This week, I upgraded to TiVo Desktop Plus. I had planned this a few months ago. One of the benefits of TiVo is the TiVo Desktop software, which allows you to transfer your recordings to another device (desktop, laptop, Mac.) I’ve used this in the past so I could archive or watch television upstairs at my desk. It’s not the greatest software, but it works decently enough. I wish the video content transferred faster — even on a 802.11g network, it’s gonna be 60 mins for an hour-long show. At least it’s free.

Now, if you want to watch on a mobile device, you need to upgrade to TiVo Desktop Plus. For $24.95, it automatically converts and can drop the resulting file into your iTunes library location. Do a quick sync in iTunes, and theoretically have your content ready for viewing on your iPhone, iPad, or other device ready for you on the morning train ride. As a test, I transferred two episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Star Wars: The Clone Wars to my iPhone 4. See a screenshot below.

It’s a little tricky to fast forward and rewind with your thumb on the tiny slider, but it’s good enough. My actual objective is to transfer movies and video to a future iPad for short and long trips — Pixar/Disney movies, Sesame Street, and content for grown-ups too.

It’s probably odd that I’m strategically plotting, but that is basically what I’m doing. I can’t do everything at one time. I was waiting on a new desktop PC first, so I can easily manage video content. The iPhone is good enough for use now, but I have my eye on the ball for additional uses for my future iPad.

World domination will have to wait.

Times sure flies. It’s been over two years since Verizon flipped on our FiOS service in 2009. Apart from the initial hiccups, it’s been smooth sailing, and I don’t believe we’ve an outage since ’09. We’ve had the Triple Play package (TV, Internet, phone), and it has worked out pretty well. I do wish they would add more HD channels on a more regular basis — one new channel a year isn’t that much to gloat about.

Since 2009, we have been upgrading our Internet speeds. We initially signed up at 10 Mbps downstream, 2 Mbps upstream. A few months in Dec 2009, I schmoozed a Verizon rep and got them to agree to upgrade us to the then-current 15 Mbps, 5 Mbps base speeds.

A year and a half later, we’re out of contract, the price lock has ended, and our rates went up about $20. Oye ve. I called Verizon to inquire is there anything we can do to lower the bill — do nothing, renew our contract for another two years, etc. Is there even a contract, similar to wireless / cell phone contracts? After a nice heart to heart, we renewed for another two years. In return, we’ll save $5 a month (ooooooh aaaaaah), our Internet gets upgraded to a symmetric 25 Mbps up and down, and we’ll get a $300 gift card if we pay our bill on time for the next two months.

Happy happy joy joy. Check out the point-in-time Speedtest.net results below from earlier today. What are we going to do with our new-found bandwidth? Hmmm, something illegal. Just kidding. Maybe. Depends on my mood. I could upload a lot of video of myself dancing to Al Green.

Recent Speedtest.net check on Jan 28 2012 after our FiOS upgrade

Sample TiVo v20.2 Guide screenshot

Regular readers will know that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the TiVo Premiere since we got it December 2010 (for my Christmas present, actually.) My wife and I weren’t particularly happy with the Verizon-supplied Motorola 6400-series STB/DVR we were renting. It had enough quirks, that it became frustrating over time. There was a much-promised IMG v1.9 update coming with a new Motorola DVR (with additional capacity), but many months passed while the new 7200 series DVR was in “testing” phase.

So my wife took the bull by the horns, and upgraded us to the TiVo Premiere. It was basically a Series 4, and had owned both a Series 2 and a Series 2 DT (dual-tuner) back in the day. I had been tracking the TiVO Premiere, including the many complaints about the product — sluggish, unstable, etc. Hmmm, not sounding good. However, the Premiere showed up under the Christmas tree. Sometimes you just gotta close your eyes, and jump in the pool. Was it perfect? No, not at all. My nemesis was the sluggish interface and the green spinning wheel of death. I also wasn’t a fan of the half-updated HDUI and disabled 2nd processor core. Why would you release an incomplete product? While many customers complained about the lack of updates and bug fixes over the course of 2011, TiVo was silent. Absolutely silent. No news, no schedule of bug fixes and patches. Nothing. Argh.

Slowly though through 2011, TiVo released v14.x type patches, and v14.9 enabled the 2nd processor core. Not a dramatic increase, but even a small performance enhancement was welcome. In addition, Margret Schmidt [VP User Experience] began interfacing and responding to customers. You could contact her at her @TiVoDesign Twitter feed, and she would answer back! She informed customers what updates would come and when. Go on the Tivo Community forums, and people love Margret Schmidt. And you know what? I don’t blame them. I love Margret too. Somebody at TiVo woke up, was interacting with the customers, answering questions, and giving us information on upcoming updates.

