MattMaroon.com

Recently I installed iTunes, because someone I know is doing pretty well with an app and I wanted to check out the app store, and wow. I mean, just wow. Next time I hear someone tell me about how Apple has such great design sense and makes products that just work, I’m just going to respond with "iTunes".

I’ve never had this painful of an experience with software before. I’m pretty sure that using this software for 10 minutes constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I have a quad core machine on an 8 mbps internet connection, yet I click app store and count off over 20 seconds before it loads.

And then, when it finally does, I get this:

(click to enlarge)

After the instant migraine subsided, I decided to try it out as, you know, a media player. I’ve used it before (though that was a couple versions ago) to load iPods. That was exceptionally brutal, because I had a Nano, and iTunes just wasn’t built to sync collections to devices that don’t have enough storage capacity, it was built to sell your grandma a few songs and put them on the player. But I’d never used it to just play.

Well, I still haven’t, because for some reason, it decided it needed to convert most of my files (which are in FLAC or WMA lossless, because I started encoding music long before there was an iTunes) to AAC, pretty much rendering the program unusable, and the rest of my OS nearly so. I had to kill it with Task Manager, but I’m ordering a silver stake off of Amazon just in case this unholy beast comes back from the dead.

I guess I’m just more of an old school Winamp type guy. I don’t need my player to do a bunch of fancy organizing for me, that’s why I have folders. I don’t want it to convert them all to some other format for no apparent reason (which would take days for me) especially when I already have the codecs installed. I thought I disliked the latest version of Windows Media Player, but after iTunes I’m thinking about marrying it.

I really don’t understand why Apple doesn’t do a better job with this. The iPod is still most people’s only contact with Apple products. It’s what draws them into iPhones and, Apple hopes, computers. Why ship this bloated monstrosity to every new customer?

Last year I decided to cancel cable. The reason was that I don’t watch that much TV, but the few shows I do enjoy I found myself downloading, even though I had a DVR, because it’s easier.

I’ve since told a lot of my more technologically-savvy friends about it, and I’m shocked to find that even those who use both Bittorrent and RSS on a daily basis don’t know that you can combine the two, or how wondrous the result is. So I thought I’d write a brief tutorial on how to use Bittorrent RSS, the easy way, to snag all of your favorite shows. (Only get the ones that are legal for you to download of course.)

I’m going to assume you’re using a Bittorrent client that has RSS functionality. My favorite by far is uTorrent (and I’ve tried them all) for Windows. To my knowledge the uTorrent Mac client doesn’t support RSS, and Transmission is a steaming pile, so if you’re an OSX user you might be SOL. Good luck with your Apple TV I guess.

Anyway, step 1 is to find an RSS feed for your show. I recommend tvrss.net. They’ve got the most reliable feeds. You can also use Mininova, but you have to add “&direct” to the end of your feed, and you’re probably going to get frustrated since it’s unmoderated and half the time you’ll discover you got nothing but some .exe file that’s almost certainly a virus.

Once you’ve found your show, choose a distribution group (I like EZTV, but your mileage may vary according to the show) and then right click where it says “Search-based RSS Feed” and copy location. Your clipboard now contains the url. Here’s what it would look like if you wanted to find the show Scrubs:

Now Step 2. Open up uTorrent, and click the RSS icon in the toolbar. You’ll see the UI guys were such geniuses that they automatically pasted your clipboard into the Feed URL box:

I like to give mine a custom alias just so they’re easy to manage in the uTorrent sidebar. Set it to automatically download (because really, what’s the point otherwise?) and click “Use smart episode filter”. Often the show will appear multiple times, but you really only need to download it once.

Click OK and you’re set to go. Every time there’s a new episode of Scrubs, you’ll automatically download it, in HDTV and commercial free.

The bonus to this is that if you set your default directory to one that’s shared publicly on your network you can watch it in any room of your house that has a television or an Xbox 360. For the latter, simply open up the My Videos folder, select the computer it’s on, and play. The shows will all come in in DivX or XviD, so you can’t play them through Media Center.

For bonus points when you travel, use a syncing program like Dropbox or Zumodrive. I actually prefer Zumodrive for this particular application because my laptop has a relatively small (and nearly full) hard drive. Dropbox will automatically put every video file I download into it and fill up my disc, whereas with Zumo it will remain in the cloud until I want to watch it. If storage space isn’t a factor, both work about the same.

To do that, simply go into uTorrent preferences, click “Directories”, and put a check next to “Move completed downloads to:” Aim your downloads at your Zumodrive:

Now you can just watch them on your laptop from the hotel. On my last trip to Las Vegas I was even able to download them from a tethered EVDO connection, where Bittorrenting would have been impossible.

