Posted in Personal by MB on 05/31/08
Back when tax returns came out I did myself a little favor and upgraded to OS X 10.5 and purchased an AppleTV (Thanks institution of marriage!)
The AppleTV is a great toy. I purchased the smaller one (hard drive). Since the appliance connects to 5 computers on your home network, there’s really no reason to have a giant hard drive. Any media you want to access gets streamed right over.
Renting movies and buying TV shows on demand is nice. And yes, I’m fully aware that I payed $299 for the privilege of spending more money from the convenience of my couch. I hate cable providers with a fiery burning passion. I am happy to give money to Netflix and iTunes. The on-demand model is perfect for me, because I want what I want when I want it and that’s all I want. And, I’m happy to pay for that. Comcast and their dirty brethren have yet to understand that. They are still trying to float a “you’ll take what we give you on our terms” business model. My magic 8-ball says that strategy is doomed in the near-ish future.
The more I think about it, the subscription entertainment model is pretty flawed. If you have a job, and you’re not a vampire, there’s only so much time in the day you could possibly be watching television. When I get home from my day job I like to do things like fix up a martini, cook dinner, seduce my wife, and work on my little projects. Sometimes we like to sit and watch a show or two. It’s just dumb to pay a large monthly fee for junk piped into your home that you aren’t even home to watch. And I don’t like TV that much anyway. The only exceptions I can think of are news junkies (barf - cable news is trash) and sports fans. (In fact one of my friends back east signs up for cable just long enough each year to watch the ACC Tournament.)
But, I digress.
The surprising thing about the AppleTV is how much I use it as a stereo. I haven’t had a ‘real’ stereo system for years. I either listen to my iPod/iPhone or plug speakers into the computer.
Why, no. I’m not an audiophile. I like music.
Plugged into my TV’s audio system the sound is good, and it’s really cool to see a giant picture of the album cover and the track info swooshing around on the screen.
I’m liking OS 10.5, Leaping Leopard, quite a bit. I bought it for one feature only and that’s Time Machine. I had cobbled together an Automater Script with rsync to do a weekly back up of my hard drive to an external drive and it worked OK, but Time Machine beats it simply because it’s automated and hides in the background.
I have found some odd behavior in a few places. The RSS feed counters in Safari (which indicate how many unread articles are waiting for you in a news feed) gets all out of whack sometimes. You can view an article, and the counter will not update. Odd. This worked fine in previous versions.
Also, there is an annoying inconsistency in iTunes’ behavior. For example, in Mail, if you click and drag a message or selection of messages to a closed folder it pops open so you can drop items in the folder below. Same is true in the Finder. iTunes doesn’t do this however. If you want to drag items into a playlist, and your playlist list is closed, iTunes just sits there. Mocking you.
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