This month, TiVo released v20.2 for the TiVo operating system. With the past few updates, TiVo has upgraded more screens, improved the performance, and made the Premiere much better than it was a year ago. It took a year, but I’m much happier now. Frankly, it’s about time

I can sympathize with some of the troubles that other would-be pet adopters have experienced. When we were looking to adopt our kittens last year, I went through a bit of a rigamarole with the adoption process. The animal hospital misunderstood some of my answers on the application, denied us, and neglected to confirm, discuss, or inform us that the adoption was denied. I basically had to do all the follow-up, including calling back three times a day from Tuesday through Friday evening that week until I reached the one and only staff member who would tell me what happened.

In the end, I straightened them out, and the adoption was back on. I understand they want to take precautions to ensure it is a good fit between human and animal, but with so many animals in need of a good loving home, they should take more care to make sure more adoptions happen.

I mention all this because Slate’s Emily Yoffe wrote a piece titled No Pet For You (Seinfeld reference!) about adoption groups taking a hard line stance regarding who is worthy to adopt future pets. Like I said earlier, they should take due care, but they should balance that with getting more adoptions to happen.

I have to give some people credit for the creativity they display and the willingness to put out the amount of effort to make this stuff up.

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

Sunday night was date night here at the Ipe household. The kids were staying over at the in-laws, and we had the evening to ourselves. After mucb contemplating about extravagant evening entertainment, we went the simple route — have dinner locally, then come home to watch a movie. Naturally, pajamas and snuggling on the couch were required. We hit a local Italian restaurant, then came home to watch Bridesmaids over Walmart’s Vudu service.

Vudu Streaming Audio screenshot

Now, we had waiting to see this in the theater upon initial release, but schedules never worked out. I’ve used Vudu in the past, and never had a complaint. Vudu offer 3 video resolutions — SD (480p), HD (720p), and HDX (1080p.) Now some film material is available with Dolby Digital Stereo (2.0), 5.1, and 7.1. During the film, I noticed we were only getting stereo sound, which boggled my mind. Wait a minute, stereo? I would have stopped it and done some investigating, but that would have ruined “date night”, so I let it be. I’ve been researching, and it seems that not all films on Vudu are streaming in surround sound. I went online just now to check out the forums, and the “More Info” tab for Bridesmaids. Check out the video/audio format on the right of the attached screenschot. Dolby Digital Stereo. Egads, who’s verifying available audio formats before you rent a streaming movie? Live and learn.

What can you do? What’s done is done. Might as well get on with talking about Bridesmaids. You know, I didn’t know exactly what to expect from this film. There was much comparison to 2009′s The Hangover, except from a bachelorette perspective. In that case, wouldn’t it be more like Tom Hanks’ Bachelor Party? The cast is huge, featuring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, John Hamm, and many more. Turns out, the film is much different than I thought.

Kristen Wiig’s character Annie is the best friend of Maya Rudolph’s bride character Lillian. As Annie comes into conflict with one of the other bridesmaids, her life continues to fall apart during the pre-wedding planning. The film features all of the idiosyncratic bridesmaids, including an outstanding and memorable performance by Melissa McCarthy. The film’s plot didn’t go where I thought it would exactly go, so I found it entertaining.

Bridesmaids (2011)

I’m putting a stake in the ground, and listing the stuff I need, and things I need to do in 2012. This is my official running list. Better get my list done now, so I know what to work towards.

Now in no particular order, the shit I need to get done:

1. Replace my desk with a custom IKEA desk.
2. Replace my Dell 19″ 1905FP monitor with the Dell 24″ U2412. Yup, just swapping Dells.
3. Replace our Epson scanner with something newer and compatible with Windows 7.
4. Replace our Logitech webcam with something newer and compatible with Windows 7, and does HD video.
5. Get an iPad 2, or an iPad 3. Hell, how about one of each?
6. Clean out our basement, and fix it up as a playroom for our kids, or when other kids come over. This will require new carpeting and a fresh coat of paint.
7. Replace the toilet flangey-thing in the hallway powder room so that it isn’t slowly leaking.
8. Paint the kitchen.
9. Clean out my side of the walk-in closet. I found some shirts in there that are late 90′s era. Why do I have them? Also, what was I thinking?
10. Buy a new car when we hand in our lease-end car this summer. I’m thinking a fully decked out Nissan Maxima, red or black.
11. Either evict or adopt the squirrel we found living in our attic this month. I’m not kidding.

