ianneubert.com

Xbox Media Center on OS X

February 13th, 2008

I just tried the latest release of XBMC on OS X (0.1.1) today. Coming along very, very well. This release seems to be solid as can be. It supports the mouse now and in my 10 minutes of testing, worked great!

I’m thinking about moving my Mac Mini into the living room now.

I still find it hard to find good content in HD though. Most of the stuff says HDTV, but its only taken from HDTV, it isn’t HD itself. Even when I do find an HD rip though, it rarely has the higher quality sound with it. I guess I’ll have to wait awhile longer before I can finally throw away my Cable and Satellite boxes.

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »

HD-DVD: The End is Near

February 12th, 2008

I got this from Netflix in my inbox yesterday:

“Toward the end of February, HD DVDs in your Saved Queue will automatically be changed to standard definition DVDs. Then toward the end of this year, all HD DVDs in your Queue will be changed to standard definition DVDs.”

No more HD-DVD from Netflix. It comes as no surprise though, I’ve had HD-DVD movies sitting at the top of my queue for months and never gotten them. I think that this is just another chink in HD-DVD’s last stand. It won’t be too long now before HD-DVD is off the shelf.

Now, If I could just get my hands on a sub $200 blu-ray player

Posted in Life | 5 Comments »

CentOS Firewall Init Script

January 28th, 2008

I wrote a simple chkconfig compatible firewall init script for CentOS/RedHat/Fedora based Linux systems. It is based on the Quick n’ Dirty script from vpslink‘s wiki.

It will setup iptables firewall rules allowing anyone to access user defined ports (22,80 by default). It also has the ability to whitelist and blacklist IP’s. I’ve tested it with chkconfig on CentOS 5.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Computers | 2 Comments »

My 3rd dead Xbox 360

January 27th, 2008

Ugh!!! My stupid Xbox 360 just started throwing out the red ring of death on me again. This is my 3rd dead Xbox 360. At least this time it’s still under warranty so it won’t cost me anything to replace. Well, except 3 weeks of no Rock Band

red ring of death Sorry to all my friends and family that wanted to play this game with me. I guess it will be 3-4 weeks before we can plan another Rock Band party

Stupid Microsoft.

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

Hitz now available on last.fm

January 23rd, 2008

Check out the new last.fm sidebar on my website. Now you can listen to almost any of the songs that I’ve put on my Hitz compilations, right from your web browser. No more dealing with stupid iTunes. Yay! Unfortunetly, last.fm only gives me one playlist, so you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the list to see the latest songs.

So I’ve gotten sick of using iTunes to handle my Hitz music mixes. Aside from constantly getting random errors from the iTunes client (which is preventing me from editing my last Hitz, which should have two songs from Paramore), I don’t like that you can’t listen to it directly from my website and users have to be using iTunes.

I went looking for a suitable replacement and I found last.fm. Wow, these guys have come a long way from what they did when they first started. They had every song, except one that I’ve put on my playlists, which I think is pretty danged good.

Posted in Music | Comments Off

Hitz – January 2008

January 18th, 2008

Better late than never, here are my favorite tracks this month!

January 2008 Hitz List – Check out the iTunes iMix.

Thanks to KROQ, I’ve discovered a pretty cool sounding band named Paramore. They have a nice punk-pop style sound, that I’m really into right now.

I’ve actually been listening to the Editors for awhile now, but I just didn’t get around to putting them on the list last month. They’re an indie band with an upbeat guitar track, and kind of an opposite vocal sound. I like them!

Young Folks was passed on to me by a friend. This Swedish song has a very pop-y sound, and a very funky music video to go along with it. Check out the video after the break.

Oh my gosh, I love the song Dashboard from Modest Mouse. I’ve been listening to this song for months and still haven’t gotten sick of it. Catchy lyrics and a great sound make for a hit!

Rob Dickinson has a much softer, melodic kind of sound, I like his one song, My Name is Love, but I’m not a big fan of any of his other stuff… too slow for me.

