Results tagged “howto” from karlo.org

Out here in LA I tend to watch less television than I did before, view more feature-length films (especially because I’m working on projects related to the industry) and drive a whole lot more.

Last week I had my high speed modem installed, but I decided not to subscribe to cable television, which saves me about $100 a month in service fees. Instead, I’m going to try using a Mac Mini, along with a number of parts and accessories, as a home media center that depends on the Internet, and eventually Over-the-Air (OTA) digital broadcast television, to satisfy my video entertainment needs.

I want the system to take care of the following tasks:

• Play from streaming media sites such as Hulu and Netflix
• Play DVDs and downloaded video from services like iTunes
• Play edited HD home movies to the television, in HD
• Provide an easy-to-use interface to my MP3 collection and streaming audio online

I also require that it:

• Be stable as a rock. Never crash. I want continuous uptime measured in months, broken only by the need to restart to install a system update.
• Have minimum maintenance and upkeep - this in particular is why I am using a Mac over Windows, it reduces update hassles and hardware compatibility headaches. I want an appliance, in essence, not another system to babysit.
• Be quiet. No loud fans - I’m looking at you, Xbox 360.
• Conserve energy. At 13 watts, the Mini burns far less power than my Tivo HD and Cable Box used to.

As I work my way through the process, I’ll continue to extend this post with relevant information and links to the parts and software I’m using.

Yeah, there's solid ground on this Amazon archipelago. It's just 50 feet underwater right now. Mind that first step with your $5000 worth of camera gear.

Almost all of my photography is urban or indoors - these are a few tips gleaned from my recent vacation down to the Rio Negro in Brazil, in the Amazon rain forest. You may find them useful if you're a semi-serious photographer planning a trip to a tropical, non-beach destination.

(This is an extended version of an email I wrote to one of the local tech mailing lists here in New York, in response to a developer's question. It seemed generally useful enough that I'm reposting it here.)

A very common design problem in web services project these days is the issue of user search. Most web services now involve pools of data that are far too large to be entirely "browseable", even if we're only talking about finding another user on the service. Very quickly you start to see a specification develop of increasing complexity, involving boolean ("AND/OR") concepts, keywords, and all kinds of other demands targeted at extremely precise results tailored very exactly to the knowledge domain or data set. What's the best way to go about building this user experience?

If you own or manage a small-to-medium-sized business with a somewhat web-savvy customer base, you’ve probably already thought about using Twitter to promote your offerings. I’ve talked with a number of small business owners who started Twitter accounts for their companies but were disappointed with the results. Here’s a few suggestions on how to improve your success with Twitter, and some issues you should consider before putting time into Twittering.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a key concept for any business, but it's especially important for Internet sites where there is a daily decision to be made about how much to pay for user acquisition and at what point advertising becomes too expensive to be profitable. Seth Godin made the very valid point earlier this month that online, the idea of an "advertising budget" is nonsensical: either an ad campaign produces positive ROI by creating customer value that exceeds the cost of customer acquisitions, and you run that campaign until the cows come home, or it doesn't and you don't run it at all.

Crucial to that concept is coming up with some kind of metric for what a customer is worth to you. The basic concept is that the average acquired customer will make a certain number of purchases (or view a certain number of ad-supported pages) before they leave due to attrition or competition. By figuring out how much profit a user will generate, we can estimate how much we should be paying to acquire them.

As much as I love posting my photos here on my blog and on Flickr, I find that I get a lot more out of them when I have them properly printed, framed and hung in my house. I moved into my current apartment in July but I'm just now getting around to hanging a whole new set of photos on the wall. Part of the fun is changing out most if not all of the images when I move to a new place.

You'd think it would be a trivial project to hang a couple of photos on the wall. But I learned this morning that things can get a little more complicated when you're trying to hang a group in an orderly fashion.

Here's what I found out the hard way, maybe it will help you avoid my mistakes:

• Hang the middle photo first, then place the other photos by seeing how they look with that center photo placed.
• If you're marking the horizontal location for that center photo with tape, make sure your dog doesn't eat the tape while you're facing away.
• If you're hanging for people who will view the photos standing, hang with the center 60 inches off the ground. Especially pay attention to this rule if you're taller than normal -- if you try to eyeball it, you're going to be too high. Mine are at 62 inches and I still think they're probably a little too high.
• If you have vertical and horizontal photos, put the hook for the vertical photos higher by exactly half the amount the longer dimension extends past the shorter (i.e., for 11x14 frames, 3/2 inches). Sounds obvious, but it will save you time versus eyeballing it.
• Use picture wires behind the frames rather than the built-in hanging holes. But don't put much slack in the wires... if they get enough upwards angle, they may start dragging the frame clips up the inside of the frame.
• Measure twice... then measure again. Once you've marked the location of the outside pictures, re-measure their distance to the nail or hook for the middle frame, or measure across both and see if the middle matches up with that nail. I found an error of about 1/2 inch when I did this.

(And for the record, the leftmost photo in this image is definitely not one of mine. It's a famous photographer - points for anyone who knows who it is.)

Worried about getting your Xbox hooked up to your broadband connection so you can run Xbox live? Avoid running ethernet across half your house by connecting your Xbox to your wireless network (you do have a wireless network, right?)

I've managed to get Xbox Live connected wirelessly using a Linksys WET11 wireless ethernet bridge. Works great. There are only two tricks (and I believe not knowing about them is why people are saying this won't work.)

1. You can't use DHCP (automatic IP configuration.) You'll need to manually set the IP on both the WET11 and the Xbox. Yeah, it's a pain but it's a one-time thing.
2. Get the WET11 connected and working with a computer, then transfer the setings to the Xbox. This isn't necessary, but it saves time.

Now all I have to do is find time to actually play... there does seem to be a few open slots in my schedule in late December or so... sigh.

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February 4, 2009 Update

If you're working on a way to connect your Xbox or Xbox 360 to a wireless network, you should probably consider using the Linksys WET54G rather than the now-discontinued WET11. The WET54G will work with the faster new types of Wifi (except for the N standard.) If you want a solution compatible with a Wireless-N type network, try their dual-band N game adapter for a few more dollars.

I know that Microsoft now sells a USB wifi adapter for the Xbox 360 but there are a number of advantages to using an ethernet to wireless bridge. First of all, it will work with any or all of your ethernet devices, not just the Xbox - so if you have other devices connected to your TV that need Internet, like a Tivo, you can also use them with these bridges (having more than one hooked up simultaneously may require a simple ethernet hub, but those are cheap, unlike the Microsoft adapter.) And unlike the Microsoft or Tivo wifi adapters, you won't have to buy a new one if you later change to a different game console or DVR. I bought my Linksys WET11 seven years ago, for my original Xbox, and I still use it for other applications long after giving away the console. If I had bought a dedicated wifi adapter, I'd have thrown it out a long time ago. Also, if you use the bridge, you only have to configure and maintain one wifi client rather than one for each device, which is less hassle.