Rolling into week 2 4 of not having cable TV. I don’t miss it even a little and I haven’t heard any complaints about it not being there from my housemates. And, at this point, I would grade the experience a solid C. A solid C that I just increased to a B+.
The biggest hurdle so far as been the Adobe Flash Player on older Apple hardware. Trying to use a first gen Intel Macbook as a home theater PC (HTPC), as it turns out, doesn’t work that great. The CPU gets hammered, there isn’t enough graphics power and it’s a little low on memory. Any video playback was poor, especially any web based video. Just not enough horsepower to get the job done.
Enter the Macbook Air. There are a pair of them in the house of the 13″ screen variety. Small, light and wicked fast. And, as it turns out, quite the video playback machine! With the correct cable connected, it will drive the 45″ LCD television in our system, at 1080p, no sweat! Even when I tried Hulu and Youtube, playback was smooth, the sound was perfect and the video output was clear and crisp. On HD Youtube videos, they look as good, if not better, than cable even did.
The next step is to streamline the setup and make it easier to operate. Currently using Plex to manage our content that is stored on an external USB drive, but Plex is installed on the machine the drive is not attached too. Makes performance a bit rough sometimes, especially when a computer goes to sleep.
Also rough when using the Macbook Air is the lack of a remote. You kids out there probably don’t remember, but there was a time when televisions did not have color screens or remote controls. Actually, that’s not 100% correct. The kids were the remote controls when Mom or Dad wanted the channel changed. TV watching was almost an aerobic activity!
This system will be a work in progress until it’s not. Ideally I would like to add a Mac Mini or build my own home theater PC running any number of linux distro’s. The trick would be to make it quiet and small enough to fit in my home entertainment system, and not run at a bazillion degrees.
Stay tuned.
It’s been pretty busy around here lately! I’ve been Mr. All-Go-No-Quit. Today we changed that, if only for a few hours.
Like I mentioned above, it’s been busy. I was in California, then a weekend of nerd stuff capped by a grilled cheese throw-down (yes, it was as awesome as it sounds) and just non stop work. Even this weekend I had mad chores to do, but they did result in a very clean garage.
We decided an adventure was in order. We tossed around a few ideas and decided to do something that I haven’t done but was still relatively close to home. We made a trip out to Queen Creek Olive Mill for lunch and to see what’s what.
Turns out this is a pretty awesome place! First of all, they produce all of the olive oils sold in the store and used in the restaurant. Straight oil, infused oil, specialty oil. Not only that, but as you can imagine, they also do more than a few things with olives including pickled and stuff with things you would have never thought about before.
Besides the store and cafe, they also have a huge picnic area! Today it was populated by people enjoying a local wine and having their lunch. Or just sitting out and enjoying another beautiful Arizona winter day. I also found out they are working toward using the space for hosting weddings in the very near future, and it’s a perfect fit for that.
The only item we brought home was a 4 pack of cupcakes (made with thier infused olive oils, of course) and a few photos. Oh, and Stella made me fetch a letterbox prize for her since it was buried under some scary rocks.
Pretty great way to end a pretty good weekend. Enjoy the photos below and if you ever need something to do on a Sunday in Arizona, a trip out to Queen Creek might be just what you need!
WordPress. Open source and free. I use it everyday. I make money from it almost weekly. It’s a giant part of what I do.
Since it is open source, anyone that uses it should feel compelled to somehow give something back to the WordPress community. Many people think that you need to spend time squashing bugs in the core code, or developing sweet plugins and themes. Sure, those all work, but I’m not really good at either of those things.
What am I good at? Training, implementing and thinking so far out of the box you can barely see the box. That’s what I do to give back and part of the reason why I volunteer at my local Wordcamp in the Rockstar Bar. That’s just a fancy term to say that if you have a question about WordPress or a problem with your WordPress or you are looking to have a discussion about WordPress, this is the place with nerds that are available to help you out. And this year I did.
Overall, it was a pretty great day of WordPress and I’m glad I was able to take the time to participate. As an added bonus, because I showed up, I received a free-for-life account at WP Engine, a premium, WordPress-only, web host. Expect a full review of that in the coming weeks.
If you have to use WordPress, are curious about WordPress or looking for a place to meet other WordPress users to swap stories and tips, I highly recommend hitting up a Wordcamp near you.
I was in need of a power accessory for my car. Sure I could have gone anywhere, but to save me driving all over town, I decided to hit up my local Radio Shack store. They had the parts that I needed, a power adapter splitter and a USB power adapter, which I took up to the counter after ‘the manager’ helped me find them. He rang me up and asked for my phone number, which has been common practice at Radio Shack stores for a few years now.
Number given, somehow my customer information had mysteriously vanished from their system. Odd since I’ve been in that system for as long as I can remember. He asks for my name, again, my phone number, again, and my home address. I give him all of this, but then he asks for my email address. To which I say no.
Instantly he goes on the defensive.
I say no.
He continues his offensive.
I continue to say no.
He continues his offensive even more.
I interrupt him, rudely, and tell him in my dad voice No.
Which makes him almost cry. So, against my better judgement, I let him continue with his bullshit reason for needing my email address. He swore to me, crossed his heart and hoped to die to me, that he left the ‘checkbox’ unchecked that should keep me off the ‘please send me Radio Shack Spam’ list.
He lied. Not even 24 hours after I made my purchase did I get my first ‘welcome to the club’ email from Radio Shack. I was not happy, as you can imagine. Do I decided to let them know about it via the very well hidden email form. And this blog post. And the above Twitter post.
Remember gang, no means no.
Do what you can to avoid Radio Shack at all costs. They are rude. They are unprofessional. They aren’t terribly knowledgeable about anything on their shelves beyond what’s written on the packaging and I’m pretty sure that when their employees aren’t on the phone with their friends while on duty, that they are in the back doing unspeakable things to kittens and old people.
Well, maybe not that last part. But don’t shop with them. Really. But if you do, give them an enemy’s email address. Trust me on that, you’ll be glad you did.
Quite possibly my newest favorite thing. I’ve been using it long enough to actual talk about it here, in the hope that you will also adopt it as your newest favorite thing. And it’s called ifttt.com. That stands for If This Then That. Very simple, very logical. It allows you to do something with one of your internet services and then make it do something with another. As an example:
If a new photo gets posted to Instagram then post it to Flickr using the data from the Instagram post and these tags that I specify.
While the possibilities aren’t endless, they are pretty close. And I’m finding uses for this everyday. There is a good chance that you are reading this because you saw a link on my Facebook page. My nerd machine did that. If you ever see my profile photo change on FB, you will also see it to change on Twitter. My nerd machine did that, too. It works with Instagram, Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, RSS, LastFM, Evernote and more! If you can think it, it can probably do it.
Best part to all of this is that it’s free! And, since it awesome and free, I’m going to make it known right now that the second they offer a pro version that I can pay for to make sure that it sticks around for as long as possible I’m in.
The first time you log into ifttt.com you might be overwhelmed. Not a problem because it’s also social! Other nerds have shared their “recipes” within the site to give you an idea of what it can do and give you some to get you started.
Worth checking out and worth giving your time too, ifttt.com is made from pure awesome and unicorn tears. You should try it out because I’m sure it will become your new favorite thing as well.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.
