I wanted to ensure the world that I’m still alive. I haven’t had much time in the past couple of years. Life is dramatically different for me now, and it is amazing! I am now a father to a beautiful little girl, and no longer work for Michigan State University. I have moved down the street to TechSmith Corporation where we are most famous for making Camtasia and SnagIt.
I will be posting more soon.
After a long hiatus, I have decided to share the details of one of my favorite projects. I have always loved music, movies and technology so what better way to enjoy all of these by creating a home media player.
Finding The Right Tools:
I’ve been connecting computers to TVs since before the days of Windows Media Center in order to be able to watch internet only streams, play music, and watch movies. During this time I’ve experimented with a number of programs, both commercial and open source. Until around four years ago they were all lacking in some way. They either had a beautiful user interface, but lacked capability and compatibility or they were highly capable power houses with an awful user interface. Then a friend and co-worker introduced me to Xbox Media Center (XBMC.)
In it’s early days XBMC ran on the original Xbox if you had a mod-chip. I’ve never been a big gamer, so this was completely foreign to me as I never had an Xbox. Before getting a PS2 for Christmas around 2004 or 2005 my last gaming system was a Super Nintento. My friend Rob and I both shared a passion for home entertainment and tech, and he spoke extremely highly about XBMC to the point that I had to check it out. Rob was nice enough to give me an old Xbox that was nearly dead that he had laying in his basement and I got online and ordered a mod chip and set forth to do some good old hardware hacking. Eventually I got everything installed and loaded up XBMC and was delighted to find that everything Rob said was true.
It fit all of my criteria:
So, I was delighted (and still am) to have a home media center that met and exceeded all of my wants and needs. In summer of 2010 however I had another need added to the list. The ability to playback HD content.
The old Xbox did a fine job of playing back standard definition media, and when I got my HDTV I was pleased to find it would even up convert it to either 720p or 1080i. However the old Intel Celeron processor that drove the original Xbox just didn’t have the horsepower to handle the playback of true 1080p HD content.
Enter the Acer Aspire Revo and XBMC Live.
Building the Box & System:
Rob and I continued to share notes on our experiences with XBMC over the years, and we found an excellent writeup in Lifehacker on how to build a very inexpensive and powerful XMBC box. Check it out here.
This was right up my alley. It would allow me to continue using XBMC (which had blossomed into versions for Windows, Mac and Linux by this time) while giving me the ability to have true 1080p playback, up conversion and viewing. All for less than $250 in hardware.
The Lifehacker article does an excellent job explaining how to actually build up the machine, so I’m not going to duplicate that, but what I will share is a few tips from my experience.
First a little background about my home media setup. I have a Panasonic P50 G20 Plasma screen. One of the things I noticed early on about this TV was that even though it has three HDMI input ports and digital optical (SPDIF) out, it will not pass the surround sound signal across the HDMI / SPDIF. This was a bummer since I have a very old Sony audio receiver from around 1997 or 1998. The only video source it knows about is composite, and it has one digital optical and one digital coax input. This meant I had to figure out how to both do video and audio switching (since I couldn’t use my TV for it, which was the original plan) and figure out how to demux the audio signal coming across the HDMI out from my fancy new Acer XBMC box.
My friend Rob pointed me toward earlier version of this, which was perfect. One of the things I always want to do is make it easy to operate my home theatre, so rather than having to switch between multiple sources on multiple devices I wanted to use this new switch to handle everything. So I found these devices to convert all of my component sources to HDMI.
With these components and some inexpensive (and excellent quality) HDMI cables also scored from Monoprice, now I had all of the components necessary to get everything connected. I brought the component output + SPDIF of my PS2, and my AT&T Uverse box into the HDMI converters. Then HDMI out from those, plus HDMI from the Acer into the Switcher. Then from the switcher I feed a single HDMI cable up to my TV, and a single SPDIF optical cable down to my receiver.
