Tivo To Go For the Mac, $$$ version

I apologize in advance for posting this here, because it strains the usual threads in my blog, my whining about the state of education, media DRM/copyright, why palm is lame, etc.

This is a recipe for accomplishing something I have wanted to do for a long time, which is allow me to watch shows on my Tivo with my Mac without having to hack anything. Everything I talk about is off ther shelf, boring stuff. I just thought it would be good to document it because it is so easy to do.

First you need a PC running Windows XP. This part sucks, I agree, but that is because the Tivo Desktop for the PC has TivoToGo, which isn't available for the Mac. Whether or not it will become available is now irrelvant for me. I was lucky in that I scored a two year old Dell 400SC server (2 Ghz celeron) for $50.00 which I had to buy a drive for, and a XP license. If you are starting from scratch just buy the cheap nasty PC with a license for XP home included, nothing more than $300.00. But hopefully you will have this lying around.

You need to have a Tivo Series 2, connected to your home network. If you have put this part off, well duh! At least get a wired usb adapter, I am using a 3Com which I picked up for $14.00.

Download Tivo Desktop for your PC. DO NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID. Don't buy the Tivo Desktop Plus. I bought it and regret that decision. I wish I could give it back. It works (mostly) but has limitations (such as quality settings, etc). Use the free version.

If you have never set up Tivo Desktop before on your PC, you will need to go online and set up your Tivo to work with Tivo to go (log into your account). You will be furnished with a Media Access Key. If you have previously done this, you can get your key online when you log into your account.

Download and purchase Roxio's MyTVtoGo. It isn't quite a nicely integrated as Tivo's software, but it works great.

If you don't already have iTunes installed on your PC, download and install that.
Run iTunes and go through the legal blather stuff. After you have it running, go to Preferences, and Select Sharing. Check the box "Share my Library".

In any case, if you are successful, you will see your shows on your Tivo. You can of course select individual shows to download, but you can also instruct the software to download all shows for a given series, which is really handy, as you will see in a moment.

After you have downloaded a couple of shows, open MyTVToGo and configure it. For your video quality settings, use the iPod settings. I use the highest quality myself. Note that the software tells you that it will copy the converted files to our iTunes library.

MyTVToGo has a setting which allows the software to convert all new shows that show up in TivoToGo automatically. I highly recommend using this. Combined with the setting in TivoToGo that downloads the equivalent of a season pass from your Tivo allows the whole thing to essentially run itself. I leave mine alone, and when I go to iTunes on my Mac every day, new shows are added with no intervention on my part.

So, I have my PC setting behind my equipment in the living room, but it could just as well be in a closet somewhere. I run it remotely via Windows Desktop, but I actually prefer to use UltraVNC. Maintenance is basically dropping on the machine every once and while to download shows from the Tivo, or delete stuff I have already watched.

Otherwise, the thing pretty much runs itself. Any computer on the network that has iTunes installed can play stuff on the TivoToGo server.

It is of course possible to set up a shared volume on the PC so that I could just mount the drive and play back the shows, but I preferred using iTunes as my front end because it requires little or no configuration.

I should also point out that while it is simple for me to actually copy these shows to my iPod or burn them, in my case that is not my intent. I am not much of an archivist these days. After I have watched something I rarely want to keep a copy of it.

I know that I could have just hacked my Tivo, or built a MythTV box or blah blah blah. I have gone through many many many different attempts to replicate the Tivo experience, with the added ability to watch shows on my network, but Tivo still has the best overall user experience. I really hate that I had to go through this much trouble to do something that Tivo could supply to me via a TivoToGo for the Mac. Quite simply, I decided I had waited enough. I hope that someone finds useful.

I will write a separate article shortly outlining a parallel experience I am having with off-air digital television.

--hal

Nokia 770, The AJax Appliance that Could

I have been fortunate enough to come across a Nokia 770 Web Tablet. This is a small device that resembles PDA, but oriented horizontally. It features a very high resolution display in a pocketable device. Bluetooth and 802.11b mean that if you are equipped with a cell phone, you can potentially always have access to your email, web content and more in a manner that is not nearly as compromised an experience as the typical PDA or Smart Phone.