That’s pretty much my media setup. I’ve got my main desktop downloading shows in my home office upstairs. I watch them either there (from my couch) or in my first-floor living room through the Xbox. I’ve got a dirt cheap PC in my exercise room attached to an LCD TV. And when I travel, I’ve got Zumodrive.

I’ve been reading a geeky social news site called Hacker News for a long time, and while I love the community there, my favorite articles are often the non-computer science stuff. And that stuff causes a lot of people to complain that it’s off-topic, which some of it may be, and which in turn annoys everyone else because comments that something is off-topic are themselves off-topic

So, rather than complain, I decided to do something about it and made a new social news site for general interest stories called Non-Hacker News. It’s going to be moderated (lightly I hope) by some people I trust to help keep the site on footing. The rules are, in a nutshell, submit smart stuff and be civil.

The goal is to keep it friendly and objective, while still allowing talk about the things that people often have a hard time remaining friendly and objective about. It’s a lofty goal, but I think with a little light moderation (removal of HuffPo articles or XKCD comics) it can be done.

In the couple days it’s been active, it’s already become one of my favorite sites on the net. There have been 5-10 other people submitting frequently, and something like 70 total people signed up (plus some untold number lurking). The submissions have been great. Here are my 3 favorites so far:

Why Alternative Energy Isn’t. Pretty similar to a blog entry I’ve been meaning to write for awhile (and probably won’t now that he said most of it) about why most forms of alternative energy are going to amount to nothing, and how the one that is going to save us has been around (and neglected) for decades.

Ad Wars: Is High-Fructose Corn Syrup Really Good for You? A neat article that attempts to take an in-depth look at HFCS, the American diet’s latest hobgoblin. As someone who avoids it as much as possible (but not because I think it’s worse for me than the sugar it replaces) I found it doubly interesting.

Schools: Obama stresses more investment, McCain parental choice. An in-depth look at what our two candidates are proposing for the future of our education system. I actually kind of like both of them. Anything is better than No Child Left Behind.

So there you have it. Come on over and join in the conversation.

A few months back I broke down and bought a Mac Mini. My cofounders all use TextMate (Mac only, unfortunately) for coding in, and after watching them it became apparent that if I want to mess around with Rails, OSX is pretty much the only way to go. I’ve also been curious for a while about OSX, though I was a little hesitant about Jaguar, which had just dropped at the time, given that even Apple fanboys were complaining about it incessantly. This is a group of people who would normally shrug it off if Steve Jobs poked them eye with a rusty fork and just say something bad about Microsoft like “well, Outlook 2007 uses the Word HTML rendering engine.” So I figured if they were complaining, there must really be something wrong.

But I was told I could easily downgrade if necessary (in fact, the mini came with the previous release installed and a Leopard CD for upgrading) so I headed on down to the Apple store. That experience was almost enough to make me turn away. A girl with some sort of mullethawk and a tattoo creeping up her neck asked me if I needed help and I almost said “no, but you do.”

After telling them what I was there to purchase, I was directed to the Genius Bar. No joke, they really have something there called the Genius Bar. Luckily for me I hadn’t eaten recently. I don’t think I can endure that much pretentiousness on a full stomach without losing my lunch.

I wasn’t really sure what I’d find there. I figured maybe some physicists sipping martinis and working on their doctoral thesis on string theory. Or maybe Dawkins having a Tom Collins and writing his next treatise on intelligent design. Instead what I found was some douchey twenty-somethings who get paid $9 an hour to help people pick out iPods. Genius Bar? Yeah, you’re fucking Einsteins. “Excuse me Mr. Heisenberg, does this mp3 player have a replaceable battery?”

The “genius” at said “bar” then proceeded to try to sell me so many warranties and miscellaneous accessories with such a high pressure sales pitch that I started to wonder if I hadn’t just accidentally purchased a Ford Focus. I sat there scratching my head, waiting for the manager to come over and negotiate the price with me, and debated whether or not I was willing to go more than 5 percent over invoice or walk out and test drive a Gateway instead.

So I left the Apple store hoping the user experience for the computer would be better. Setting it up definitely was. The Mini is so small and unobtrusive that it’s easy to find room for it on any desk. The power brick is huge, which I found odd since the brick for a Macbook Pro is much smaller, though it seems as if it must use more power. But you can stash it on the floor, so who really cares? Best of all, it’s dead silent, except when there’s a CD or DVD in the drive, and even then it’s not too bad.

It was easy enough to get it started and set up. I played around happily with some of the included apps like iPhoto and iChat, which are much nicer than the crap Windows OEMs typically bloat their installations with, until I ran into my first snag.

