Ubuntu on the Big Screen

So, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, and now Ubuntu TV. I think there's going to be problems making it a standard install because there's no standard setup on TVs. A big hamstring is the lack of Blu-Ray support in Linux (true last time I checked, maybe not now) but I can easily see a point soon where that doesn't matter anymore.

So, the set-top is the new desktop? And is this reason to go to Linux Mint or even straight Debian on machines you want to run at work? 

Configuration Joys

I just got a new remote. I don't suppose I really needed one. I have three in my bedroom (four if you count the wireless keyboard) and I'm more than fine with handling them. It wasn't "Hey, I need a new zapper in the bedroom" that lead me to jump on this.

It was my RSS feed.

I have Radio Shack stuck in there, mostly to see when Radio Shack starts selling the Arduino. What I saw was an announcement of Logitech's Harmony line of remotes. I had heard about them. A friend has a fairly advanced one that has a screen and allows you to combine button-presses for several devices into one action, such as "play movie" starting the DVD player and moving to the composite input.

I got the Harmony 200,  a much less complex and cool remote. Also, at $20, much much cheaper. It can control three devices, which works well for the bedroom (TV, DVD, Cable) but the living room has TiVo too and the four-device Harmony 300 is $10 more.

The selling point, the thing that made me go out and get it, was the programming. Well, the price, too, but that just meant it was possible. You plug it into USB and there's a quick-and-easy screen which lets you tell it this is my TV, this is my DVD player, etc. You can then customize the buttons. Then you sync the settings and you're done. No more messing with the "Press the Mode button for 4 seconds, look for the flashing LCD, then punch this four-digit number in" or the worse "Press Power then Down again and again until the TV goes off".

I'll mess with finding different combinations, but this is a solid, well-made remote whose ROM I flash to bend it to my will.

We live in the future.

Streaming Problem

I run Boxee on two machines. First is a fairly modern Vista-running machine, connected via wired ethernet to my modem/router/switch/access-point. The second is a Dell Optiplex running XP that was being retired from university use when I got it, connected to the network with a Netgear USB WiFi dongle.

I have demonstrated that I can serously hinder the ability of the second to stream, simply by surfing the web via my netbook. I don't know which part of the chain is the weak point, and even the strong points are not strong on a PC that old. My friend Patrick says that running CAT6 through the home is kinda worthless for most people because home broadband bandwidth are and will be much smaller than even older WiFi protocols. I understand this and believe it, but problems like this make me wonder.

New-To-Us TiVo, New-To-Us GPS

We have a TiVo. Finally. Yeah, I know we're ... a decade past the curve here? Something like that. I have to add that the TiVo+satellite box sucks because that means only one tuner, which means you cannot record this and watch that. But I have to say, the folks who say that the user interface to TiVo is a cut above? They have something there.

What sucks outright is the IR blasters. Well, they're OK, except there's no feedback loop. It would be far better to have the TiVo be the satellite box. I understand the HDMI interconnections of the Google TV box (of which there's really only the Logitech Revue, last I checked) have bi-directional communication, and that's what you really want.

It's a bit funny, though. We have a PC running Boxee and a Wii that does good Netflix. So far, we're widely distributed. I want a newer, faster PC for Boxee (and other duties, like home file+print server), and with the TiVo we now have access to Amazon On Demand. (Not like we've used it yet. We're still a Red Box family, and spinning discs of optical media at DVD quality is definitely a trailing-edge technology, no matter the shiny red vending machine.)

For Christmas, my father gave me his old TomTom. I have always wanted a stand-alone GPS, but not really for car use. Well, yes and no. I want a list of discrete lat&long coordinates I can map. I'm sure I can have that with the Evo phone, but I haven't really dived into that. Anyway, the point at this juncture is that I have a phone with a navigation feature, my wife had a phone with a navigation feature, and 2 of 3 sons had phones with navigation features. I thought "Hey, I'll never use this".

There are two reasons I've started to. First is the mount. I can mount the TomTom to the window and keep it in a good position. I don't have a good cellphone mount for the Evo. I love having the rolling map and the speedometer even when I don't have a destination set.

The second is duplication. I can have my phone set to do phone things, or provide audio, or even just on my belt as it should, and not worry about it forgetting my destination. Don't know how I'll really integrate it into my driving, though.

