Happy New Year!

My friends on the east coast are ringing in the new year already, while we have to wait a little longer on the west coast. I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year. Here's to a 2009 full of peace, prosperity and progress.

Snow!!!

The snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest last night was amazing. We live in an apartment with a view of Seattle. Last night, most of it disappeared behind the falling snow. With no cars on the road, it was so quiet in our neighborhood, which is a rarity. People were sledding down arterial streets last night and enjoying this rare occurrence.

Seattle is not great with snow, so be careful out there and be sure to keep warm safely if you lose electricity. A few years ago, people died in the area by using their grills indoors to keep warm. For information on how to stay safe in the winter in the Seattle metro, see http://www.govlink.org/storm/. Be safe!

Boxee update

This is starting to look like my Boxee blog! There is an update out today that corrects some navigational issues on the apple tv and should address a few bugs. Here is more info: http://blog.boxee.tv/2008/12/16/fixing-bugs/

Boxee Fixed!

Once I got home from an incredibly stressful day with my servers at work, I decided to attack the Boxee freezing problem. It was extremely easy to fix. The answer is here: http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=2383


To summarize:

1. Get your IP address in settings->network

2. SSH into the AppleTV:

ssh frontrow@[replace with ip address]

3. frontrow is the password

4 enter the following command:

rm /Users/frontrow/Library/Application\ Support/BOXEE/UserData/guisettings.xml

It's as easy as deleting a preference file. Thanks Boxee forums. I'm ashamed that I did not look there sooner.

Boxee upgrade - FAIL!

My attempt to upgrade Boxee on my Apple TV has failed. The install itself seems to have gone okay and the launcher and updater work just fine. However, once Boxee starts, the Apple TV stops responding to the remote and I am forced to reboot. I may have to restore the ATV and start over, which I am hesitant to do because it takes a lot of time. Instead, I will probably wait for the next Boxee update and try to install that using the updater. If that fails, I will restore and reinstall.

Something's dogging the Dog Star

I've been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber for years now and have really appreciated having the service. In some ways, radio is even more important to me than the television. Being a graduate student with a full-time job, I don't have a lot of time to watch television, but I do appreciate having music in the background.

Lately, however, things have been a little different with Sirius. After Sirius and XM merged, a number of stations that I enjoyed listening to changed names, playlists and personalities. Although I am as resistant to change as anyone else, I know that I will eventually get settled into a new set of favorite stations. The problem is not really any of these changes, but rather a decline in the quality of the signal itself.

I have a Stiletto 2. I used to dock it using a vehicle kit in the house and it worked very well, in spite of the fact that I live in an apartment with west facing windows on the west coast of the US (Sirius recommends facing your home antenna toward northern Minnesota, which for me is to the northeast.) Recently for aesthetic reasons, I switched to a home dock and my troubles began. I often lose the signal. I am not sure right now if the problem is due to the dock or to local weather conditions and I will have to troubleshoot to see if I can solve the problem.

That problem is really the easy one to fix. Another problem is entirely out of my hands. Stations have started to broadcast the emergency alert system warning tones on a regular and more frequent basis. These are neither tests, which Sirius normally announces, or real alerts. Rather, they happen randomly, sometimes as often as every fifteen minutes.

When the buzzing of the emergency alert is not happening, another problem can occur. Short, random segments of another song will briefly interrupt the broadcast of whatever song is supposed to be playing. This is not only annoying, but it makes the use of the recording feature built into the Stiletto 2 hard to rely upon. To make matters worse, some stations that formerly allowed recording no longer do so. This started happening after the recent channel realignment. I have yet to find a reliable report about if and when Sirius will fix the problem.

Until then, I will wait patiently. Satellite radio has become part of my routine. I can't say that I will wait forever, though. Internet radios like the Squeezebox Boom are looking mighty tempting right about now. Hopefully they are more reliable than my Siruis service has been.

Boxee & Apple TV

I recently started to use Boxee on Apple TV and love it. It took multiple attempts to get the installer to run, but once it did, it worked flawlessly. I now am able to watch Hulu on my television set, which is incredible. I replaced cable with an Apple TV, so Boxee greatly expands my content options and without a service charge.

Currently, I have only noticed two problems with my new setup. First, Boxee's interface on the Apple TV can be a little sluggish. Sometimes it is hard to tell if the system has accepted input from the remote control. It would be wonderful if it could accept remote control commands from the iPhone (not that I am being greedy or expecting too much! ;) ) I imagine that will improve over time as Boxee is currently in alpha.

Also, I occasionally have problems watching content that Hulu flags as accessible only to those 18 and older. Sometimes when I try to watch a show, it will tell me that I have not verified my age. Unfortunately, there is no way to rectify that under the setup that I have currently installed.

The good news is that Boxee now has a version that works with Apple TV 2.3 software. This version allows users to use their own Hulu accounts, which should solve the age verification problem.

Overall, I am very excited about checking this out and will report back after I install the upgraded software. Boxee has a blog with details about their work here: http://blog.boxee.tv/

All mixed up

So, I'm bad at blogging, or at least at being consistent about it. In the spirit of getting back into it, I wanted to write a little about my iPhone woes. Recently, I noticed that it is mixing up the cover art for songs and podcasts. In some cases, it also builds the menus incorrectly, so that when I click on a podcast to get to the episodes, I get a list for another podcast. Everything is okay on iTunes, so I'm not sure what the problem is. So far, the only thing that I have found that consistently solves the problem is to restore the iPhone from a backup. I need to do that again. I sure miss the Apple of a few years ago. They must be having growing pains.