Chris​Hubbs​.com

I’ll get to a summary post or two about my India trip in upcoming days, but today I’d rather go on about my frustration with my auxiliary home theater PC setup.

Basic review: my main HTPC setup works great. I’m running Windows 7 on a tower with 2.5 TB of HDD and a Windows Media Center remote, and it all works very nicely, including the Netflix plugin for Windows Media Center. No complaints at all.

What’s driving me batty right now is my secondary setup up in my bedroom. For the last couple of years I’ve actually been pretty happy using Plex on my Mac Mini as the setup; it can playback recorded TV across my network from the HTPC, the Netflix plugin worked nicely, and there was even a HDHomeRun plugin so I can watch live TV streaming from my networked tuner.

But a few months ago the Netflix plugin for Plex broke - rather, Netflix updated their API and the plugin developer hasn’t been able to keep up. Which means the only good way to watch Netflix in that room (which the kids want to do nearly every morning) is to open up Netflix in the browser. Not such a good solution. So, I’m trying to figure out another solution that won’t cost me too much.

One option would be a Roku. It has a good Netflix app, a Plex app which in theory will connect right up to my existing Plex Media Server to watch recorded TV, and even has an app for Amazon Streaming Video, which we get with our Prime membership but have never really used. (Bonus!) Downside: HDHomeRun doesn’t work, and you don’t get a basic web browser, which means no watching live TV, and no streaming any other video off the net from more, um, dubious sources.

I know that XMBC is floating around out there with a Mac app, but it’s a pain in the rear to configure and not pretty at all, and I don’t know that it even supports Netflix. So that’s a non-starter.

A better option would be to buy a netbook computer (this 11" Asus model has good reviews) for about $300 and hook it up in place of the Mini. I could get another Windows Media Center remote and just duplicate my main install (save for the big disk drives). That way I know I’d get Netflix, the HDHomeRun tuner would work, all the videos would playback (perhaps even without as much transcoding as I’m doing now), and I’d still have a browser. The downside: it’d cost me $300. Even if I could sell the Mini, I’d still be down a couple hundred bucks. That’s antihistamine money.

The other option that occurs to me is that I could do the same thing with the old Dell laptop that I’m typing this post on. It’s already got Win 7, and with a fresh Windows install it’d be plenty fast enough. The downside is that this is the PC that the kids now use for their computer time, and where we’ve got it setup isn’t conducive to switching it out with the Mini.

Guess I’ll keep thinking. Anybody have any good ideas?

Update: After running through the options with my wife, she says “$300 for the best option? Forget it. For $300 I can get out of bed and open a browser if they want to watch Netflix.” Guess that answers the question.

So the same day I published my previous post on ditching my Android, a customer service guy from US Cellular named Tom pinged me on Twitter and asked for my email address so he could respond. I sent it to him, and he responded with a 1000-word treatise trying to address some of my points.

Highlights from his side of the story:

Android OS Updates Samsung actually stopped releasing software updates for all 1st generation Samsung Galaxy S devices. Samsung made the decision that this line of devices would not get an official Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0x or Jelly Bean 4.1x update. … This is much like Apple no longer supporting older hardware be it OSX Lion on an older Macbook or IOS 6 on an older iphone. As the software requirements are greater, older technology is rendered obsolete.

OK, so it’s not US Cellular’s fault, or Google’s fault - it’s Samsung’s fault. Still, his comparison to Apple/iPhone is misguided. As I pointed out in my original post, if I’d bought even the older iPhone (3GS) available back in December 2010, it would still be able to pick up the IOS 6 upgrade later this year. Advantage: iPhone.

Backup

Backing up an Android device is a different story. If you are looking for ways to back up specific application data, then there isn’t much I have found out there to do this…

To be fair, he notes that you can use Google to keep your calendar, contacts, and mail in sync w/ your Google account. But still, otherwise, he concedes the point. Android’s backup solutions all suck, and to do a full apps/settings backup requires you to root your phone and void the warranty.

System Stability This is something that has only been getting better with newer hardware and software. My Galaxy S II for example has never had any issues with freezing up. My wife has the Mesmerize and from time to time will have issues with certain applications causing her phone to freeze. The Galaxy S III is in a ballpark all of its own. The hardware and software is much more advanced then even the Galaxy S II…

At this point it feels like he’s starting to quote from the promotional literature. In short: yeah, your current phone (which we sold you as top-of-the-line 20 months ago) sucks, but trust us, it’s getting better. Oh wow, I feel so much better with that reassurance! Or not.

Phone/Signal/Software issues you’ve had. It’s clear you have had issues with your phone. I do not doubt that at all. How much of this has been caused by rooting and putting different roms on the phone is unknown and can be debatable.

Ha, I knew it’d come back to this. When it comes down to brass tacks, I’ll get blamed for rooting it. But I digress.

I’ve seen the back button issue before. This can be caused by many things, from internal cracks in the digitizer, software related issues, internal hardware malfunctions, or even a screen protector not being put on the phone correctly. Your statement about it only happening in low-signal situations is the first I’ve heard this and will definitely be looking at that more closely.

