Archive for the 'Apple' Category
September 4th, 2010 by coreyjf
Warning Tech Post with Apple focus. Don’t bother reading if you aren’t into Apple, Tech, and digital Media.
On September 1, 2010 Plex released an upgrade to their already powerful and flexible multimedia software. For the record it is definitely a beta, but it is a brilliant. It plays most media flawlessly, but its real power as a home theatre backbone is in the remote friendly interface that intelligently gathers metadata from the internet to organize your television and movies. It pulls, movies posters, cast and episode data, in some cases even theme music. This is without a doubt my favorite and most used piece of OS X software. The irony that Plex evolved from a program that had its start on the XBox, XMBC, is not lost me.
The real power of their latest release is decentralization. Meaning no matter what computer you are on (in network), you have access to your full library. Start a show in one room/computer pick it up on another. I am currently running the Plex server/player software on three computers. My macbook and two hackintoshes. For the record, Apple makes great hardware (well they don’t technically make it); I choice the hackintosh route to augment my home theater setup as I already had the hardware available. Also for the record, I have a license for each copy of OS X that is installed.
So I can start a show here, conveniently set up right in front of my treadmill.
Then finish it on the Plasma.
I can also watch it in any other room in my house that I have my Macbook, iPad or iPhone. Yes, Plex also released client software for IOS iPad and iPhone. It transcodes and streams your content to the iPhone or iPad beautifully. I had no problem sitting on my patio tonight and streaming a 720p video. With a little port forwarding, I could even stream over 3g, although at a greatly reduced video quality.
While this isn’t something I would use often, you even have the option of using the app as a remote. Select the video you want then choose to either stream it to the IOS device or open on the server. Typically I would just use my remote, but if I couldn’t find it, it could be useful.
The Plex software for OS X is free/donation model, but they do charge for the iPhone/iPad app. Probably the best $5 I have spent in the App store. The video quality is beautiful, and it just works. I have used other video streaming software for IOS devices, but the integration into Plex, the access to metadata, and being able to just pick up were you left off on another computer/device…At $5 it’s a steal.
A I said, this is still Beta software, and it is not without it bugs, but after a few days of use I can honestly say it has been damn near flawless with one notable exception. Plex had to temporarily shut off the gathering of the metadata (Show Info, Posters, cast etc..) on TV shows. It currently uses TheTVDB.com to gather the information, and thoroughly hosed their servers. It is beta software and there were a huge number of users who upgraded, all scanning their full libraries all at once… From what I understand, Plex is setting up a cache to share the load, and that is expected to be online over the next day or so. I was lucky and managed to get most of my metadata before the lockout. And if you really want to reactivate the scanning before Plex officially turns it back on (I don’t recommend this unless you have a small number of shows), it is as simple as removing one line of code. I’m not going to tell you how, but google is your friend.
July 20th, 2010 by coreyjf
Baa Baa Troll Sheep
Have you any fuel?
Yes sir, yes sir,
My signal bars aren’t full!
1 for the lefty,
2 for the right.
None for the bumper-less
who don’t want their iPhone out of site.
OK, I am unbelievably tired of the whining surrounding the iPhone 4’s so called Antennagate. Granted I live in a high reception area and I have been known to drop a phone or two, so yeah my iPhone is sheathed in a bumper. Sure Apple has done a less then stellar PR job on this one, But Steve Jobs is right, the antenna thing is not new and easily negated with a bumper. So if you are complaining and actually own an iPhone 4, and aren’t a troll with nothing better to do, here are your options:
1. Stop using your Jedi Kung-Fu action deathgrip.
2. Hold your phone in your other hand
3. Get a bumper or other case (Apple will be giving them away for free)
4. Return it
5. STFU already.
This is my 4th iPhone. I have had each generation and I can honestly say each has been an improvement on the last. The iPhone 4 is gorgeous in form and function. The screen is amazing. It is fast, reliable, and the best battery life of any smartphone I have ever owned.
June 23rd, 2010 by coreyjf
Tomorrow morning I’ll be standing in line for my new iPhone. Apparently if I had pre ordered versus reserved there is a good chance I would be making this post on my new iPhone 4. Oh well, what’s another day in the grand scheme of things. And yes, I know it is just a phone – there are far more important things in life, such as family and good health. But the iPhone has changed the way I live my life on a day to day basis, and I look forward to the changes iPhone 4 will bring.
