability 34 Massachusetts towns, this is how the losses stack up:1. Comcast lost 5,216 subscribers across a base of 204,160, a drop of 2.6%.2. RCN lost 1,813 subscribers, or 7% off its base of 25,895 subscribers.3. 4.5k FiOS TV subscribers came from DirecTV/DISH, or about 40% of their total subscriber4. Verizon’s gain was 11,982 subscribers.I guess that explains why Massachusetts is getting FiOS TV 2.0 next!

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Diagram of FiOS Network

I thought it might be helpful for those considering Verizon FiOS to know what the topology might look like. The diagram shows my current topology.

Two things I am curious about.
1. The STBs show up in the router as Coax IP connections.
2. The internet connection comes into the router through the coax same splitter that connects the STBs.
3. The home media option allows me to access music and photos from my primary workstation.

I suspect that this allows the STB to get OnDemand via IP without going through the router. However, it also means that for the Home Media option to work the STBs have to be punched through the firewall in the router since they are technically connected to the WAN port.

It is also possible that the STBs have wireless capabilities that may get them "inside" the firewall. If this is the case then what happens if I try and change from WEP to WPA? WEP is configured by default and the "key" is etched on the bottom of the Router. I definately plan on moving to WPA so I'll learn pretty quick if the STBs are wireless or coax?

Also the HD DVR STB has an ethernet jack on the back however the installer told me that it wasn't necessary to use.

I will post some screen shots of the router. It has a very polished and slick GUI that I like quite a bit. However, I do want to do some port scans and traffic analysis on both my internal network and from the internet to see how the data is flowing.