SoapBoxRants.net Speaking on all things.

I was at Best Buy today and noticed that SimpleTech has apparently reworked their external drive offerings. As a result, the old model of the 1TB external USB drive that was $259.99 is now on clearance for…get this…$92.99! The online store still lists the full price so I suggest that if you are in the market for a huge external drive for pocket change, stop into the store and see if they’ve got it marked down. It’ll be the silver drive with the sloped front (the enclosure, not the box it’s in).

Also remember that if you use a Mac then you will have to format it because it comes as NTFS which will only give you read access. If you aren’t sure how that works, just fire up Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder) and select the drive. From there select the Partition tab and click on Options. You have to make it a GUID partition table or else the format will fail. After doing that you can format the drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Give it whatever name you want and click Apply. In moments you will have a fresh drive ready for mass quantities of digital goodness. (Important note: There is a backup utility on the drive that you will need to copy off first if you plan on using it. I prefer to just use Time Machine so I didn’t bother.)

Personally I made two partitions so I can have one for Time Machine (200GB) and one for my movies (731GB, you lose some in formatting). I’m still waiting on Time Machine to finish the initial backup and then I’m going to copy the movies I’ve already ripped via Handbrake over and see how it works with the Xbox. When I get it all up and going I will update the Mac Media Center page with the details. Oh, and if you are worried that USB 2.0 won’t be fast enough, let’s just say I’m getting better than 1GB/min transfer and since the movies are about 1GB per hour…there should be nothing to worry about.

Edit: I fixed the reduced price. I incorrectly reported it as $96.99.

Posted under General

Media is all atwitter (yep…a pun in the first sentence) about the launch of the 3G iPhone. Well I say whoop-de-doo. Apple finally released the device they should have unleashed upon the masses when it first hit the market a year ago. Seriously, why wouldn’t you make your ground-breaking new piece of hardware take advantage of the latest and greatest technology like 3G?

Think about it. One of the major selling points was online media a-la Youtube. What possessed the creators to settle for EDGE? We all know EDGE sucks. We all know 3G is much faster and makes the entire mobile online experience tolerable. We all accept 3G as the best thing to use next to WiFi and real broadband. But you settled for EDGE. 3G always wins because EDGE is dumb.

You touted how great it was to have online map lookups for places you might be interested in and yet you didn’t include GPS. So I can know where I’m going but not where I’m at? Who comes up with this stuff? If I’m using the map to find a place to eat, I am probably in a place unfamiliar to me so it would help to know where I’m sitting in relation to my destination. It makes it easier to determine my travel route. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just full of crazy talk.

You finally decided to let AT&T subsidize the price so more people can buy it. Why didn’t you do that before? Sure the whole profit sharing thing may have sounded interesting but did you not learn a lesson from Wal-Mart? It’s far better to get a dollar from thousands than ten dollars from hundreds. You make more in the long run that way. If you don’t believe that then you haven’t been to ebay lately.

You say it has wonderful Exchange integration. Like it or not they own the market. Why wouldn’t you support that right out of the gate? There are several clients that can talk to Exchange so it shouldn’t have been a huge deal to get working. Did you have some delusion that by offering this “must-have” device to the masses that corporate attitudes would change overnight? I certainly hope not. I really don’t understand what you were thinking there, Steve.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an Apple hater. I adore my iMac and I use it far more than my Windows laptop. I really like the iPhone and I want to get one. But I think you goofed. You brought out a device that, while revolutionary, lacked in many key areas. You also flubbed the pricing and had to offer some compensation to stifle the ire of the masses. The intial offer seems more and more like a beta and popular opinion would say that doing such a thing is a Microsoft thing, not an Apple thing.

Then to top it all off you earn the Fail Whale trophy for activation. You had the stock out there. You really should have known what kind of bombardment you were going to have as AT&T doors opened. But it’s okay. You aren’t the only one that loused it up today. AT&T is right there with you. They had the gall to allocate every last store rep to iPhone sales. Every last one. I needed to get a phone for an employee today…a Nokia…before he left for a job out of town. I was told point blank that I couldn’t and I would have to wait until this afternoon or tomorrow. You know, AT&T, you aren’t the only game in town that offers standard ho-hum phones. I can get one somewhere else if my business isn’t worth 10 minutes of one rep’s time.