This device has recieved notoroiously bad reviews, but it is not entirely the device's fault. Partially to blame has been a initial release of the OS that was at times sluggish, some rough edges in the user experience, and stability.

The beta of the new "2006" OS is on my 770. It is quite good. In fact, in using it for a while, the strengths of the device become much more obvious.

The 770 is not a PDA. It is not a laptop. These are obvious points, but they color our expectation of how devices that resemble them should behave.

The 770 is purely a creature of the connected experience. This is apparent in little things, such as the well done connection manager which makes configuration with a cell phone simple, but also in larger aspects, such as the default "desktop" of the 770.

The 770's initial UI resembles in some ways Apple's dashboard, and this is no accident. It is possibly a low threshold approach to allow developers to build "infowidgets" that can be accessed immediately, exactly in the way this device is envisioned to be used. It is for immediate access.

The inclusion of a chat client further supports this. It expands the utility of a cell phone by offering a useful way for users to communicate. Intriguingly, due to Nokia's partnership with Google, the 770 includes voice over IP support, and does have a microphone built in, but of course could be used with a bluetooth headset as well.

The browser included with the 770 is quite useable, and this is where it becomes interesting. Since the 770 is so network centric, technologies that make use of the browser as an application platform (AJAX etc) can leverage this.

I think this is where reviewers that gave the 770 a bad rating didn't get it. The 770 isn't necessarily about writing applications for it per se, but about utilizing web development and cross platform expertise to power a portable device. It is actually quite smart. Palm has to convince people to learn a unique development platform to write software for their PDA's. People can write for the 770 using skills they already have; and their efforts won't just work on a single series of devices, but a broad range of devices and environments.

Microsoft has ushered in a smaller tablet format, but it is quite expensive -- the cheapest one is at least 3 times the cost of the 770, and can't be slipped into a pants pocket. The only thing they got right is the idea of a network centric tablet device that people carry with them, but I don't any of the existing UMPC models qualify.

The 770 is an imperfect, but I think vital, glimpse of the near future.

Just What Do They Want From Us Anyway?

A New York Times Article on high tech cheating generated a fair amount of traffic on our TLTR list here at NCSU. Due to crunch on projects I was not able to respond in a timely manner to the posts, and had intended to post something here. Well, time has passed and this response has morphed again into something else.

One question that never asked during the discussion was why students cheat. The answer is obvious, because they have not done their work, they are unable to keep up, they want a simple shortcut to a good grade instead of doing the work.

The work. The work indeed.

The answer was "higher moral conduct" by some to this problem. Students should be held accountable. This is a safe answer. It is sort of like saying that I like babies, sunny days and ice cream.

I think it is actually much harder to ask the question I want to ask. The same dumb question. Why do students cheat?

I have my own answer. It is a semi-successful means of accomplishing the goal, which is getting a good grade. Actual grasp of the subject matter is a distant secondary goal(and in fact, may just get in the way of accomplishing the primary goal). With no "moral" boundaries, students are apt to cheat. It is a morally objectionable, but perhaps successful way of navigating a system that rewards good grades.

I don't worry if there is a superior being watching me when I work on a assignment. My motivation for not cheating is pride in my work, my engagement in my studies. I guess I am not the normal student, but I think something is at work here.

By the time students get to college, they have figured out that school is mostly easily quantifiable knowledge. You are tested on that which is easily testable. Successful students "read" an instructor, and know fairly quickly what is expected of them, what is the percentage of their time they have to expend to get a good grade. They stare at the instructor, and ask themselves the title of this posting: "Just What Do They Want From Us Anyway?".

I know this because I was often terrible at doing this when I was younger. I would try to understand formulas instead of just memorizing them. One takes more resources, but in the end it doesn't matter -- just being able to memorize a formula is better when you have 50 minutes to take a test. You may forget every bit of it 2 years later, but that doesn't matter.