Installing programs on OSX is extremely counterintuitive and labor intensive. The whole process is very poorly designed. First you download a dmg file which, when clicked, creates a virtual drive. On the virtual drive is the program, which you then have to drag into your Applications folder. Then you have to unmount the virtual drive and delete the dmg file from your desktop. It sounds laborious here, but it’s far worse when you have no idea what’s going on and are used to Windows, where you simply click the file you downloaded and then click yes or no to answer a question or two.

There’s no way that anyone could guess this procedure, and nobody reads manuals. I thought I had installed Firefox but found out the next day that I had only ran it from its virtual drive. Different installers seem to do different amounts of this work for you (some pop up an easy little window for dragging) but none seem to do the job completely. It’s always far more work/confusion than installing any Windows program has been since 1992. For all everyone hypes up the intuitiveness and ease of use of the Mac OS, it seems that one of the most basic and perhaps important operations one performs is extremely and unnecessarily complex.

Also the fonts are much different than windows, and frankly I don’t care for them. I may get used to them at some point. I doubt it though. The blurriness is disconcerting. My understanding of why they are that way is that Windows, which I’m used to, forces the fonts to conform to pixels on the monitor, making them less pretty but never blurry. Mac remains as true to the font as possible.

Having done the vast majority of my reading over the last 10 years on a computer rather than a magazine or book, I prefer Windows fonts. I really don’t give a flying fuck about what the letters would look like if they were in a newspaper, I only care what they look like on my screen. It’s 2008 and I think we can safely say it’s time to eradicate all fonts that weren’t designed specifically for monitors. Using fonts designed for printing presses on a monitor is like saying “yeah those tires on your car really have no traction and burst every 2,000 miles, but if you put them on a Conestoga wagon, wow would you be impressed.”

Another major gripe I have is window maximizing. When I click that button on any program on Windows, it takes up the whole screen. This is invaluable for people like me who use dual monitors (which, by the way, you shouldn’t even bother attempting on a Mac. My cofounder has to close the lid when he hooks his MBP up to a monitor). On a Mac you click the maximize button and anything can happen. From what I understand, OSX leaves it to the application developer to decide, which means that sometimes it maximizes vertically, sometimes horizontally, and sometimes it rotates 90 degrees to the left and sings La Cucaracha. It’s a gamble, but it almost never does what you’d want or expect it to.

Other than those things though, I like the OS. There are a lot of nice little things. Icons are easily resizable which is nice when you’re using a big monitor at a high resolution. Uninstalling programs is as easy as installing is hard. You just delete it from your Applications folder. No registry or dll concerns, which saves you from having to reinstall your OS as frequently as you might with Windows.

Driver support isn’t Windows, of course, but it is better than I thought it would be. Apple seems to have made their own driver for my Logitech DiNovo Edge, which is awesome. Inability to use it probably would have meant me returning the Mac or selling it on eBay.

There are some pretty sweet third party apps as well. Adium is a pretty awesome chat client. I use Miranda on Windows, and after a few plugins and hours of configuration I probably still prefer it, but Adium is almost as good right out of the box. The included office productivity programs are atrocious, especially compared to Word/Outlook 2007, so I won’t be using them, but Microsoft does make Mac products which I hear, with the exception of Entourage (email) are almost as good as the real thing. I wasn’t planning on doing more than coding and maybe web surfing on that PC anyway. Safari seems nice enough (certainly far better than IE6 or 7) but I prefer browsers that crash every 15 minutes, so I installed Firefox.

I’ve had the machine crash a couple times, so I can’t say much for its touted stability. It doesn’t seem as reliable as Windows is these days, but at least Apple replaced the dreaded blue screen with something much more pleasant. I didn’t even know it was crashing until my cofounder told me, and that has to be worth something.

There’s lots of little stuff that I can see why programmers love. My cofounders liken it to “Linux but with a good user interface”. Hotkeys seem to be more consistent from one application to another, and I probably generally prefer doing stuff with the Apple key to the Ctrl key. And TextMate is pretty awesome, as is Quicksilver and a few more geek tools I played around with.

But for the most part, I just don’t see it being as user friendly as Windows for Joe Sixpack. Basic operations like program installation and window maximizing (and what the hell is a keychain?) are all so convoluted and counter-intuitive that it just isn’t worth it. So my final verdict is pretty much that if you know what a command line is and what to do with one, buy a Mac. Otherwise, you’ll be much happier with Windows.

Nice article about Vista on eweek via Hacker News. As I said in the comments there, I find all of the anti-Vista sentiment perplexing. My theory is that it’s just due to shoddy OEMs like Dell trying to use it to polish the proverbial turd.

I bought it the day it was released and installed on both my desktop and Lenovo X60. The desktop died long ago (due to a faulty hard drive and my own laziness) but the Lenovo is still going strong. I haven’t had to reinstall once, and with XP I typically would have 3 times by now.