New Multimedia Keyboard

I have the biggest remote I have ever seen.

It's the GKM561R keyboard from IOGear, which I got through NewEgg. It's got a built in trackball, which makes it better for multimedia settings than the Logitech wireless desktop I got before. I have always used Logitech wireless keyboards before, and I'm sure I'll get one again, but the mouse stopped working and got lost, and for multimedia applications, it makes sense.

Image from KVMGalore

There was a weird thing. The W key had fallen off, but it was securely in the packaging and was easy to replace. I'm loving the addition of a TV PC.

The New Telephony meets the New Television: Expensive Remote

I have fairly close to the top end of the smartphones, the HTC Evo Android phone. I have a Vista computer connected to the Internet. I have just installed Boxee on said TV. Thing is, this TV, while it has a big screen and all, is across the room from me, and the keyboard and mouse are corded.

I did say I have an Android phone, right?

While it is a wonder of technology that can talk to WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G/4G mobile networks, and do much cooler stuff. I can watch video. I can make video. It is a cool thing. Being able to control my other computer is minor, but still cool.

I've done something like this before. Years ago, I had a Palm III. You could install an app that made your Palm into a programmable universal remote. That's cool, but that's coolness relying on IR and line-of-site and the IR source was meant for sending electronic business cards 3 feet away, not turning on a DVD player 10 feet away. This works over wireless networking, so line of sight is done, and thanks for that.

I'm also new to virtualizing interfaces. I've been a big fan of Synergy2 to allow you to have one keyboard for two or more computers. I just didn't expect it to touch the smartphone.

I know I'm at best second or third wave on this sort of thing. MythTV's been around for over 5 years, and many of these concepts are very stable. Microsoft's been putting these capabilities as part of their advertisements these days. And I know there are things involved here that I'm taking the goofy way around with. Big example is moving media onto my Android. (I call it RoyBatty, by the way. Considered going with RickDeckard, but no.) The old reliable way to do it would be to plug in the USB/charging cable. The slightly cooler way is via Bluetooth. My way is to use Dropbox. It's a cool and wonderful cross-platform thing. I was expecting full syncing, but it turns out to be pick-and-choose, which is okay, but it means I'm more active.) I think the really cool solution would be to using uPnP/DLNA. This means I have to start learning how to make that stuff work.

But seriously, this really convinces me that the New Television is a big monitor, receiving signal from whatever device you want, and not really the interface device in and of itself.

Now, if you excuse me, I'll watch some Revision3 on my computer as I go to bed.

Somehow The New Television is listening to Me

And not in the creepy HAL2000 kind of way.

I was searching for info on Net Neutrality, wrapping my head around it, and found this bit from G4's Attack of the Show on Hulu. Next clip on the channel was on Bluetooth headsets, and it was presented by Dungeons and Dragons. Which was a bit of a wow for me.

I've been clear on this, but let me restate that I am not categorically against advertising because advertising, properly done, is content. Consider the copy of The Productive Programmer on my desk right now. The last page before the back cover is an ad that says you can read this book online for 45 days at Safari Online. If you're reading a book called The Productive Programmer, you're more than likely a programmer. Which means you deal with computers a lot. Reading this book online will make sense to you, as you read much online. It's as much content to you as the book's suggestions for Desktop shortcuts. This doesn't mean that you, as the programmer reading this book, will jump up and start reading online any more than it means that you will immediately pick up Virtual Desktop Manager to get virtual desktops on your XP dev box. But it'll be something at least interesting to you.

However, if the back-of-the-book ad was Chanel #5 or Audis or Levi's jeans, it would be far less clear that there's a connection between the audience and the advertisement. This is where mass-market media starts to fall apart. They make a statistical model of their audience, or who they want their audience to be, and advertisers who want to sell to that audience buy ads. If you are not in that statistical model, or the statistical model is too general, the ads will not speak to you.

I haven't been an RPG gamer in two decades. D&D is not going to sell me, but it seems a more natural fit to the G4 audience than cars.

