It appears that SageTV somewhat quietly released a new version of their HD extenders called the HD Theater.  The specifications and features are a little bit vague at this point, despite the ability to purchase this product on-line...right now.

The old SageTV HD Extenders (HD100) required a SageTV server on the back-end, or they would not function.  My guess is that this device is their answer to other stand-alone set-top-boxes (STBs) that do not require server hardware.  It appears that this device will work without a back-end server to handle much of the functionality (your own pictures, videos, music, DVDs, on-line content, etc).  However, if you want DVR functionality, THAT will require the SageTV back-end server.

If I'm right on this, it certainly opens up the doors for SageTV and their market.  No more will users need to be savvy enough to set up a computer in their garage in order to get some of the nice features SageTV offers.  As well, it opens up the likely possiblity that SageTV will be soon supporting the likes of Netflix Watch Now, maybe other sites such as the increasingly popular Hulu, etc.  My question is, will my HD100 get this new functionality as well, or will I be forced to upgrade?  Hmmm...

I have to question their marketing, however.  Despite the cool features, there's really nothing that would draw a new customer to purchase.  Their "screenshot" is flat out basic and not very attractive, so it doesn't appear they've made any improvements on this somewhat sore spot for their product (it's still "Interface 1.0").  There are plenty of other products out there (XBMC, Boxee, AppleTV, Media Portal, etc.) that don't do what SageTV does nearly as well...but they DO look nice and draw people from a marketing perspective with their "Interface 2.0" designs.  I hope SageTV spends some serious time on this in the future...not just with their product, but with their website.

Despite this, I'm still a huge (HUGE) SageTV fan and hope this product does well for them (and maybe me if I figure out enough about it to decide if it's worthy of upgrading to). 

This is a screenshot provided via the SageTV website, credit SageTV. 

For more information on SageTV, visit their website or read one of my previous articles on the topic.

How do you organize your music?  Are you an iTunes or Windows Media user?  Do you not bother owning your own music, and use services like Pandora or Last.FM?  Do you create playlists?  If so, are they manual or "smart"?  Can your playlists evolve as your tastes in music do, or do they require you to make changes on your own?

Music happens to be something I spend a lot of my days listening to, and I've also spent a lot of time creating ways for my world to have my music in a form I'm interested in listening to it.  From my home, to my car, to my office, to my gym, to my phone...I've got most of them dialed in to what I want to hear, when I want to hear it, and how I want it organized.

There have been two recent software releases that triggered this post.  The first is from Pandora, where they've created a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget for their service.  The second is from a service called Simplify Media, and the ability to Scrobble your personal music listening habits directly into Last.FM.  This post will surround these two new services as well as general discussion points on iTunes, Pandora, Last.FM, MusicIP Mixer, and Simplify Media...and how these services help you take your music with you, suggest new music, and organize music to your liking.

I used to be a Windows Media guy...because, well, the iTunes machine just wasn't for me.  Then I got an iPhone, and all that obviously changed.  It simply would be silly for me to not use iTunes.  Since I rank/rate my music, it was a difficult process migrating and I actually had to write software to move my Windows Media ratings into iTunes.  Regardless, the media player of focus here will be iTunes.

Pandora and Last.FM 

First, a bit about Pandora and Last.FM.  These are services that allows you to listen to a wide variety of music via the internet, iPhone, or other media devices.  You simply select a song, an artist, or an album, and voila...an instant stream of similar music is sent your way.  You do not own this music or get to download it locally, but you can stream all day long.  Pandora uses humans to categorize music by giving each and every song a "fingerprint" of sorts to be compared with others.  Last.FM uses more of an automated algorithm to do much of the same.  Some like one over the other...frankly, I like them both.  I've used Pandora for longer, so I tend to lean towards it...but really there's not a lot of difference in the quality of music selection.  There are differences in features and community connectivity, but I'll leave that up to you to discover on your own.

Pandora Vista Sidebar Gadget 

Don't have Vista?  Want the Sidebar gadget for XP?  Here's a way to get it!  Ok, back to Vista.  First, get the Pandora gadget.  Note, it will not work with 64-bit versions of Vista because it runs on Adobe Flash, and Adobe has not released a 64-bit version of Flash yet.  Tsk, tsk, Adobe.  There is a workaround, but it requires you to configure your system to use the 32-bit version of the Sidebar.  Once you're installed, follow the on-screen instructions, log in, configure your settings, and voila.  You're rockin' and rollin' from your sidebar.  A nice feature, for sure.  A couple images follow...