The "high tech" angle on cheating in the NY Times article is just a red herring anyway. Cheating is simply a way that students try to bypass a system that is becoming irrelevant to learning anyway. They have figured that out. Life is not a series of multiple choice questions, although with some thought we may be able to reduce them to that. I think the fact that no one seems to be thinking about "why" versus "how" is quite instructive. Education is stuck. in. a. rut.

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On another note, I have begun updating my LiveJournal account again. It's personal stuff, nothing too personal, just a scratch pad, random thoughts. Changed the name to "Hal Meeks Slept Here".

Music and Alternate Interfaces

I dabble in music, sort of inspired in part by the likes of Brian Eno. I used to enjoy setting up audio "systems" where I was a participant, using a combination of cheap synthesizers, tape loops and overdubbing. Now I play guitar, record it and screw around with it in Garageband. I particularly like the "Voice Changer" plug in, combined with other effects. It kills my poor powerbook, but I do love Augustus Loop, which emulates a tape delay/loop unit. These devices are magical because of the decay effect that they provide; Robert Fripp uses two Revox tape decks to get the same effect.

For non-musicians, and perhaps traditional musicians, the sort of musical devices that are created for electronic composition and performance can seem quite other worldly. There are many devices that share characteristics with the Theremin such as the Photo-Theremin. The Alesis AirFX is something similar, where you feed it an audio signal, and by waving your hand over a sensor modify it in several different ways.

I have been a fan of the Suzuki QChords for some time. They are sort of like a autoharp, where you press keys and "strum" over a sensor. They were originally designed to teach children the basics of music, but the newer ones have midi out.

I remember having a discussion a while back with someone who felt that learning music was too hard; that it should be possible to create software that can do most of the work. I don't think I convinced them that not only was this an unnecessary thing, it is likely an unwanted thing. Playing with loops in Garage Band all them time gets quite boring.

While all of these tools simplify mechanical aspects of creating music, they still require work to master. The theremin is notorious for this -- it is a great toy, but to actually play music on it takes a bit of practice. However, the variability of the output from using these devices is what makes them engaging. It is a bit different every time. Ask any electronic musician about the evils of "quantitization", it sucks the soul out of a piano part. It is that little bit of variability in timing that makes it seem "natural". It's just a little bit of noise, a bit of dust.

So we are left with our musical devices, but it us that makes them go. Even when we look at compositions made up of nothing more that looped samples, it is our process of selection, not a piece of software, that makes it relevant for us. Even Eno's "systems" such as what was used in Discreet Music require some input to begin. We are the water for the mill.

I know that I am kind of meandering here, but I will come back to this again soon and try to make more sense.

Edit video online

Reading Bolther/Grusin's Remediation is at once a great reading experience and a opportunity to turn your world view into some sort of oppositional view for a brief while. The idea is quite infectious, that mediums combine and "remediate" each other; TV becomes more like the web, and the web expands out from text and still images into a experience that is not television -- something more and in my opinion much better.

I have spent a lot of time in YouTube, because I think they get it in a way that Google and some of the others (such as Veoh) don't get it; it is about a simple viewing experience enhanced with a social construct. It's pretty deep, I've written a paper on it for a course I'm taking, and I hope to publish it somewhere. It is close to offering the types of things that people might want in a future video sevice; the only thing that is missing now is ditching the web browser centric interface for a "10 foot" experience.

I talk a lot about how pervasive visual tools for contructing knowledge have become. Word processing is now something that doesn't live on your desktop, but is an application that lives in your browser -- Google has a word processor, Microsoft has Live Office, and there are a host of other simple word processing applications such as AjaxWrite. The folks behind Ajaxwrite continue to roll out web-based applications as a way to undermine Microsoft's move into this environment, but it is not clear to me that what they offer is a suitable replacement.