All in all I say that the Fail Whale award for today goes to Apple with support from AT&T.

Posted under Technology

I don’t know about the rest of you but I have friends that like to borrow things. These things are usually in the form of DVDs or books. With my memory not exactly being what it used to be, I really have a hard time remembering who has what. Heck, I’ve loaned stuff out that stayed gone so long that I forgot I even owned it. This is where Delicious Library 2 comes in if you have a Mac.

Delicious Library 2 is a program that will catalog pretty much anything and everything you own. Yes, I am aware there are lots of programs that will do this. Let me tell you the joys of why DL2 is superior. Probably the best feature in my opinion is the barcode scan ability. All you do is hold the book or DVD or whatever’s barcode up to your iSight camera and it will read it, look the item up on Amazon, and download all information about that item into your database (including current sale value!).

DL2 also integrates into your Mac’s address book which will let you drag an item you loaned to that person’s entry so you can keep up with who has what. It’ll even put an iCal reminder for the due date you set. See? Bad memory is no longer a problem. And speaking of friends, DL2 will use Bonjour to show you the library of other Macs on your network. It’ll even let you find libraries of your friends that are published to the web. Did I mention you can publish it to the web (using either .Mac or iWeb or even FTP)?

There’s a whole host of other things you can do including a simple three click process to sell an item on Amazon but for a full list of everything it can do I would suggest just going to the website. You can download the program and put up to 25 items in it before you need to purchase it. The cost is a very reasonable $40. Actually, next to the $20 I spent on Connect360, I think this is the best investment I’ve made in my iMac.

Posted under Technology

Well the net is all afire with the just released pricing plans from AT&T for the iPhone 3G. Jobs announced that the phones would be retailing for $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. What he failed to mention was the specific circumstances at which these prices are valid. Yes, I know it is shocking to think that AT&T might make things complicated and that they might have their own pocketbooks in mind rather than the customer…but it’s true.

See, the prices are for a specific group. To get these prices you must have purchased an iPhone before July 11, be activating a new line of service with AT&T, or be eligible for an upgrade. If you don’t fall into these categories, then be prepared to pay the same old $399 and $499 prices for these phones…with a two-year contract. Isn’t it great to be the customer? They will also be offering the phones without a contract but that’ll run you $599 or $699 depending on storage size. Now, I like Apple. I also happen to like my AT&T service. I want to like the iPhone. But man are they making it hard for me to consider giving up my Tilt.

Jobs failed to put the tell-tale * in the slides with the pricing during his keynote. I can understand how this information could dampen the response to his company’s new toy. But I can’t stomach the special “customer service” that’s going on with this pricing. Well, it really isn’t the pricing itself that I find annoying. Most AT&T phones have two prices, the upgrade and the non-upgrade price. It’s the deceitful way that Jobs presented it to the world. I think my Tilt has plenty of use left in it even though it is a much bulkier device.

Thanks so much for saving me a few hundred dollars AT&T. I couldn’t have done it without your special touch to what was a wonderful offer from Apple. Oh, and don’t forget kiddies, AT&T data plans no longer include an SMS package. You’ll have to add that piece of overpriced fluff separately.

Posted under Technology

Updated 8-2-2008: Added information about the USB drive I added for more storage.

Building a Home Media Center with a Mac can be either very easy or just easy depending on what you want to do. There are two options: Store everything in iTunes or store just the music in iTunes. As with any such system, however, it will not be cheap. Now if you happen to have a Mac of some sort then you have the bulk of the money spent. The build I use involves a 20″ Aluminum iMac that pretty much is stock except for the extra 1GB of memory I added to it. The problem is I want to watch/listen to my media in the living room and the computer is in my bedroom.