Now after, some remote control programming, you simply select the input number of the device you want to watch from the switcher’s small credit card remote, sit back and enjoy. Perhaps someday I’ll invest in one of the Harmony remotes and reduce down from five remotes to one, but for the time being I’m happy to be able to control the entire system from my couch.
Looking Ahead:
Now that Apple has released the Apple TV2 for the price point of $99 and XBMC has a version that works on iOS and the ATV2, I am anxious to get my hands on one of these devices and see how it works. Unfortunately I don’t see this as a replacement for my Acer setup, because at the present time the Apple TV can only output a max of 720p. If I ever get a second HDTV for my bedroom or elsewhere in the house, you can bet you’ll be reading an article about my experience with XBMC on ATV2.
I recently have been helping one of my clients work through the transition from a PC to a Mac and they have run into some troubles with the interface of the Mac Mail application and their Gmail account. In helping explain some of the issues I came up with what I thought may be a useful explanation of my personal methodology for e-mail, and specifically Gmail.
Some Background on Gmail:
– With Gmail, the original logic is “keep everything.”
— That isn’t entirely valid these days with the huge amount of junk
mail that is out there.
– My methodology for Gmail is:
— Delete the junk, archive anything that could remotely be worth keeping.
– Each message within Gmail fits into one (and only one) of the
following categories:
— Inbox
— Archived
— Sent
— Trash
— Spam
— Draft
– Each message within Gmail also has the following status:
— Read
— Unread
— Labeled (can have multiple labels associated)
— Not Labeled
— Starred
– Gmail is great for organizing your archived messages because unlike
traditional e-mail clients (Outlook, Mac Mail, GroupWise etc.) you can file messages in “multiple folders” at the same time by associating multiple labels to messages.
– The way Gmail presents itself to other systems (via POP3, IMAP, or ActiveSync) is that each “label” is treated like a folder.
My Version of the “Inbox Zero” Methodology:
To keep your e-mail manageable I recommend the following work-flow:
– Try to keep your Inbox as small as possible. I personally strive to
keep it at zero.
– Create a label structure that works for you. Some people create
structures based upon sender, some by date, and others by subject / project. I am “a project person.”
– As a message comes in either:
— Act upon the message. (read, reply / whatever)
or
— Flag it for follow-up later. (I use the star feature for this.)
– Once you have acted upon or flagged the message, do the following:
— Assign the appropriate labels (if multiple) then archive it.
or
— Move it to the appropriate label / folder if it only fits into one category.
This work flow has worked for me for a number of years and helps keep
my inbox clean. This allows for a quick sync to my devices connected to that account.
I personally use Google’s web interface for interaction with my Gmail
account whenever possible. The only time I use something else is via
my iPhone or iPad. The methodology above can be easily modified for use with any e-mail system by dropping the star and label specific
stuff and replacing it with something like “marking as unread” and “moving to folders.”
When to Act vs. Follow-up?
I start my day by addressing messages that have come in overnight. The metric I use for immediate action vs. follow-up is: “Can I wrap this up within five minutes? – or – Is this an urgent issue?” Once my Inbox has hit zero, I move on to the follow-up queues.
As I work through my day, I keep coming back to check-in on the Inbox at a pretty regular interval. Most “desk days” it’s every hour or two. Each time I look at it I use the same metric for evaluating messages.
Toward the end of my work day I wrap up current projects or at least get them to a stopping point. Then I take the time to go back to my Inbox work it down to zero before I leave that day.
This allows me to keep an eye during non-working hours on messages that push out to my phone. During this time, unless it is an emergency it stays in the Inbox until the morning “evaluation.”
Being a busy person, I have found this method to keep me on top of my game at work and on personal projects and still allow me to relax and walk away from it without feeling guilty at the end of the day.
Well it only took me 11 years, but I’ve finally decided to move my digital presence firmly into the 21st Century and have officially started my blog.
I’m still learning the finer points of WordPress so please bear with me as I do some experimentation and tweaking over the forthcoming weeks. 🙂
Paul Donahue 