That’s all I can think of, but there may be more. Looks like a good list to me, and I’ve got 12 months to do it.

I believe Apple iTunes does strange things, and I almost lost my music for a third time.

I remember years ago when my Dell Dimension was new, I had some strange issue with Apple iTunes where 130+ songs disappeared. Very odd. A few months later, I happened to find them in the Recycle Bin of all places. I considered myself lucky that it hadn’t been cleared. In 2006 when my Dell’s original hard drive failed after a year, my friend Plex was able to recover my data, and I also used this Red Chair Software product called Anapod Explorer to copy songs from my iPod back to my PC. It worked like a charm.

Well, I just had incident #3 this week. I thought I was conscientious. I backed up my data to the external drive, and then copied it to the new machine. Sometime this week, 76 songs couldn’t be located on either the primary HDD or the external. However, they were still on the iPhone. Weird.

I tried installing the old Anapod software to transfer it back, but it wouldn’t work. I went to the Red Chair Software website for tech support, and it appears they went out of business. I did download their latest (and last) version, but it doesn’t work either.

I was flummoxed.

I googled some more, but I didn’t want to buy more software. Eventually, I found some freeware called SharePod. I downloaded SharePod 3.9.8, and it saved me. God bless the Internet.

SharePod v3.9.8

The new Noctua indeed arrived as expected. I opened the packaging, read the minimal instructions (just a simple picture on the box), and opened up my PC case.

To recap, there are four fans:

• the CPU fan
• the power supply fan
• the front air intake fan
• the rear exhaust fan

I quickly unscrewed the rear fan screws, and replaced the fan with the brown Noctua fan. The fan comes with regular metal screws, and also rubber “vibration” connectors, which look sort of like brown pawn chess pieces. Supposedly, I can use these instead of the screws to minimize the vibration and noise. Well, I’m game. Replacing and securing the new fan with the rubber thingies was a breeze. I decided to test it out at the stock fan speed initially. I can always swap out and switch it to a lower RPM later.

Verdict? It works, and it’s much quieter. Problem? Now the front air intake fan is noisy in comparison. I checked it out, but couldn’t figure out to adjust and lower the fan speed. There should be a switch, but I couldn’t find it. Since the front fan is only optional, I disconnected it. So far, the PC internal temperature is running cool at around 38 degrees Celsius, and the PC is now whisper quiet.

Eureka!

Let me take a few minutes to talk about the new PC. As you may have read, I recently got a new PC on the last day of 2011. It took a while, but it’s finally here. I brought it home Saturday evening, and spent New Year’s Eve watching Crazy Stupid Love and backing up (and later transferring) my data to the new PC. What’s the verdict so far?

Well, it’s pretty good. I like having a fast, responsive machine. Four CPU cores, 8 GBs of RAM, and a super-fast video card helps, of course. However, I must admit that the whole experience doesn’t feel quite right though. I’m missing a few things.

• I want my new desk. With large tracts of land. I know it is at IKEA, but I just need to get it.
• I want my big 24″ monitor. I’ve narrowed down the future monitor to either the Dell UltraSharp U2412M or Dell UltraSharp U2410 monitors. Both have good review, plenty of ways to adjust them, and I get an employee purchase program discount through work.
• I want a new keyboard and mouse. My long-lived Logitech Cordless Duo MX isn’t compatible with 64-bit Windows 7 . The keyboard is working, but I’ve swapped in a [gasp!] corded Logitech mouse. Not ideal, and it is irking me.
• Our long-lived Epson Perfection 1660 flatbed scanner isn’t compatible with 64-bit Windows 7 either. It’s currently unplugged, awaiting eventual replacement.
• While I’m glad the PC runs cool due to all the fans, the rear exhaust case fan is LOUD. I like a quiet PC, and this sounds like jet engine.

So let’s talk more about the loud case fan. I’ve got four fans in the PC, but the rear fan is the loudest. I considered living with it, but it’s annoying me too much. Way too much. I did some research this morning, and ordered a Noctua case fan that runs quiet (adjustable with 3 different speeds.)  It’s an Austrian product, and a weird brown color, but I don’t care. I want a quiet nexus to my digital life. I ordered from my favorite retailer Amazon.com, and it’ll be here by tomorrow. Egads, they’re fast. Wednesday night, I’ll be replacing the fan, and hoping that this improves the situation.

The new PC, circa 2012

The Noctua NF-S12B case fan: silent but deadly