The New Television is similar to the (Older) New Telephone

When I was in college about a decade ago, I knew some people who didn't have a "landline", or a traditional wired telephone in their place of residence. It made sense to me for college students. If you're out and studying, going to classes, working between classes, etc., it made sense that you weren't home enough to hear your phone ringing, so it's best to just have the mobile phone and not worry about it. For students, sure that made perfect sense. For adults, however, I wasn't sure. Come ten years after, you have more and more people who are dropping the landline that are out of school. There are sticking points, like how E911 for mobile isn't quite as far as for traditional telephony*, but it's a trade-off more and more making.

I have an adapter for my old-school TV that allows me to plug my netbook's VGA and watch YouTube, or whatever, on the big screen. My Wii can do Netflix, as can my friend's iPhone. Android is coming soon. Hulu can bring most of my favorite shows to me. Not everything, but close and closer all the time. If this is true, if you can get all the moving pictures you need from the internets and don't need the co-ax run. And we're not talking people who can't afford cable. We're talking people who decided that they just didn't need another wire run and time-sink in their lives.

The comments highlight a few of the hinderances with this. First, if you want to watch live events, like sporting events or news, you're out of luck. If there's a way to see Big Bang Theory or The Marty Stuart Show or new episodes of Discovery shows online, I've yet to see it. And this model is more-or-less fine if you know what you watch and watch what you know, but it locks you out of searching through and finding the next cool thing you didn't know existed. So, TV-wise, I'm not a cord-cutter yet. But I'm moving that way.

* The two times I've had to dial 911, I was calling because of a car accident.

Dimensions and the New Television

I saw this article from Maximum PC:

While 3D-enabled displays struggle to gain a foothold in mainstream living rooms, Internet-connected televisions are barging through the front door. According to market research firm WitsView, TVs with integrated NICs will balloon to 40 million units in 2010, or roughly 20 percent of the global LCD TV market.

That's a cool thing. I was told years ago on Twitter that I should get a Mac Mini and connect it to my TV. My initial attempt was to put a monitor on top of my TV and connect the audio out of a broken laptop to it. With Hulu and Netflix (and, in my house, That Guy With The Glasses), there's lots of net-available stuff that's set for the whole family to watch. Being broke, I used a broken laptop and moved up to a five-year-old tower rather than a new Mac with the footprint of a Sun IPC, but the ability to see our favorite shows on the big screen of the house still is there.

Which gets to the other thing.

I've tried 3D TVs at Best Buy. Are they dang cool? Yes. They are dang cool. Am I amazed that you can get 3D shots of football games? Yes. Am I going to get a set? Not likely.

Here's the thing. You get a TV, and it's crazy expensive and comes with 2 pairs of 3D glasses. I have five people in the family. I'd have to pay extra for three extra pairs, or more if I want people to come over and try it out. And, lets face it, watching TV in 3D while your friends watch the weird pre-formatted ugly stuff, that's just rude. If TV is for the whole family to watch together, then make it for the whole family to be able to watch together.

More on the New Television

I think the last time I relied on over-the-air broadcast for TV was in 1985. I was living in St. Louis, and we did have cable, but not for every TV. I remember using a little plastic tube to turn the knob to get the VHF stations at the top of the dial, and watching Benny Hill and Doctor in the House and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. I remember the jokes, how in 1984, Ronald Reagan would be President, ha-ha-hah. 

I don't remember even trying to get a TV signal in North Carolina. In Arizona, we had cable and the only broadcast channel I remember watching is KTLA from Los Angeles. In South Dakota, the day rooms in the residence halls had cable, and I never had my own TV, so I never tried. And here, in Indiana, in a city served by one television station, we didn't get great reception from a station with a broadcast tower three miles away, so I stopped trying.

Until now.

I've just moved, and we have one of two cable boxes. I had bought an antenna for the TV tuner card but had kept the cable plugged in, wanting the wider selection of the cable, even if it was a low-resolution analog signal. Right now, rather than dig through boxes and find coax cable, I tried the antenna. Two takeaways: Of course nothing came in but the local station (now about seven miles away), and man, digital looks so much better than analog. Will have to A/B some screen shots from my recorded shows, but trust me, big difference.

Which is what they've been saying forever, I'm sure.

Catching Up to the New Television

First, there was broadcasting. This is one-to-many, and because of the costs and because of regulation, there weren't that many "ones" floating around. If you live in a town with an ABC and a CBS but no NBC, for example, that's because they decided years ago that your town only needed two broadcasters. When I was 14, in St Louis, we had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and two or three UHF channels showing syndicated reruns. That's how I came to know Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Remember the Weird Al movie, UHF? I can't say that real UHF was like that, but there was more than a little truth to it.

