My latest issue with them resulted in more than a week of technical issues and wasted time. It was only resolved when I moved my domain to a different company. I was further irritated when they billed me for the domain, that had been transferred to another company a month earlier, and forced me to fill in a form and fax it across the continent to be reimbursed.

A word of advice for 1&1 customers trying to setup or change GLUE (nameserver IPs) for their domain. After making changes to your subdomains ns1 and ns2.yourdomain.com, you must go into the settings for yourdomain.com and click “update” to start the update process. Otherwise nothing will happen and your GLUE will not be updated, and sometimes even this doesn’t work. Best of luck.

Look. I’m not one to complain about paying for things. I understand that nothing is free, and someone is paying for services I use even if they don’t cost me anything. But this is 2010 and TV listings are everywhere. I can go to canada.com and get listings for free, or stop at the gas station and grab a TV Guide for free (this is same company that’s making us pay for EPG). Forcing us to fork over $19.95 USD just so we can use the listings in EyeTV is absolutely ridiculous. Its not a huge expense, but the irritation of the whole process just puts me off.

Making the situation worse is that most Canadian cable providers encrypt their digital channels. So even with the listings I can still only watch and record in standard definition. The experience is just dismal in comparison to what’s available in the US (for almost nothing or nothing at all). I won’t be purchasing a subscription. Best wishes for those of you who decide to get one.

If anyone is considering creating Canadian EPG alternative, please contact me and I will provide help and server resources.

My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.

 1) AppleTV

The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.

• Initial cost
• File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
• Limited configurability/tweaking
• No support for SDTVs

These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.

2) Tiger + ATV4mac

Because I already have an unused Mac mini, this option removes the up front cost of running my media center. AT4mac is a really cool project that lets you run the Apple TV OS as an application on any intel Mac running Tiger. It requires OS X 10.4 because the Apple TV OS is based on the older version, and it turns out that installing Tiger on my mini was the most difficult step. I installed Perian to cover those missing formats and picked up an Apple DVI to Video converter to connect to the television. Audio went through a headphone to composite adapter directly into the receiver. The procedure to get ATV4mac up and running was quick and painless. Afterwards I was able to sync, stream and play with my media flawlessly. All the functions of the Apple TV were present and functional. 

The problem is, once again, that I’m using an SDTV (See update below). While the ATV4mac brings down the resolution, it still has a widescreen ratio. This means the right most 1/4 of the picture is cut off. By using this solution I avoided all the issues surrounding the Apple TV except for the problem related to my SDTV. 

3) Leopard + Front Row

Until an HDTV enters the equation, it looks like the Apple TV route isn’t the way to go. The next obvious solution is Front Row. I had problems with Front Row on Tiger crashing, so I reinstalled Leopard on the mini and chose some tools to make things work. 

I installed Perian again, and I also got a copy of Sofa Control. It lets you do almost anything you can do with your mouse and keyboard right from your Apple Remote. Then I installed Syncopation. This little app is idea for our project. It connects to iTunes libraries on the network and automatically merges them into to one. All the media can then be played in Front Row. Its pretty slick, but I’m disappointed that there isn’t a free alternative. I’d really like to sync remote iTunes libraries just like you can an Apple TV. You can’t buy or rent content directly from Front Row either, and there’s also the missing YouTube and Flickr access. This solution is less than perfect, but at least it works without cutting off the screen.  

In conclusion I have to say none of these solutions turned out to be all I hoped for. The good news I can watch video and play my music, even if the process to do those is convoluted. I hope that someone finds a better solution or that I get an HDTV, and I’ll update this story once one of those things happens.

Update: I found a solution (SwitchResX) to the ATV4mac / SDTV problem. I’ll provide a tutorial soon outlining how to get your intel Mac and old SDTV to work together.

Here are some complaints I’ve heard:

• I don’t like the new wall
• I can’t see all the stuff on my profile now
• I can’t find x or x, and I don’t know where x went
• Its too wide and theirs too much whitespace

At first I was complaining too. When I stopped and looked at the changes objectively, however, I realized that all of these complaints were drop dead stupid. The new wall is an improvement, it consolidates the massive amounts of information people share on Facebook into one easy to read cornucopia of awesomeness.

The Facebook developers took out all the boxes that applications made and put them on their own tabs. They’re still easily accessible, but without having to scroll for decades or wait an inexplicably long time for profiles to load.

People are having problems finding things because they’re still thinking about the original interface. Let go. Approaching the site as if you had never visited makes it easy to figure out, its really well laid out if you forget about the weird conventions of the old UI.

The width makes way for new, better ways to organize information on Facebook pages. It also allows for that whitespace, which we really should love. Most people prefer living and working in open and clutter-free enviorment, so why not Facebooking? 

The reason comes back to what I was talking about before, the status quo. People are used to the old Facebook, they like the old Facebook. Some have even vowed to stop using the site over the change. Its time to forget all that hate and move on.

You know what I hate? Junk mail. And starvation. And cancer.

The problem I had with the old Apple keyboard was just how easily it became dirty. All too often a hair would show up underneath the transparent acrylic, or a smudge on the white surface. I found myself cleaning it often and it became an irritation. Another problem I had with the acrylic keyboards was that they crapped out at a considerably high rate. Out of the three I owned, two stopped working for no apparent reason. Needless to say after these experiences, I became skeptical of these ‘pro’ keyboards.

In this case however, the good does out weigh the bad. My experience has been that they’re quiet, require only light taps and feel right under your fingers. This along with other improvements in the latest aluminum generation have persuaded me to stick with Apple keyboards.

I love typing on the MacBook and the next generation brought everything I like about it to my desk. Unfortunately, like my MacBook, they also chopped off the numeric pad on the wireless version. I was disappointed to see this when the keyboards were announced, but after using it for a number of months I have to say it was a worthwhile sacrifice. I can move the keyboard without feeling like I’m waving a tire iron around, its nice that it fits almost anywhere in my workspace. The media keys are also very handy, I wish they could have activated them on my MacBook. Battery life is impressive. A number of months after the purchase (with moderate daily use) there’s still more than a half charge left in the included batteries.

In fact, I don’t have a single gripe about the keyboard itself. It looks great, it works great and it does everything a keyboard should. The big problem here is price. In case you’re wondering, the notorious Apple Tax does apply, the wireless keyboard will run you an astounding $80 when buying directly from Apple. That said, I got lucky and conned a Best Buy employee into selling me one for only $60 after taxes. If you play your cards right at the store, or shop on eBay or Craigslist, you should be able to find yourself an affordable Apple keyboard. I think you’ll like it too.