Oh, great. He’ll look at it more closely. That helps me a lot.

I emailed him back with a short rebuttal, thanking him for his time. Yeah, US Cellular has been great customer service-wise. But I only use Customer Service maybe once a year. I use my phone every day. If I have to pick between one or the other, I’ll go with the phone.

I sent one last email to Tom at the end of last week, with my final summary, and an offer:

I appreciate your desire to keep me as a customer, but at this point I don’t have the time/inclination to continue a debate on the merits of Android/iPhone. I’m sure that Samsung has improved things significantly now with the Galaxy S3; however, I’m not willing right now to spend $300, mess around with a rebate, and commit to another 2 years of service to take a chance on the new Android after my previous experience, especially when I know my alternative (once my contract runs out in December) is to purchase a phone that has uniformly brilliant reviews from friends and family members.

If US Cellular wanted to provide me with an S3 at a much-reduced price, and without requiring me to re-up my contract, I’d be happy to give it a fair evaluation, a review on my blog, and return it if I still decide that I want an iPhone. (I’m not expecting that from USCC, but that’s about what it’d take at this point to get me to consider the S3.)

To this point, I haven’t heard back from Tom. I don’t really expect them to take me up on my offer.

The new iPhone can’t come soon enough.

This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)

I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…

I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports - he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)

Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.

My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve - i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.

Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?

Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.

I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.

Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?

Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.

After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.

Purchase and Installation

Like Mint before it, Inman’s pricing model is similar to that of off-the-shelf software: pay once, install on your own machine. In this case, your own webhost. $30 buys you a license which is tied to a specific domain name.

Installation is ridiculously easy. You download a little “tester” zip file, unzip it and upload it to your domain, and visit the one page that it creates. The tester does some cursory checks to ensure that adequate versions/settings of PHP and SQL are present, and then does a database check to ensure your database is set up with adequate permissions. A word of warning here: pay attention: the database settings you use to test here will be used to install Fever should you choose to purchase it. This wasn’t clear to me when I did the install. Fortunately it didn’t become an issue.

Once your server has passed all the tests, you are given a link that will take you back to feedafever.com, where you can drop your $30 via Paypal for the license. Once you pay up, you are given a license key which you can then copy and paste back into Fever. Normally, at this point, you’d be expecting to have to download a full install, upload it, do some manual configuration, and so on, right? Not with Fever, though. Once you give it the license key, Fever silently installs the full setup (about 900 KB of files) and you’re up and running. Brilliant.

Importing Feeds

Next I went over to Google Reader and dumped my OPML file. I’m a heavy user, probably not quite in the ‘power user’ category yet, but the OPML had 454 feeds, about 100KB worth of XML. It took about two clicks to suck it into fever, and the import went very smoothly. Compared to the import times when I’ve tried using FeedDemon, FeedLounge, or (shudder) Bloglines, Fever screamed through the import.

You have the option of keeping all your categories from the OPML or choosing not to when you import. I did keep my categories, but found a small issue with that choice later on - there is a bug (design choice?) that keeps the category list from scrolling. So, I can only see about half of my lists. Not a fatal issue, but something that needs fixed.

Once the feeds were imported, Fever started kicking off updates of all the feeds. This just takes a little while. If you want to set up a cron job on your server, you can have Fever pull in updates every 15 minutes ‘round the clock. If not, Fever will update every 15 minutes when you have it open in a browser. I have yet to set up the cron job - we’ll see how it goes.

General Usage

Fever is set up with the power user in mind. Keyboard shortcuts are built-in and intuitive; they allow you to do navigation, switch between two-pane and three-pane views (shown below), and the space bar lets you jump one article at a time, or, if it’s a long article, one page at a time. Slick.

Fever looks great, too. The overall layout feels a lot like Google Reader, even more like its Greasemonkey-enhanced alter ego Helvetireader. Group and feed lists are on the side, and you have the choice of showing or hiding unread counts.

When you go to the Hot category, Fever assigns “temperatures” to the topics and presents the links in grouped form. For example, in the shot below, “Sojurn Community Church” is a hot topic among my feeds, and the half-dozen links discussing it are listed below. Clicking on any of them opens the actual blog article in a new tab. The “temperatures” are the one thing I’m actually a little unsure about. While they are a nice way of showing “hot” topics, having the temperature listed there in a BIG font seems a little big cheesy. We’ll have to see how it stands the test of time.

Performance

I have yet to hear from my webhost and friend Geof complaining that the server’s taking a beating, so I’m hoping Fever has a smart backend that won’t tie up the server. Right now the SQL database is taking about 13 MB of space. I’m a bit curious to see at what point Fever starts pruning old feed items and how large my database might grow to be.

Bugs and Quirks

I do have a few gripes with Fever that I hope will get ironed out in short order. (Note: Fever automatically checks the server for updates to itself! Awesome!) The first is the feed editing dialog. (Click on the image to see it full-sized.) Maybe it’s just because I have a lot of groups defined, but when I bring up the feed editing dialog, the bottom of the box is off-screen, with no way to scroll to it. (This is running 1280x800 resolution with Firefox fully maximized.) Fortunately, if I F11 to full screen view, the whole thing just barely fits on the screen. Otherwise, I’d be stuck.