June 3rd, 2010 by coreyjf
I don’t have time for a full review but I have been playing with the Wordpress iPhone App. So far I’m impressed. You can view/approve comments and draft/publish posts. You can select categories and tags, upload photos and even geotag your entries. My last 3 posts have been entirely composed and published through my iPhone.
My rafting post was a little challenging. The categories wouldn’t populate at first and I somehow uploaded the same picture twice, but this I am sure had more to do with the wilds of West VA’s limited wireless connectivity than the Wordpress App.
It is a great little program. I was easily able to compose and publish this post while waiting for my lunch at the Deli next to my office. So does this mean I will post more often? We shall see!
May 10th, 2010 by coreyjf
My wife finally agreed to let me buy and iPad, the only condition was I had to sell the two first generation iPhones we had collecting dust on a shelf. So I logged on the Ebay and put them both up for sale. The first one sold but they buyer never responded. I invoiced her and sent a friendly little reminder the next day, both with no response. Maybe she had buyer’s remorse or bid on more than one auction and was stuck with multiple winning bids. I don’t know, I was honestly more annoyed that I never heard from her than the fact she didn’t buy the phone. But I will take a lack of common courtesy over what happen with the other auction.
I noticed the winning bid was from the UK and thought to myself I should have noted in the auction I would charge more for shipping on international sales. But I got a good price for the iPhone and was willing to chalk that up to lessons learned. So I sent the Ebay/PayPal invoice to the winner and wrote myself a sticky to take the phone to work so I could drop it at the Post Office at lunch. This morning I get the following email from the winner.
“Payment has just been sent and i am sure PayPal will have sent you a confirmation email. check all your folders i.e bulk,spam,junk for the confirmation email from PayPal.i want you to get my item posted out first thing this morning via USPS EXPRESS MAIL INTERNATIONAL. Please, do handle the item with care because i have had problems of scratches in the Past. i will leave a positive feedback for you as soon as Postage is Confirmed
This is the shipping address as given by PayPal. Many
Thanks”
Yes, I noticed how bad the grammar and spelling sucked, but if you are a regular reader you know why I try not to hold that against anyone.
Around the same time I get a spoofed email claiming to be from Paypal saying the transaction has been approved and all I had to do was send them the tracking number for the shipment and my money would be available in 5 hours. I was curious what this guys response would be if I called him on it, and also wanted to document to Ebay that I tried to confirm this was fraud before canceling/re-listing the auction. So I responded to his email and pointed out that his Ebay information claimed to have a UK shipping address, yet his PayPal shipping address was in Nigeria. More importantly I didn’t have any pending/complete PayPal transactions and the PayPal conformation email didn’t actually appear to be from PayPal.
This guys has the audacity to send me the following – “This is ridiculous. I have been using eBay for a while now and i have never had any problems whatsoever. Yes,my eBay says UK and i reside in the UK. Presently,i m in Nigeria on an official assignment to raise funds for the children living with cancer. As soon as you ship my item, send the Tracking Number to the PayPal customer care email on the payment invoice sent to you when i made payment for verification. This measure has just been taken to protect both parties from getting involved in fraudulent acts. As soon as u do this, your account will be credited. I will leave a positive feedback for you as soon as postage is confirmed. Kindly go to the post office right away and ship my phone via USPS EXPRESS MAIL INTERNATIONAL. Let me know when u have shipped it out. Thanks and best regards.”
The bit about the kids with cancer was a nice touch. He also completely glossed over the part about the spoofed PayPal email.
The thing I found really disturbing was Ebay. Not only were they impossible to reach via phone, when I contacted them through their live help (which was difficult to find), the representative seemed to have no interest in taking my information, only telling me how to offer the item to the next highest bidder. I get it, they are huge and this type of occurrence is probably all too common, by at least feign some interest in protecting your customers.