I don’t have any idea what’s involved in an upgrade for a large corporation running lots of Windows XP machines, so it’s quite possible that Vista is rather uncompelling for that market. But for someone buying a new PC, I’d recommend Vista wholeheartedly.

First there’s the aesthetics. It’s a much better looking OS, and that alone will increase your enjoyment factor significantly. It’s visually stunning, especially if you’ve got the graphics horsepower for the aero glass effects, and we’re visual creatures. That sort of thing is never to be underestimated. Not that I’m in favor of the style over substance approach that Apple uses, but a little more prettiness definitely goes a long way.

Then there are a dozen little ways in which it’s more enjoyable to use. Networking has been greatly simplified. No more running a wizard on every PC, it just automatically detects the network. And when connecting to a new wireless network it just asks you whether it’s a public one, a work one, or a home one and configures security settings accordingly. That probably doesn’t mean much to your average Hacker News reader (in fact it might be a tad annoying to them) but it means a lot to their parents.

The sidebar is a nice touch. The most common comment about that is “they stole that from OSX”. So? If it’s a good feature, why not? OSX took plenty of cues from Windows, yet it’s actually possible to read an article about Apple without some moron pointing that out.

The search is great too. No more wading through long lists of programs, just type the first couple characters and hit enter. I realize that this and the sidebar are possible in XP given some third party apps, but most people don’t know that, and even if they do it’s undeniably better to have that functionality built in at the OS level.

Navigation in explorer is much improved. Let’s say you’re viewing something in your program files. Suppose I’m editing some images in my Full Tilt poker folder. When I’m there in explorer I see at the top C:>Program Files>Full Tilt Poker>Images . Each word is a link, so with one click I can go back to Program Files or C:>, rather than having to hit up or back a couple times or dealing with the address bar.

I like the built in, easy to use rating system for media. Media Center has been given a beautiful overhaul too, though I can’t really comment as to its functionality since I don’t record with it anymore. Bluetooth in XP can often be like pulling teeth, in Vista it’s a snap. I find the control panel layout to be more intuitive. I could go on and one with one little feature after another that I like better.

There are a few warts undoubtedly. I’ve found the most commonly cited one, driver support, to be a non-factor, but then maybe most people have older hardware than me. Either way, I could definitely name a few things about Vista that I dislike. But as a whole the OS is much more enjoyable, and anyone buying a sufficiently powerful PC (and you really shouldn’t be buying any less nowadays) would be a moron not to get Vista on it.

Of course, I also steer people away from Dell, which almost every Vista hater I’ve encountered is running. The difference in build quality between them and Lenovo is roughly equivalent to the difference between Kia and Lexus. (In this equation I guess HP would be Toyota). It should come as no surprise that almost every Windows user at Y Combinator this summer (which there were very few of) had a Lenovo.

So buy a good PC, and get Vista on it. Or hell, buy a Mac if that’s your bent. But don’t believe the anti-Vista hype. It’s just the bleating of mindless Apple fanboys.

I’ve tried every Microsoft Office product since I was in high school, and every time I thought that they’d finally published the ultimate version. Surely, I’d think, they’ll never be able to compel me to upgrade to the next. Maybe, I thought, I’ll buy a new one two versions down the line. Every time they’ve proven me wrong.

A lot of stuff Microsoft makes is kinda junky. Their websites all suck. MSN is nowhere near as good as Google. Run the same search on both, the difference is readily apparent. Hotmail is trounced by Gmail and Yahoo. SQL Server is probably not even in the top 3 and Access is laughable. Windows Vista is great, but most of its best features have been in OSX for years. And XP served its purpose, but was never really a joy to use, except when compared to the abomination that was Windows 98.

But Office is different. It’s really their only product that is always light years ahead of the competition and, somehow, always far better than previous versions. It’s their Photoshop.

My favorite feature in this one is obviously the ability to publish directly to a blog from Word. I can only hope that this will improve the spelling on a few of the blogs I read. I’ve been composing in Word and cut and pasting for the three plus years I’ve been blogging for that reason, but judging by a lot of the stuff you read on the net, not too many other people do the same.

I love the Ribbon of course. They’ve basically taken all of the zillions of commands, put them in toolbars as logically as possible, and tabbed them. It couldn’t be easier to navigate.

There’s also a contextual spell checker, that attempts to notify you if you put a “to” where a “too” should be. I’ve thrown it a few softballs and it caught them. I don’t know for sure yet how many of the extremely annoying typos that happen to be an actual word this will end up preventing, but it’s definitely some, and anything that makes things easier to read is OK by me.

So I feel it safe to say that this time Microsoft has built the ultimate Office product. There could be absolutely nothing they can do to make me upgrade to the next version.