The other general gripe is the mechanism for sorting feeds into groups. As I said earlier, I had a lot (50?) of categories defined in my OPML file, so I decided I’d consolidate things a bit. Creating a new group is easy; picking the feeds for it is less so. Once you decide to edit a group, you are given a scroll box with your entire list of feeds. It’s a multi-select box, which means you better make sure you hold down the Control key while you scroll through and select the ones you want - otherwise you’ll be starting over. Ugh. Suggestion for Mr. Inman: use check boxes. Or even better, figure out a way to drag-and-drop.

As a general note, there is an iPhone/iPod Touch interface built in for Fever. To this point, though, it’s not liking my Fever login… not sure why. Gotta keep trying.

Summary

All in all, Fever is a welcome addition to the world of feed readers. For a tool I’m gonna use every day, I’m willing to spend a few bucks, and I think in this case Fever is $30 well spent. I’m looking forward to having a few days to get things organized, and for a few bugs to get sorted out, and I may well have a new favorite feed reader. Time will tell.

Discovered this one last night: when I tapped the Genius icon to create a Genius playlist out of the currently-playing song, the playlist it created began with a different version of that song. It was repeatable, happened twice.

In detail: I was playing “All the Way Home (live)” from Andrew Peterson’s Appendix M record. I hit the Genius button to create a playlist, and it generated one quite neatly. Unfortunately, rather than starting the playlist with “All the Way Home (live)” from Appendix M, it started the playlist with “All the Way Home” from AP’s Carried Along.

Don’t know quite what’s going on here, but something ain’t quite right with the Genius.

No, Dad, regardless of the title, I’m not talking about Wagner or Puccini or that kind of opera… sorry. But with Firefox 3 coming out yesterday, I figured I’d be the contrarian and give that other browser a try; Opera was promising more features with version 9.5, and I hadn’t played with Opera in quite a while. So yesterday was Opera trial day. Mind you, I’m a quite-happy Firefox user, but I figured I should give it a try.

My first impression when starting Opera: It’s pretty. I like the UI, though admittedly I’m a sucker for new, shiny toys. But it looks good. And the rendering looks good, and it seems fast. So far, so good. Sadly, on my list of comments/thoughts about Opera, that’s pretty much the end of the good things.

Then there’s my list of annoyances. First stop: Gmail. I keep Gmail open all the time, and use the Google Talk function embedded in Gmail as my primary chat engine. It seems to be the only thing that’ll function here at work. Well, the GTalk panel doesn’t even load in Gmail. Quick Google search, and ah, I can use the &nobrowsercheck option in the URL. Then it shows up. Cool!

But it ends up there’s a reason Gmail doesn’t load chat in Opera; it doesn’t work. You can’t initiate a chat with anybody from the chat panel, it won’t pop up the little window. If someone else starts the chat, then you can pop it up, but you can’t pop it out; it’s stuck within the main Opera window. No good to me.

Another Google search provides my next try for GTalk: load it up in the “Panel” aka sidebar. It loads up better there, but again you can’t pop out chat sessions; they’re all stuck within the panel. Given that I like to have more than one session going at once at times, this just won’t work for me. Bummer.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about searches - one weird thing: the hotkey to get up to the search box is different between Opera and Firefox/IE. FF/IE both use CTRL-K to put your cursor in the search box. Opera uses CRTL-E. Would it have been that hard to stay consistent?

Firefox users who check out Opera quickly notice that there are no extensions for Opera like there are for Firefox. Opera proponents quickly point out that some of the most popular “extended” functionality in Firefox is built-in to Opera natively; they cite Mouse Gestures and Content Blocking as examples. Now, Mouse Gestures I have to give them. I love using Mouse Gestures and they work well in Opera. Content Blocking… not so much.

I’m hooked on Adblock for Firefox. It just works. The net it casts for ads catches most all the ads without filtering out the pictures I want to see. Opera has a built-in “content blocker”, but it’s not very user-friendly. Right-click on a blank area of the screen, and choose Block Content. Then it highlights all the blockable items on the screen. Then you have to click on the ones you want to block. By default, it blocks everything from a pretty high level in the domain the ad is hosted. This is fine if the ad you’re blocking is from an adserver, but for some of the sites I visit, the ads are hosted right on the domain… which means Opera ends up blocking ALL the images from that domain, including the ones I want. Yes, you can fine-tune it, but it requires opening up another dialog, and it’s a pain. I’ll take the Adblock extension for Firefox any day.

Other little annoyances: I’ve grown to love the Remember The Milk extension for Firefox that embeds my to-do list into my Gmail screen. Not available in Opera. The drag-and-drop arrangement for my fantasy baseball team in Yahoo Fantasy Sports? Not available in Opera. It’s little things like that here and there that make my choice easy.

This morning with some relief I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and was happy to see FF version 3 loading up. This is a browser worth keeping.