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EyeTV expands to EyeHome

EyeHome is a new magic box that streams photos, music, video, and movies from your mac to your TV. I only does MPEG and DivX, so quicktime or raw DV output from iMovie won’t work. It comes with a remote and all the standard home theater hookups, and looks like it has all the features most other media centers have, except it uses Apple’s rendezvous network protocol to share media files from macs.

Their EyeTV line looks like it has expanded with a model for regular tv, one for digital satellite, one for HDTV over the air broadcasts, and all sporting firewire interfaces and the ability to dump recordings to DVD. The HDTV one looks the most interesting, I’d love to know what kind of storage and processor is required to record much hi-def content. [PVRblog]

This is cool stuff… I like the look of the EyeHome, and think it would be cool to beam home movies and pictures to the TV when company comes over. The addition of the EyeTV for HDTV would be excellent as well though only using the terrestrial signals is a drag. Our HD signal comes through cable and without that, the main convenience is I would not have to dump to VCR (which I don’t do) to then burn to DVD. I’d love to burn TV and Movies to DVD…

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The challenges of synching

I predicted the other day that synching would appear in lots of newsreaders in 2004. (Some have it already, yes, but they don’t have it as I’ve defined it below.)

A good question would be: why isn’t synching already a feature of every newsreader already? It can’t be that hard, right—just read and write from a file somewhere that two copies of your newsreader can access. [inessential.com]

Aggregator Sync will be what IMAP is to mail. Being able to move seamlessly between clients (mobile, desktop, laptop, platform, etc…) and maintain an already read and to keep list will be very worth the wait.

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Mobile Surfing…

While on the go, it’s nice to know that you can still stay connected with more than email if need be. For this, I highly recommend that you bookmark PDAPortal.us which lists hundreds of sites ready to be linked to with a PDA browser. You can of course use this as a starting point for custom AvantGo or Plucker channels as well, but I’ve found that browsing live over GPRS is quite simple and manageable.

Written while listing to — Tenacious D “Double Team” from Tenacious D .

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

We had a nice quiet night at home…cooked a nice dinner and watched the ball drop.

Looking ahead to this year is exciting — many changes await around the next corner. I can’t wait!

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But how much will I have to pay for the pleasure…

In the next year, not one, but two shopping magazines will begin publishing what they hope will function as catalogs. [New York Times: Business]

In my mind this is ridiculous. I think these magazines and Lucky for women would be better off as consumer controlled circulation issues. Why do I want to pay for this?? It’s like buying the sharper image catalog at the newsstand. Well Sony does sell their SonyStyle magalog… though I would never choose to buy it. They should be giving it away – or paying us to have it with incentives, like discounts for direct purchase.

This is almost as ridiculous as adding actual commercials to movie pre-screen advertainment. This coming year, we’ll be fortunate enough to pay 10.25 for this opportunity in NYC.

As I’ve ranted previously, if you add commercials to premium content, the price should be reduced. HBO does not run commercials for anything other than what you might also enjoy on the network. We should expect the same at the movie theater where it costs as much for one sitting as it does to have 2 premium cable channels added to your bill each month.

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What’s Next…

It’s hard to believe that the end of the year is here already…. so much has happened and there is so much to look forward to. One significant piece of unknown for me, is what’s next career-wise. Since I can’t earn a living as a stay-at-home dad, I need to get this squared away soon. The trick of course is figuring out what to do next.

I’ve worked in a start-up which was exciting and cool, though it was clear (in that case) that the money was not going to be earned by me in the end. I’ve worked for a mid-sized company which was then acquired by a mega-corp, which after many changes eventually led to my current situation. I like the small and mid-size thing… Once you get to the mega-corp, it’s very hard to see your impact, even if you have senior level visibility and responsibility, just given the size of the company and the way things tend not to change.

More to think about certainly…

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Net-based RSS Aggregators

This is an area where there seems to be plenty of action of late. Bloglines, myFeedster, FastBuzz, MyWireService and Kinja coming up. I still use our Info Aggregator, with all the feeds delivered to an IMAP mailbox and which I then read in my mail client. [E M E R G I C . o r g]

No idea why this is such a hot topic to blog on, or why there are so many services coming out. I’ve tried them all and keep coming back to NetNewsWire. I guess I like the read to post in my blog feature too much. I also like the way my feeds are managed into groups.

Ideally, I’d like to see a desktop-webbased-palm system so I could read the same feeds in multiple places, keeping track of course of what was read and unread.