cellio | technological disappointments

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technological disappointments

I don't care about iPhone at all, but the announcement of AppleTV caught my interest. I'd probably pay $300 for a device that lets me dump the cable service (depending on what content costs). I don't watch a lot of TV but I don't want to watch what I do watch on my computer; this fills a real need for me. Alas, it appears (from Apple's site) that my plain old TV, bought about five years ago, can't talk to this new box; they use the words "widescreen" and "enhanced definition", neither of which I think applies to my TV (assuming "widescreen" means 16:9 instead of the standard 4:3 aspect ratio -- why that should make a difference when they could just letterbox is beyond me). They can make an allowance for wired networks but not for recent-but-not-current TVs? Bummer.

Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.

I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:

My filters, in order of firing, are:

Pobox bounce: 200 messages/day (these generate unknown-address notices)
Pobox trap: about 75 messages/day
Procmail 1 (SpamAssassin score 7+ and a few specific targets): about 100 messages/day
Procmail 2 (aka "maybe spam"; gets about 5% false positives): about 10 messages/day

I haven't been keeping careful records, but I think about 15-20 messages/day get through all that to my inbox.

Gak. That's about 400 pieces of spam per day aimed at my mailbox, of which about a third are getting through to my mail host. (I want this stuff to be caught as far upstream as possible.) Pobox used to catch a higher proportion; in addition, the ratio of Pobox bounce:trap used to be about 5:1, not the current ~3:1. I can't say that this is a Pobox degradation, though, as it wasn't long ago that I got about 100 pieces of spam a day, total. Pobox is presumably trapping everything it used to and a good deal more, but the spammers have gotten more clever. (I should write a procmail rule to catch any message that begins with an image.) I used to browse the traps about once a week looking for legitimate mail, but even with search that's getting impractical. I no longer inspect the bounce trap at all.

The spammers have caused email reliability to revert to that of the UUCP days, when there was a chance that your legitimate message just plain never got there. Thanks, guys.

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(I should write a procmail rule to catch any message that begins with an image.)

I know...it seems so obvious to me that those should be caught...especially since I NEVER get images by e-mail (I mean from non-spammers).

I'm also surprised the Apple TV assumes you have a widescreen TV. I don't see why it would have cost them so much to add connections for s-video or composite video output, or at the very least for a switch that converts from 16:9 to 4:3 aspect ratio. (The component cables at least don't care how the signal they carry will be interpreted.)

Re: Apple TV. An alternative you might consider is buying a video iPod. Apple sells a cradle with an s-video and line-out connection, so you can put your iPod in the cradle and connect it right to your T.V. It's both pricier and less convenient than the Apple TV (you have to sync via USB), but, on the other hand, it's also a portable video device and an iPod. There's also a remote control for the iPod cradle, but it's really only good for volume and pausing. It won't let you select shows.

I can attest that it's nicer to leave the cradle hooked up to the TV than to be constantly plugging in a laptop to your TV. And, frankly, I don't intend to move to HD until a variety of components get cheaper, so I won't be getting an Apple TV either.

If you just want a box that will show downloaded stuff on TV with a minimum of fuss, let me suggest a DVD burner in your computer and a DVD player that supports the DivX/XviD codecs. Then you just copy your bittorrented video files over to a disc and put them in the player hooked to your TV.

Here's one that also will take a USB key and play files from that:
amazon link

I've been meaning to ask -- perhaps you already addressed this and I missed it -- you took a Mac laptop on your trip with you, yes? How did that work out for you?

I occasionally get image attachments from legitimate people who just don't know better. (Occasionally it's even desirable, like if they're sending me photos from something I care about. Usually it's something stupid like a "virtual business card".) I haven't spent enough time looking at the bad HTML that spammers generate yet, so I don't know how easy it will be to pick out the embedded images. I really want "image as first part of content" rule, but I'm not sure how to write a position-based rule.

You've given me an idea. I have a laptop (an iBook), and at least as a first attempt I wouldn't object at all to hooking it up to the TV. (It's not my main machine, so it's rarely in use when I'm at home except for maintenance. I use it for mobility, not primary access.) The only relevant connectors I see are USB and Firewire (and, well, network :-) ), so it's obvious I have to go through some interface to get to my TV. How do you plug your laptop into your TV?

Thanks for the pointer. $69 is pretty good for the player. I don't have the burner, so that would add to the cost. (I thought writable DVDs were still dollars apiece, but a little searching shows otherwise. That's good to know.)

I hadn't thought of this until someone else commented, but I have an iBook I'm willing to involve in this process, if I can figure out how to get signal from it to the TV.

(If all of this works out, my next project will be finding the downloadable content. I failed to set up BitTorrent a year or two ago but haven't looked recently. The Apple announcement implies that they sell content. Do you know of other viable options?)

Pretty well in general. I took an iBook (12", a couple years old, running OS 10.4) that I bought used recently. This is the only laptop I've ever owned, though I've borrowed the occasional Windows laptop for conferences and the like, so I have limited experience for compare-and-contrast analysis.