October 30th, 2009 by coreyjf
I did not have a good night sleep. Lots of tossing, turning and coughing(stupid chest cold). I finally gave up at 5:30. I flicked through email and facebook on my iPhone but decided if I was up I’d might as well get in a workout. With the chest cold I wasn’t up for a run but figured I would do some strength training in the basement. As I mentioned, I had my iPhone which apparently in an otherwise dark room reflects nicely off the bedroom door, providing the illusion that it is open. Yes, I walked into the door, which was actually partially open, slamming it closed and knocking me on my backside. The slamming door woke up Melissa and Joshua. I tried to convince Joshua that it wasn’t morning yet. He was not convinced and was loud enough in his disagreement to wake up Elijah. Both kids are up and clearly still tired. Of course I have to go to work, so I won’t be the one dealing with the results of my klutziness. Sorry Honey!
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October 21st, 2009 by coreyjf
I finally did it, I joined Netflix. We had been using Blockbuster’s netflix copycat service but dropped it a couple years ago after we did the math. We figured it was coming out to about $20 per rental; we just weren’t watching enough to justify it. We signed up for the service BK (before kids) and choose it over Netflix because of the in store option. If there was a movie we wanted to see, we didn’t have to wait for delivery, just bring one of the old DVDs back to a local blockbuster and take home what we wanted. Eventually we realized considering how few movies we watch it was cheaper to just rent from Apple/ITunes or Comcast On Demand and there was no need to leave the house to watch what we wanted, when we wanted.
Not that anything in our lives has changed. With 2 little ones we don’t have much in the way of popcorn time, and when we do there is enough TV the wife and I actually have in common that we are far more likely to fire up the DVR. There are no time limits on the DVR like there is with Comcast and Apple rentals. We often don’t have the time for a 1.5/2 hour movie but might be able to squeeze in an hour of Grey’s or Glee or even a 1/2 of HIMYM.
So why join Netflix? Impulse I suppose but he selling point was the unlimited streaming. You can stream as much as you want for no additional cost. You don’t like what you are watching stop it and stream something else. No extra cost and this is above and beyond the DVD rental. The video quality was only OK, but I am not sure if that was an impact by yesterday’s integration of Netflix into Microsoft’s Media Center; i’m sure Netflix’s bandwith was being put to the test last night.
I choose the $9 dollar a month – 1 DVD and unlimited streaming plan. I basically need to watch 2 movies a month to justify the cost. I think that is pretty doable.
October 14th, 2009 by coreyjf
I’m sorry 7 you’re just not what I am looking for in an OS. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a definite improvement over the 1 step forward 2 steps backwards that was Vista. You got some pretty new bells and whistles and you may even be as stable as Grandma XP (which is good compared to its far past but far from good). While your Apple charm school lessons have done much to enhance your overall elegance- well it is still so much lipstick on a pig. When we first got together I knew you were a beta but you have been in release candidate for months now and your still giving me way too many blue screens of death. I know it doesn’t help to point fingers or compare you to other OSs but you have crashed more times in the last month then my trusty macbook has in 2 years. I’m not saying its over since BeyondTV/Snapstream doesn’t make DVR software for OS X, you will still have a place at the core of my DVR Box. But I have to tell you, if you can’t get your act together I might have to consider MythTV on Linux. I know crazy Uncle Walt (not really my Uncle) Mossberg thinks your almost as good as OS X. But your not. Oh you can still do a few things for me that no other OS can. But I don’t have to work in Access as much these days and I am getting pretty comfy with MYSQL and as I said, if things don’t improve I might seriously consider Linux/MythTV for the one box (quad core Intel w/ 4 TVtuners and 2 terabytes of HDTV goodness) really keeping you with me at home.
Don’t worry, we can still be work buddies. I’m not planning any moves and I can’t imagine the paradigm shift that would have to happen for our office to go Mac, its just not even possible with our current HRIS software. And its not like I won’t ever see you outside of the office. As I said there are certain things you do very well, and I am willing to keep you around in Virtual Machine form. I will call on you when I need some quick and dirty MS Office project that can’t be done in Office for Mac or Google Docs. And when I am done, I can just shut down the VM software and forget about you until our next month boot up call.