Eyespot is a online video editing and sharing environment. It has some aspects of YouTube, but offers the ability to mix and match content. "Editing" in this environment is essentially cuts-only editing, but given time I am sure that will change. However, the quality is not great, it is almost more of a technology showcase than a practical tool. But still, I am in favor of anything that makes this more approachable.

The mind-numbing truth is that we have always been visual thinkers, some more than others. Film and video were not invented by arbitrarily; it hooks into the way that our brains work. It is, to use a bad analogy, why Tetris is popular -- it uses a basic skill that we have, the ability to rotate objects in our head, and turns it into a game. Video editing combines the cultural (what is the proper way to tell a story, what is time, what is real) with the innate (we think in pictures).

Eyespot itself is not necessarily that important, but what it represents is important; that these once esoteric tools are becoming common as dirt. It is not the accessibility to the tools that is preventing us from embracing them and using them to construct knowledge, it is our attitude towards them. Education is not ready to deal with students that are heavily visual thinkers.

Everything has moved away from that; again I come back to the general ideas of "industrial revolution" thinking; repeatability, quality assurance, easily quantifiable knowledge, scaling. These goals are not consistent with this breed of learner. I will not call them a "new breed" because it is my strong belief that these people have always existed, what has changed is the opporunities they have to learn, and our attitude towards them. The schools of today and the near future do not embrace these students; they are considered abnormal -- borderline autistic, adhd, what have you. We give them medication to make them manageable, but we don't teach them. They have to teach themselves.

--hal

Reinventing Radio

I have been working on a simple streaming radio station project. In the process, I thought about the whole satellite radio thing.

Some speculation: what happens when wireless data access is good enough that it can be integrated into consumer products such as portable radios? There are some UI considerations, but what if Live365 was available on your car's stereo?

A while back, Nextel was testing the "wireless broadband" service in our area, and I was fortunate enough to try it. I really liked it. When reading the documentation, I noticed the curious admonition that I shouldn't use it while operating a moving vehicle. Of course, I then had to do just that to see why.

It still is not clear to my why they told me to not use it while driving my car, but I can say that it worked. It was cool to be able to drive around with a laptop streaming internet radio.

My guess is that we will be able to do that at some point with edge phones that connect to our bluetooth car stereo system. It should be interesting, since it is actually quite easy to set up a streaming service. I can see very focused regional broadcasters that otherwise couldn't be supported in traditional broadcasting.

--hal

Video Furnace Mon Amor

I went to a demo of Video Furnace yesterday. It is a solution that allows you to offer cable services over IP. It has several pieces:

• An encoder that takes a video source (s-video,composite or cable) and turns that into a mpeg-4 stream.
• A program channel manager and on-demand video server.
• A desktop client that has an integrated channel guide, authentication. It is essentially TV for your computer. It requires no install, but does require java.
  

It's biggest appeal is that it allows telecom to stop using coax. They can use this to send TV channels over ethernet. However, it requires a separate encoder for each channel. If you carry 32 channels of TV, you need 32 encoders.

The system can support HD resolution video, but they can't encode it yet. The demo I saw yesterday showed content at 320x240, but I know it will do double that comfortably.

It's strength and weakness is that it is an end-to-end solution. As a replacement for cable television, I think it is quite viable. The player has nice features, you can open more than one channel at once, and the program guide is nicely designed. I'd use it instead of regular TV if they would let me time-shift programming (they don't). I did ask them about accessibility and the CEO said they supported captioning, but didn't know if the player would work with a screen reader. I didn't think to ask at the time, but I wonder if it would be possible to allow users to roam (log in and watch TV anywhere).

I am more skeptical about it being a solution to replace other kinds of video delivery. The channel metaphor it uses is limiting in some ways. It isn't a replacement for a commodity streaming media service, where content can be found using Google. It would be interesting if they were to integrate a search engine and RSS reader into their software, so that coursework content could live alongside Cartoon Network.

In the end, I think the whole channel idea is on it's last legs. I think what we see with YouTube, GoogleVideo and iTunes is the future.

--hal