Simplify Media and Last.FM Scrobbling

Simplify Media is a service I've been using for some time.  On it's own, it's a fantasic (I repeat, FANTASTIC) application.  Install it on your desktop and point it to your iTunes Library, Winamp Library, or just a general music folder...and voila, accessibility to your music just increased dramatically.  Not only can you install the same application on other PC's, but you can also install the iPhone version of the application.  What does this allow you to do?  STREAM your music to you...wherever you are.  You heard it right, I can be in my car driving down the freeway streaming music from my home computer, to my iPhone, and into my stereo.  I do the same from my work PC (minus the driving part).  My playlists, my music, as if I were in front of my computer.  BRILLIANT.

What's better than that?  You can share your music with up to 30 (that's THIRTY) of your friends, and you can connect to any number of friends that are also running the application.  You have complete ability to play their music, their playlists, directly from their libraries.  And yes, it's all quite legal.  Better yet, it even uses the iTunes interface to access your or your friends' music (not sure how Winamp functionality works).  Amazing.  Get this software and spread your wings a bit.  Seriously.  Some nice screenshots of the application are located below (plus a few more here).

So, they've recently added a new feature in Simplify Media 1.2 that allows you to Scrobble from your iPhone.  What is Scrobbling?  Simply put, it attaches your media player to Last.FM, so it knows the last music you've played via whatever music player you use.  For the desktop, it's been available for a while and can be downloaded here.  The beauty of what Simplify Media did is that you can now also Scrobble from your iPhone...so all music played there gets transmitted to Last.FM.  Good times!

Apple iTunes Genius Playlists 

What's next on the discussion list?  How about Apple's new Genius Playlist functionality.  Personally, I'm not a fan of this and have explained why in this article.  They do, however, work great for certain types of music libraries (i.e. those where you enjoy all the music in your library).  For me, I have too many full albums that I only like a few songs from...and unfortunatly Genius includes songs I've ranked 1 or 2 in it's "intelligent" recommendations.  I digress...on to the beauty of it.

Aside from a fantasic marketing tool for Apple (lookie, more music for me to buy from you!) it actually does work great for many.  You can select a song and it will create a new playlist of similar music for you, based on that particular song you've selected.  As well, as mentioned, it will also provide you with a list of similar music you do not own...can preview...and then quickly purchase if you wish.  Of course, this is built right into iTunes and works nicely for most.

MusicIP Mixer

MusicIP, and their Mixer Product is more of an unknown...but I've grown to like the application.  Since I have issues with iTunes Genius Playlists (really, I wouldn't use MusicIP Mixer if I didn't) it plays the part of creating similar-song playlists based on my selections.  Then, I import these into iTunes and other systems.  The problem here, similarly to Genius, is that MusicIP Mixer typically isn't aware of your ratings and will mix songs you don't like or even hate into it's playlists.  Since I've been using this for nearly a year now (well before Genius was released), I spent some time developing a little bit of software to take my iTunes ratings and merge them with the MusicIP playlists in order to create playlists that actually have similar music that I like.  Yes, more than what the average bear can tackle...I know.  But, it's worked for me. 

Regardless, it's a fairly worthwhile application that may prove benefical to those who don't use iTunes, don't rate music, and just want something to analyze their music and provide recommendations.  As well, it allows you to select a song, album, or artist...where Genius only allows you to select a song.  So, there are benefits.  It also has a very nice API for you developers who want to mess around with it's capabilities within your own applications.

Conclusion

Not sure I really have a conclusion here, or that this was meant to be a conclusive article.  But, I needed a header to separate from the last bit...so there ya have it.  I do enjoy the direction media manipulation is going in, especially when it comes to music.  I'm not a fan of manually creating playlists...never have, actually.  Finally, folks are writing software that is intuitive enough to play the right music for me.  Are any of the solutions perfect?  Certainly not for everyone...but many of the solutions hit the mark for many of us.  Some, in combination, really close the gap.

Logo/Image Credits: Apple iTunes, MusicIP, Last.FM, Pandora, Simplify Media

Whether or not you're a fan of the movie Minority Report (or Tom Cruise, for that matter), you're going to love what you see here.  This article was sparked by some new technology from a company called Oblong Industries.  Apparently, many of the founders of this organization were involved in the making of the movie and have decided to make the incredibly cool user interface from the movie into reality.

The user interface is quite elegant and (of course) the movie makes it appear easy to interact with.  The surprising thing is, the real version looks just as easy to manipulate.  What's the core interface comprised of?  You standing in front of any number of screens moving your hands around, making jestures, pointing, etc. 

So, this is a discussion on Graphical User Interface (GUI), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and any other buzz-phrase / acronym you can come up with to describe how we interact with virtual worlds and environments.  I've always been a proponent of something outside of the stale keyboard and mouse standard we're all tied into.  To quote a close friend Jack Bell, "There's got to be a better way."  I believe that there are better ways today, and very soon, there will be incredibly better ways.