Then came cable. The one-to-many paradigm became some-to-many, but through one wire. "57 channels and nothin' on" was the Boss 20 years ago. Seems kinda quaint today, doesn't it? The TVs were set for UHF and VHF, so special adapters had to be bought so your TV could get the cable channels. Eventually, you started to get "cable-ready" TVs. Right now, we have a TV that was swank in 1988 that has channels up to 60-some and three stereo RCA ins (for VCRs and such) and a few 1990s TVs that have channels up to and past 100 and one mono RCA in. Once, my VCRs were connected daisy-chained over co-ax, but now when I set one up, I always go RCA.

I guess there are two big changes post-1999, and they would be TiVo and YouTube, but to take away the camel caps and brand names, you can say digital video recording and Flash video. Once, when you wanted video online, it opened up Real or Quicktime, and I groaned for all the configuration options. I was applying for a web-dev position and one of the company's sites had video in the page and it amazed me. Since then, it's become a big thing. So big, in fact, that a <VIDEO> tag showed up in HTML5. Clearly, now it makes sense to have a computer connected to your TV, making TVs more and more just monitors.

(I suppose that the move from videotape to DVD and beyond needs a mention. DVDs were clearly better than tape — better image, no rewinding — so the video stores cleared out their tapes. Streaming video is equal in quality and clearly more convenient than DVDs, so strip malls are clearing out their video stores. I think that Blu-Ray is impressive, but like digital broadcast, it came in just in time to herald the end of non-streaming-internet video. Both require a change, and if the world is going to change, why go with the only-vaguely-better?)

The old TV way of scheduling recordings sucked. If you knew the time and channel and duration, you could set it up to record, but you could only watch what you're recording. My 80s videotapes are either Dr Who shown on PBS starting 10pm on Sunday or lots and lots of videos off MTV. (Yes, I still have some VHS tapes. No, I don't watch 'em much. Yes, it's more convenient to watch the same Tom Baker eps off Netflix and searching "Humpty Dance" on YouTube. I'm getting to that.) If you have your VCR inline with your cable box, it got worse, because your VCR couldn't change the channel and you might get several hours of the Weather Channel. With the TiVo, and with the set-top boxes that came after, and the TV tuner cards that cane after that, you have a box that knows the TV channels and schedules, can switch between them,

This is clearly wonderful, as this means that you are no longer bound to be at the TV to watch your favorite show at 9pm on a Tuesday. It also means that there's an explosion of set-top boxes, often doing mostly the same thing. GoogleTV, AppleTV, Boxee, Roku, TiVo, Wii, XBox, PlayStation, whatever came with my Samsung Blu-Ray player, all wanting to cover some subset of Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon on Demand and YouTube, plus whatever other streaming stuff is available.

I'm slowly trying to get from the 90s model (CRT, cable, VCR, DVD player) to the 2010 model, but I'm not sure what the 2010 model really is. Clearly, going to an HDTV that's inches thick instead of an old screen that's feet thick is a crucial move. I think the general-purpose computer is a dying thing, but a machine running Windows can handle all the video codecs and sites and choices you might want to do. I have an inexpensive VGA-RCA converter and an old desktop running at 800x600 connected to a big monitor right now, and another with a Wooted TV tuner. This gets my toe in, and while the first step is clearly getting a bigger, better, thinner HD screen, I'm not sure what the next step is. A recent Wired article seems to say that you can get everything you want cheaper by renting the shows than by getting cable. I'm thinking that having seventeen boxes connected KVM-like to my HDTV/monitor might be the way, but that seems so wasteful and wrong, too.

My position on the NBC Late Night issue

Pieces-Parts To Program, Toward A Better Programming Life.

Just to be clear: I do not have advanced digital cable. We get the basic analog cable that comes with our internet. We have asked to not get it, because we don't want to be surprised into having to pay for it. This means we don't have the TiVo-like interface to remember when the show we want.

What we do have is the TVGuide Channel. Which is the Michael Jackson and Ugly Betty channel, which sucks.