I found the last band on this list, Eisley, from the BUTR podcast (probably the best podcast on the ‘net). Anyway, they have a unique sound, something between pop and indie. Their song, Invasion, has a really nice chorus that just gets stuck in my head… even when I have no idea what they’re saying.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Music, Video | 1 Comment »

iTunes Movie Rentals: Not Enough

January 15th, 2008

As I type this Steve Jobs is still giving his Keynote presentation at Macworld in San Francisco. The most interesting thing that I was looking forward to was anything to do with movies on the iTunes store and HD. As it turns out, they will be supporting HD movies in the movie store, at least for rentals. Here are the rental specs:

iTunes Movie Rentals

HD quality
$3 library titles, $4 new titles, extra $1 for HD
30 days to start watching
24 hours to finish watching
Movies can be streamed

$4 for new releases?! What are they thinking? Here’s a quick comparison with my Netflix account. In December, I rented 8 movies, and it cost me $15.07. Some quick math: $1.88 per movie. And that’s in HD!! That pricing scheme is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d never spend that much to rent a movie anymore, not with great alternatives like Netflix around.

Posted in Computers, Life | 4 Comments »

Macworld and DRM on movies

January 13th, 2008

With Macworld starting up on Tuesday, there are lots of rumors going around about what Apple plans to introduce. Lots of blogs predict a sub-compact notebook, with USA Today reporting that it may be 50% thinner than existing MacBooks. The announcement I’m looking forward to the most however, is movie downloads. Movie rentals are expected to be announced on Tuesday, but I’m more interested in what Apple plans to do with their Apple TV set-top box and what extra may be had in the iTunes Store.

Steve Job’s intro’s iPhone

The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is seemingly at an end. But, I think that we’re going to be downloading movies quicker than we think, making Blu-ray not really all that exciting. That’s why I’m looking forward to what Apple might have in store. I’m hoping that they’ll introduce HD content into the iTunes Store. That would finally make movies on iTunes exciting to me.

One problem remains though: DRM. The music companies have just now figured out that DRM on music is bad for business. But, the movie companies haven’t learned that yet. If you bought the latest movie release on iTunes, you’d have to plunk down $9.99 to $12.99. And then you could only play it on an Apple approved device: like an iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, or iTunes itself.

I don’t think that movie downloads are really going to take off until DRM is removed. It’s just too risky to spend $10 bucks per movie and be looked into a device that you can’t control. Until the studios realize that though, they’ll probably just fracture the market with many different DRM schemes and end up confusing the consumer. Just like they did with HD-DVD vs Blu-ray.

Posted in Computers, Life | 2 Comments »

Happy New Year’s!

January 11th, 2008

So it’s been 11 days since New Year’s, but better late than never, right? I had a great time over New Year’s up in central California, near San Luis Obispo. From playing a lot of Rock Band to finding 14 new geocache‘s to going on a 2 mile hike, it’s probably the most active New Year’s I’ve ever had. And by far the best too!

The hike we went on was great, pretty strenuous at the start, but worth it in the end. The views of Pismo Beach and the ocean were spectacular, just check out the picture below! We started the hike at the southwest end of the mountain, and followed the ridge up to its peak at 630 feet, then descended through a great tree covered valley to the Sycamore Mineral Springs. There we sat in naturally hot mineral springs to sooth our aching muscles!

What a great trip!

View Larger Map

Posted in Life | Comments Off

Amazon SimpleDB

December 14th, 2007

Amazon just ~~released~~ announced their new SimpleDB web service. It is designed to take the place of a traditional RDBMS for about 80% of use cases. It seems to function more like Directory Service than your average MySQL install.

For example:

There is no schema: You can add and remove any number of attributes to an item. Indexes are automagically updated.
Attributes can have multiple values: Instead of creating tons of linking tables, that store simply primary IDs from one table to another, you can just add in multiple values to an attribute.
Redundancy built in: No need to worry about clustering or replication. It’s all built in and handled behind the scenes.
Scalable: I assume that after the beta has been out for awhile they will relax the 100 domain, 10GB/domain size limits. Hopefully the 1024 byte attribute/value limit will be eased too.
Lexicographical indexes: You’ll need to pad integers with zero’s, you can’t use negative numbers, and dates need to be in ISO 8601 format.

It’s hard to say right now how awesome this thing is going to be, since I can’t get access to any code yet (it’s in a limited beta). It’s definitely a different way to think about databases, but if they can keep it fast, and deliver as advertised, it could change everything.

Posted in Computers | Comments Off