September 1st, 2009 by coreyjf
I am not ready for this. Melissa, she is ready. Josh, he is ready. I am sure even Elijah is ready for the more one on one time he will get with Mommy once Josh starts preschool (though Eli obviously has no idea). I am not ready, not even close. I know I fall slightly on the overprotective side of the parenting fence, but that is really only part of the issue. Sure I have thought about randomly swinging by the school to make sure the doors are locked. And I hate that we live in a world were a synagogue/preschool feels the need to line the border of the property with “decorative” boulders. But much of my trepidation isn’t really about security. It is a good school, we checked it out thoroughly and have many neighbors/friends with kids there. What I think really bothers me most is just how fast time is moving.
I decided to not work through lunch today. I took some time to read some blogs and write this post. One of the blogs I read belongs to my friend Jodi. Her current (at least at the time of this draft – she is a far more prolific writer then I) blog post has a picture of her little boy when he was an infant. Her next post down shows him just the other day. The difference was startlingly. I haven’t asked her, but I would be shocked if she said that time has done anything but flown by. After I read her post, I browsed though some of my favorite pictures of the kids on my iPhone. I can’t believe how much Josh has changed over the course of his 2 1/2 years and Elijah over his 7 months. Every day I come home from work to find one or both of them have learned some new thing or have done something for the very first time.
I enjoy my job; I work for a good company and the reality is I can’t be there the way I would like. But I do feel like a missing so much. It makes these milestones bittersweet, but I supposed that is the taste of life.
January 26th, 2009 by coreyjf
I was tagged and completed one of those “25 random things about me” and true to #25 I decided to repost to my blog.
1. Someday I will finish and publish a novel.
2. I have finished many shorts stories over the years and have never attempted to have any of them published.
3. I have an irrational fear of birds.
4. That said very few things in this world truly frighten me. I have driven a buck twenty bumper to bumper on a tortuous road, gone bungee jumping, cliff diving, skydiving and countless other youthful indiscretions.
5. And that said I have been terrified on a couple of occasions. The first was a month before Josh was born and we were driving to Holly Cross to do a tour of the maternity ward. We were stopped in traffic on 495 near magical kingdom AKA the Mormon Temple. Melissa stated screaming as a SVU plowed into us at highway speeds. The accident put her into early labor and it was hours before they were able to stop the labor and give us any assurance that she and the baby would be OK. The second time in recent memory was when I held my son for the first time.
6. Even though I am pro-science and highly critical of religious dogma, I am surprisingly religious. I have never doubted in G-d, only humanity’s ability to understand.
7. Most of my life I preferred to read what Academics call literature and now I prefer speculative fiction. I can even admit to truly loving some urban/dark fantasy that could just as easily be housed in the romance isle.
8. I am a terrible insomniac and Lunesta has changed my life.
9. I have been contemplating giving up meat on moral grounds but am not sure I have the will power to make it happen.
10. I’m a Mac, and a PC and a LINUX
11. As a kid I used to take things apart to to figure out how they worked, I still do.
12. I used to build PCs before it was considered easy.
12. I am very mechanically inclined but have never changed my own oil, mostly because I don’t like getting dirty.
13. I love to garden. I know that sounds contradictory but I don’t mind dirt dirt. It is the greasy and/or sticky things I don’t love.
14. I have studied Christianity more in depth than Judaism.
15. I hated being Jewish as a child but happily identify with Judaism as an adult.
16. My favorite game is Gin provided I am playing with my wife. She is a knocker!
17. My mind works best when I am multitasking.
18. I can listen to an audio book or watch TV while reading and follow both. I know this makes me a little odd but I was a multitasker before modern communication necessitated it.
19. My wife never ceases to amaze me.
20. On any given day Lifeguarding was my favorite job. Bar-tending was the most fun, and Teaching the most rewarding.
21. Even though I don’t LOVE it I am very good at HR an assume I will keep doing it forever unless I do #1 more than once and really really really well.
22. I am terrible with names.
23. Having a child (soon to be children) has changed my life in unbelievable and indescribable ways.
24. Yes I do get asked about the other Corey Feldman all to often and how funny is it that my best friend’s name is Tony Orlando.
25. Most of my life I have shared easily but with few. With Social media (blogging, facebook, twitter) I now share with many but no longer with ease.