We've seen some major steps forward in touch and multi-touch technology via the Apple iPhone and Microsoft's Surface technologies.  This has certainly sparked development in the User Interface (UI) industry, but I don't see it as the holy grail.  What might that holy grail look like today?  Likely no single item you'll see in this article, but possibly a combination of them...working together to provide us a seamless and intuitive ability to interact with the machines and virtual worlds we rely on today.

Are you a hand-talker?  This might just be the inteface for you!  Unless, of course, you're trying to navigate and talk at the same time.  <chuckle>  The first video I'm sharing is the inspiration for this post, and is truly cutting edge when it comes to UI.

I recommend you view this in full screen to get the full effect (button on the bottom right of the video).

Another popular technology getting a fair amount of attention is Microsoft's Surface.  The video is long, and a little slow in the beginning (marketing blab), but this is a great video that shows off some of the possibilities this technology has. 

The next two videos aren't so much directly about a human interacting with a computer, but are more about computers being smart enough to adjust to our environment which is certainly quite important in the ultimate UI experience.  This first video shows how a projector can automatically calculate a screen to match where the screen is...wherever it is.

This next video is very similar, and shows how we might be able to use similar technologies for virtual newspapers (foldable!) and other dynamic surfaces.

Another very important aspect is how we organize our data within this new interface.  We could have the most incredibly evolved way to interact with a computer, but if we can't find anything because how we store the information we need is clunky then our inteface is useless.  This is a novel desktop replacement idea that has some slick ideas. 

I found this video interesting because is shows a cheap and easy way to track head location and movement using a Wii remote and receiver.  Pretty amazing what this guy is able to do by re-using existing (and affordable) technologies.

Finally, this is yet another great video showing the ability for a computer system to track humans or items in the real world, and project information based on those real-world items. 

Image Credit:  20th Century Fox

In one of my previous articles prior to the election, I made mention of whether or not the great business leaders of the United States would step up to the governmental plate and bring this country back on track.  Whether or not you like his views, political stance, experience, background, or anything else about him...you have to admit that President Elect Obama knows how to rally a people.  This man certainly knows how to get his ideas out there, spread the word, and communicate with the world at large.  This type of communication alone has the ability to attract the attention of those with the abilities to bring stability back to this country.  Anyone that knows me knows that I'm cautiously optimistic about many things of this magnitude, but this alone is a great first step.

Below is the first of (what will apparently be) a weekly video address via YouTube:

The other day I ran across an incredible video on Vimeo (will share video in an upcoming post...don't want to spoil it!)  In doing so, I realized that I needed to post it on my blog...since I'd already written a YouTube Extension / Plug-In for BlogEngine.NET, I decided to modify this to work for Vimeo and publish it as well.  Enjoy!

Yet again, I should give some credit to Sean Blakemore's Silverlight Extension, since that is what I based my YouTube Extension on.

Version history at end of this post.

So, installation is quite easy:

1. Take this ZIP file - VimeoPlayer.zip (1.39 kb) - and extract the VimeoPlayer.cs file into your /App_Code/Extensions folder within the root of your BlogEngine installation.
2. Log into the "Extensions" portion of your admin panel, you should see the VimeoPlayer extension.
3. Click the Edit link to change settings.  NOTE: You do not need to modify these settings if you don't want, you can skip to step 4.
   • Width and Height are set to the default Vimeo size, but I actually run mine at a larger setting of 600 x 338.
   • Make sure you keep this "aspect ratio" of 400 x 225.  Meaning, the default ratio of 400 / 225 = 1.7778.  My new ratio of 600 / 338 = 1.775 (pretty close).  This will assure that you display wide-screen format in case the Vimeo video you imbed is Hi-Definition content.
4. Create a new entry and add this code to your blog to insert a Vimeo video:  [ vimeo:YourVideoCodeGoesHere ]  (without the spaces).
   • Note that the "YourVideoCodeGoesHere" part is typically random numbers.  You can see them in the URL of your Vimeo video.

Below is an example of a Standard-Definition (SD) video, as well as a High-Definition (HD) video. 

That being said, the code entered for these two videos are [ vimeo:1098984 ] and [ vimeo:1674177 ]
(minus the spaces)

The SD video looks like this:

The HD video looks like this: 

Enjoy!