To solve this little distance issue I needed a plan. Now this was simple enough since I have an XBox360 already connected to my plasma television. All I really need is enough bandwidth to move the data and a way for the 360 to see my iTunes library on the iMac. To accomplish the connection, all you need is Rivet or Connect360. There is a meager $1.05 price difference ($18.95 and $20.00 respectively) between them but most of the features are the same. I personally went with Connect360 in my build. It was a seamless and painless setup.

My 360 immediately found the iMac on my network as a computer sharing media. So there is nothing to be done on the console unless you have it also connected to a Windows system using Media Center. If you do, just select the Change Source option and select the Mac. At this point you will see the songs or photos or videos that you are sharing. Select and play.

I am using 802.11G wireless for the iMac. My 360 is currently wired into the network. I was able to play ripped DVDs without stutter in this configuration. Therefore I would posit that the bandwidth of Wireless-G is sufficient for non-HD streaming. This is good because my iMac doesn’t have N and neither does my router. Money saved.

As for software on the Mac, you will need a couple of things. Of course you need Rivet or Connect360. Beyond that you will need iTunes if you plan on sharing music. If you have pictures and videos in iTunes, those will also be shared. These apps will also let you share folders of your choosing allowing for media outside of iTunes. If you want to rip DVDs for playback on the console, you will need to get Handbrake. I suggest just using the presets for XBox360 which will be in a slide out pane on the right side of the window. Then just insert a DVD, select it as the source, and start the encoding. Depending on the hardware specs and other programs running at the time, you can expect it to take 50%-100% longer than the length of the DVD (a 2.5 hour movie may take 4 hours to encode). Oh, to save on time I suggest changing the name of the file itself to something cleaner than what it defaults to.

Now where you store this is an important decision. You can save these files to the Movies folder under the iTunes music folder if you want iTunes to manage your movies. This has the advantage of letting iTunes handle all of your media management. However this also means you must have your iTunes library on a drive with lots and lots of storage. I used this right at first and added every movie I ripped to the iTunes library. However I do not like keeping my music anywhere other than the default path. So when I got my USB drive, I moved the movies over and took them out of iTunes. Then I opened Connect360’s preferences and changed the Movies path to the USB drive. Either option works well but I chose to keep the movies separate since I don’t plan on watching them on the iMac when I have a 50″ plasma. Just remember that if you are saving the movies in iTunes, actually save them originally in iTunes. If you let iTunes manage the media it will leave the original in whatever folder it was in and just make a copy in it’s library folder thus taking up twice the space it should.

After the encoding is finished you need to add it to the iTunes Library (with Command+O) if you want to watch it on your iMac and share it through iTunes to the 360. Skip that step if you are just using a folder elsewhere to store the movies. Either way you will access it from the Media blade on the dashboard. Just select Videos and the iTunes Movies or whatever you named your media folder to see the list. The system will remember which movies you were watching and ask if you want to resume where you left off if you stop it for any reason. It is a nice little feature that works even if you play another movie before coming back to the one you stopped.

This design gives you access to the movies themselves without menus and extras. It preserves 5.1 surround and while it doesn’t exactly give you chapters, it does have jump points spaced equally throughout the movie. I’ve tested this pretty well on my Samsung 50″ plasma television and the quality is very good even though the movie is trimmed down to take only about a gigabyte of space per hour of video. Which brings up another point…storage. I now have a 1TB external USB hard drive to house all of this media. It works really well thus far. I opted for the SimpleTech SP-U35/1TB drive since I caught it on clearance for $160 off. The speed is really good and it keeps pretty quiet. Best of all is it powers down to a sort of sleep mode when I put the iMac to sleep thus extending the drive’s life.

So here is the short list of what you need to duplicate my build:

• Mac computer
• Xbox360
• Home Network (If not using wired, I suggest using Wireless N if you plan on streaming HD content)
• Rivet or Connect360 software to share media
• Handbrake software to convert DVDs
• iTunes for media management
• SimpleTech or other brand 1TB USB 2.0 hard drive
• Lots of time for ripping and encoding

Posted under General