And TVGuide.com, which never remembers the settings I want to have it set. It's a reasonable. But there's the big big big table of all that's on. I don't care about that. I have a much smaller list of shows I want to watch.

And want to watch is a key. We're not talking is fine to watch, which I can search for the best thing right now. I'm talking about the things I want to be sure for the whens of my favorite shows.

This is what I want, what I think I can do.

• get_TV_data - an API to access what's on what channel
• set_google_calendar_event - an API to create an event on a Google Calendar calendar. I want this anyway, and I'm pretty sure that it's on CPAN.
• google_calendar_alert - When you set an event in Google Calendar, it will either pop up (useless if you're not in Google Calendar), send an email, or send an SMS, which is essentially an email. What I want is for it to talk to me via GoogleTalk, which is Jabber, or XMPP. I have the XMPP part, I more than have that, so it's just the reading of the calendars.

Everything on that is pie in the sky, but it should be doable.

Kill Your Television

The House blocked the Digital TV Delay.

I live roughly 1/3 of the way between Indianapolis and Chicago. Since I moved here in 1993, I have, at best, only received one channel, the CBS station. Even that didn't come in well sometimes, even when my parents-in-law lived in the shadow of the broadcast tower. Before that, I lived in South Dakota, with only the in-town PBS channel coming in clear. Campus provided cable to the dayrooms. So, here, in 2008, it has been all 20 years of since I had to rely on over-the-air broadcast rather than cable.

(OK, I get satellite at home today, but for purposes of this discussion, that counts as cable, OK.)

And that's not the whole of it. I think I was in St Louis in 1985 when I last really watched broadcast. JoAnne Worley singing "You'll never be able to own your own telephone" from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in syndication, with Sports Illustrated giving away free football phones with a subscription between bits. That was the last time I watched TV over the air. And even then, we had cable, too.

I am fairly sure that I am not remotely alone here. I am sure that, even in places where there are many broadcast channels in range, most people pay for more channels. They pay to get news on demand with CNN or Fox News, to get weather on demand with the Weather Channel, to see grown men covered with muck or destroying stuff on the Discovery Channel, to get music bitchy and annoying people on demand from MTV.

The coming of TV killed radio. My suspicion is that the analog-to-digital switch will kill over-the-air video, and the difference between cable->settop box->TV screen and cable->computer->monitor will decrease even more as time goes on.

I do not understand why anyone would pay to get a digital converter box.

It is my prediction that broadcast (from digital over-the-air to digital over-cable, "everyone having to watch this show at 8pm Thursday") will be dead by 2020, given way to streaming or podcasting models.

So, when I find that the House blocked the Digital TV Delay, I range between "good for them" and "who cares?" I respond to digital broadcast TV with words I first heard from a Gallagher special on Showtime in the mid 80s: "Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work."

My question is about the frequency range it vacates. What's going in there?

An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum for public safety communications (such as police, fire departments, and rescue squads). Also, some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#faq2

Am I way to cynical to think that the "Also, some of the spectrum will be auctioned off" is much more of a pusher for this technology than the "public safety communications"? If it means I get to have decent-speed bits of info flying to a hand-held gizmo I can shove in a pocket, then I'm all for that cynicism.

My friend Patrick has an idea for TV to be an entirely pay-for-play proposition. You want to watch a guy travel the world to find new and exciting ways to get covered with grease and animal dung? You subscribe, you pay $20 a year or so, said host travels the world, gets messy, and releases video. DRM-free video. You watch it. You maybe send an episode to a friend, who also pays $20 a year or so. I am not sure that will play. No. I'm not sure when that will play. I've seen interviews with Joss Whedon where he played with the possibility of new, fan-supported Firefly episodes before shooting it down. Thing is, this is pre-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which, beyond being something to do during the Writers' Strike, was pretty much an experiment on how to do a fan-supported internet video show.

My current hardware desire (besides memory! always more memory!) is a PCI HDTV card, so I can tell my PC what I want to watch and watch it when I want to watch it, where I want to watch it. This is the failure of DVRs that I see. I have 4 TVs in my home. All four have cable boxes, but only one had a DVR. It is in a room I hate to linger in, so I never get to watch it and never get to record from it. This way, my cable becomes like my podcasts, which is how I want it. I am fairly sure that I am not remotely alone here, either.