=================
VERSION HISTORY
=================

11.15.08
Version 1.0, first release
VimeoPlayer.zip (1.39 kb)

Having just got back from a trip to San Jose to meet with a number of my new CenterBeam team members, I decided to plow through my Google Reader and have a look at some of the starred items I've been tagging over the past couple of weeks.  In doing so, I've found a few nuggets that I felt should be shared.  Thus, "Nothing to See Here" has been born.  Hopefully, the title won't live up to it's name.

1. Frustration-Free Packaging - Amazon Launches a multi-year plan to allow you to easily get to the products you've ordered.  Not only this, but they promise to make the packaging environmentally friendly.  Recall the last time you picked up a piece of electronics, toy, or other goodie from the store?  Recall the fact that you flat-out can NOT open it with your own two hands due to the hard clear plastic with the kung-fu grip welding job along the edges?  Amazon to the rescue.  Someone tell me why it's taken this long for someone to get this misery removed from our lives?  This alone makes me want to buy everything from Amazon.  Thank-you!
2. How secure is your password?  How long would it take a brute force attack to compromise your security?  Use this Excel spreadsheet to find out!  I was shocked by some of my passwords, both in good and bad ways.  Time to make some adjustments where needed!  You might want to read the tab that has instructions, as there are two ways to enter information about the structure of your password.
3. Thriller as a 64-Voice Acapella - You've really got to appreciate the time and effort that went into the creation of this.  Truly amazing.  Make sure you check out the clothing used for the Vincent Price voice-over at the end...classic.  I wish I had that kind of time on my hands!
4. Windows Azure - Hmm, this may be an interesting topic for later...
5. CIO.com offers a nice glance at some upcoming technologies.  Some of the 15 that stuck out for me: Memristors, GPU shifts, USB 3.0, wireless power, a theoretical Google Desktop, better interaction with your TV.  They also offer an entertaining look at their own "predictions we've gotten right" as well as "predections we've gotten wrong" at the end of the article.
6. LinkedIn steps up to the Social Networking plate with Applications.  I'm a fan of the BlogLink application, so I can show my blog posts on my LinkedIn page.  Theoretically, it's supposed to show you blogs from your contacts as well, but I've yet to really see that working correctly.  Either way, cheers to them for building the framework.  While you're at it, have a look at My LinkedIn Profile.
7. Guns N' Roses (I should say, Axl Rose) released a single to radio a few weeks back from the Chinese Democracy album.  Has anyone actually heard this yet?  Amazingly I haven't, considering I used to go to their concerts before anyone even knew who they were.  I've not been dialed into radio much lately, but I assume that since I'm not hearing it constantly in typical beat-a-dead-horse radio fashion...that it must suck.  Frankly, I hope I don't like it because Guns N' Roses doesn't theoretically exist any more.  <grin>  On a side note...if you're looking for a read, Slash's Autobiography was surprisingly entertaining.  EDIT: Looks like going to the main website (linked earlier) allows you to listen to the song.  I'm not overly disappointed in my desire to not like it.  Meh.
8. Finally, a glimpse at Windows 7.  So far, I really like what I see and am excited to get my hands on it.  From what it sounds like, usability and speed were the main focus for this new operating system and I'm amazed (and happy) to hear all the positive feedback on-line about it.  Below are some videos displaying the functionality.  I think I'll be quite entertaining to see how Apple chooses to market against this.

A good video of the new interface and usability changes including the new peek feature

Another shot of the peek and jump lists features

Windows Live Maps tied to touch gestures

Likely a 3rd party application, but nicely done regardless.

Image Courtesy: SouthPark

Every four years I have the same moment of bewilderment.  It's that moment when I go on line (or digging through my mail) to figure out where it is I'm supposed to vote.  Every time, I'm told the same thing: "Some Random Person's Garage".

In this day and age, in a world full of technology...I'm awestruck by the fact that we still commandeer thousands of garages across the nation in order to cast the vote of millions of United States Citizens.

Ya know what?  I LOVE THIS.

Every time I say that I'm going to sign up for an absentee ballot the next time, but I don't.  Every time I say to myself that we'll have technology in place that will allow us all to vote on-line next time around, but we don't.  The fact is, I may never choose these quick-and-easy options because I love walking 0.2 miles to my neighbor's garage to cast my vote for the next President of these United States.  To me, that is an amazing thing.  The fact that these votes all get gathered, organized, tallied, and slapped up on our TV screens within such a short period of time is equally amazing.

There's something about this grass roots voting process that brings me back to my youth, to the days of crayons, neighborhood gatherings, doing things manually, and getting the community together to rally around something so monumental.  We still do this.  A nation of 305+ Million people.  We vote in garages.  We vote in VFW's.  We vote in apartment lobbies.  We vote wherever we can find a willing host with room for voters.

Amazing.  Now run to your local garage and cast your vote!