Being able to open the machine and auto-detect wireless networks in airports and hotels was nice. The access was never free and in all cases, launching a browser brought me to the hot-spot page telling me how to get access. (I assume that's all standard behavior.)

I took a mouse with me because I've had a lot of trouble with PC trackpads, but most of the time I didn't actually use it. I would have used it for finer-grained activities, but starting the machine, launching emacs, typing an LJ entry, launching a browser, and pasting it in was not that big a deal with the on-board hardware. (Sometimes I plugged a mouse in for the cut-and-paste operation.) Ditto reading comments on my entries -- the trackpad was fine, at least for the amount of time I was spending online. (Access was metered so I didn't even try to read my friends page -- just comments on my own entries, and my email via shell.)

I mostly couldn't use the machine on the planes for two reasons, one likely personal. It was hard for me to get the laptop into a position where I could both type and see the monitor on those little tray tables -- that's just me, due to my limited vision. The other problem might have been hardware, and I may have to pay a visit to the local experts: I discovered that the machine was very sensitive to being tilted. Once on the plane it made an awful squealing noise and wouldn't boot (at the beginning of the trip, so this was scary); later it was fine on a hotel desk but when I picked it up to carry it across the room (running and on battery power only), it made that same noise and the screen blanked. (I set it down and things went back to normal.) Before the trip I bought a new battery (brand new, not used); that's the only hardware change I've made. Both times this happened it was running on battery power. Are those facts related? I have no idea.

I had forgotten that I hadn't configured a decent-sized emacs font before leaving, and machine-local exploration (like querying emacs' font set) wasn't turning up anything useful for me. (I haven't tried Google yet, having forgotten until just now.) I used the zoom functionality built into OS X to handle that; it meant the entire screen wasn't on-screen, but since I was just using a text editor that was ok so long as the text I was directly working on was there. One down-side: the center point of the zoom is dynamic and based on mouse-cursor position, so I couldn't just shove the mouse off to the side out of the way. I found places to put it where it didn't bother me, and I understand why they did it that way, but I think I would have liked an option to specify a center point for this kind of case.

The other thing that was a little frustrating was that plugging in a mouse didn't disable the trackpad, so an accidental brush there produced surprising results. (If you're using the trackpad you expect it to raact, but when I plugged in the mouse I began to think of the mouse as the sole control, not just one of two, so I was startled every time the trackpad activated.)

Some people who know about my vision expressed surprise that I chose a 12" monitor, but that was (1) fine for my purposes and (2) a feature when considering portability. I knew I was going to be using it to (functionally) do just one thing at a time anyway, so if my emacs session or browser or ssh session wanted most of the screen, fine. This would be completely unacceptable for a work or primary-home machine, but it's just fine for a travelling machine. And being able to easily put the machine in my backpack without worrying about either footprint or weight was nice.

Oh, I also used it for downloading pictures from the camera (and backing them up on a thumb drive). For that I used the mouse. I did not attempt to do any editing of said pictures on the laptop.

Overall, definitely a positive experience.

Most iBooks have a video out connection of some sort. It's usually DVI, mini-DVI or mini-VGA, which looks like a sort of fat USB connector. There's a little dongle that attaches to the connector and has a composite video out. If one didn't come with the laptop, the Apple store can provide you with one for about $20.

The parent post was me. I wasn't logged in.

This is probably the connector that you want (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=722C6629&nplm=M9109G%2FA), but I'd visit the store to be certain. On my three-year-old 12" iBook, the video connector is beside the headphone connector on the left side of the machine.

I think you want this (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/6884002/wo/IA2WGkz12mPn2xRv0fvKaslYXDk/1.0.21.1.0.8.25.7.11.0.3). (I have a Powerbook, so it has an s-video port.)

Thanks! Duh; I mistook that for a Firewire connector. (Having nothing that uses Firewire, I didn't notice by connection failure...) I see now that it is different from the other non-USB connector on the side of the machine.

I use a D-Link DSM-520. It streams video and audio wirelessly from any media-server-equipped computer (you can use any UPnP-compatible media server; I use TVersity).

As for content, well, with iTV or an iPod you get the Apple Store. But that also means you get restricted content in a crappy resolution that's DRM'd out the wazoo and locks you into Apple products forever. The DSM-520 is compatible with PlaysForSure, so if you wanted to buy content from Microsoft you could. I just pull down the things I want to watch from BitTorrent; TVersity also does internet streams and can transcode pretty much anything into an MPEG2 stream.

I suppose, given that you post your email on a public page, I should attempt to follow-up on the email I sent you.

The message was regarding your tech writing abilities.

The email sent was from the domain respect101.com - Did you receive it?

Best Regards
Frank

Hi! Not ignoring you; meant to reply last night but got busy. Will send email tonight.

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use the video connector

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Did my message get past your spam filters?

Re: Did my message get past your spam filters?