My Life in the Tech World

My friends at Foodista Friends  are posting some great recipes. Check out their site.

Air Video allows you to stream your videos to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices. I like it and recommend that you give the free version a try. Here's how to set it up in a few minutes. Air Video Air Video has two parts. The first part is a server that runs on your desktop machine at home or whenever your videos are stored. The server essentially reads the local videos (that you've configured to be viewable) and publishes them for your mobile devices. In some cases, that requires that the videos be converted to a format for your mobile device. This conversion can happen in real time (Air Video "Live Conversion") if you have at least a Core 2 Duo processor on your desktop. Live conversion allows you to watch the video instantly. The videos may also be converted in batch mode. You basically say you want to convert a video and it will be available to watch as soon as the conversion finishes. Step 1) Install the Air Video Server  on a fast machine with access...

My two year old Lexus LS is in the shop getting valve springs replaced as part of a recall. Apparently, a small percentage of these springs have impurities in the metals which may cause them to break apart. The job is going to take several days so I have a loaner ES 350. I've taken this opportunity to check out the new electronics in the ES 350. Lexus made several improvements to bluetooth support versus my system. First, they added a "phone" label to the "Info" button so that users can actually find the phone setup. This change alone probably saves new Lexus drivers thousands of minutes everyday. The on-screen menus are also improved so I was able to setup handsfree in just a few seconds. The phone power and signal meters are also accurate which isn't true with the LS screens. The LS often indicates incorrectly that the phone battery is near death or that I have signal when I don't. The biggest improvement is bluetooth audio support. Music can be stre...

The latest piece of equipment for home theater puzzle is an  Acer AspireRevo AR3700 . It's a very small nettop PC that can easily be hooked up to a TV using HDMI. My plan was to load the amazing XBMC application  onto the device, point XBMC at my library of ripped movies, and then enjoy watching. I also wanted to keep Windows 7 installed in case I needed other Windows applications. By the way, for those who already know Google TV and Apple TV you can think of XBMC as a much better application for playing back content on your home network. Maybe someone will port it to Google TV one day. After cabling up the Revo 3700 I spent some time removing all the extra software Acer had loaded onto the system. Then I ran windows update and loaded XBMC. I configured XBMC to use files on an SMB server and started playing some video. It worked but the video stuttered quite a bit. I worried that the Revo did not have enough horsepower to play 1080p video so I put some video on a USB dri...

Tried to sign up for Google IO today at about 11AM but by the time I loaded the registration page the conference was sold out. 5000 seats sold out in less than an hour! I understand the excitement. Talks detailing Google's latest APIs, a few free gadgets, and access to Google engineers. Personally, I really wanted to hear about GWT. Access Denied! Poor me.

The family was at the mall over the weekend and decided to buy an Apple TV so that we'd be one step closer to having a complete set of internet TV devices. The current Apple TV device is a small black box about the size of a stack of a few fancy drink coasters. You know the kind with cork on the bottom. It comes with an aluminum Apple remote and a power cord. The packaging is amazingly spare and elegant. You need to supply the HDMI cable. Apple conveniently sells a matching black HDMI cable in the store. I was disappointed that the cable wasn't included in the box because you'll absolutely need one to connect to your TV. You might say cable length matters but honestly the Apple TV is so small that you won't have any trouble placing it near your TV or even velcro'd to the back. Getting the device out of the box and physically connected to the TV took no more than five minutes. I powered the Apple TV on using the remote. There is no physical power button. Then I...

A friend of mine just built a web store for her favorite kids clothes store. She tells me that little girls love Banana Cabana Bathing Suits . Check out Kids Only Los Altos if you have time.

Google TV got an update. The most important thing for me is the improved Netflix interface. It's now essentially the same as Netflix on Wii, Xbox, and PS3. I haven't noticed any other GTV changes that are significant to me. That said, the new Netflix interface is a great improvement. Sony Google TV Remote. It's got a wooz button! For the last few weeks I've been watching more Google TV. Since we're a Tivo/Comcast household we have all our broadcast shows stored on the Tivo. I tried to play some HD video pulled from my Tivo. I downloaded the video using a web browser, ran tivodecode ,  and copied it to a server. The video plays with VLC and Windows Media Player. It did not play on Google TV's media player. In fact, sadly, playing the Tivo video actually locked up the Google TV so that it wouldn't respond to the remote control or power button on the TV itself. Wow. Eventually the Google TV asked if I wanted to force quit the media player. This got me th...

I've been making the switch from Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 to Sony Vegas Pro 10. Up until buying an AVCHD camcorder two years ago I had been using Premiere exclusively. However, the lack of AVCHD in CS3 and the initial buggy AVCHD support in CS4 prompted me to look for alternatives. I tried out the trial version of Vegas Pro and found that it was rock solid editing AVCHD, had great export options, and seemed more modern than CS3 or CS4 because of its 64bit architecture support. More recently Vegas has improved their GPU acceleration and the UI has become more polished. Anyway, since I don't have all night to write this. I wanted to focus on the cool image stabilization feature that isn't included in CS4. I had some old very shaky handheld footage I shot at a friends wedding using a Hi-8 camcorder. I searched the internet to see if there was anything I could do to fix it. Turns out that Vegas Pro has an amazing video stabilization feature. Basically, you just select...

Just wanted to give an update on my last post about the Vais VML MultiMediaLinQ . Over the last several months I've had a lot of different devices connected to it. I'm happy with the VML but I hadn't found a storage device that worked perfectly. All the mechanical USB drives I connected would occasionally go offline requiring me to unplug the USB cable to reset everything. Turns out those mechanical drives don't like speed bumps or cold weather. Who knew? Even thumb drives sometimes needed a reset (probably not due to speed bumps). The most stable device has been the iPod which never needs a reset but the sound quality is degraded for some music. I'm not clear on technical reasons why that would happen but I suspect there is some issue in the conversion from digital to analog. I should mention that this is only true for my older 60GB iPod. Music from my iPhone sounds perfect. I would use my iPhone but I don't want to use up all the space on the device for mu...

Television used to be a bug free zone. Now it's a computer science problem complete with bugs. I was reading David Pogue's review of Google TV . Having recently purchased one I can say that he is spot on with many of his points. In general, the usability of the device needs a lot of work. It's not just surface stuff either, it's deep and pervasive from the controller to the GUI. The pain starts with the initial setup. Why? Because it is exactly like doing a Windows OS install. Several updates and reboots with a full set of wizards to run through. The updates took an hour on my relatively fast Comcast cable connection. I understand the need for updates but why can't the device start up and play while doing the updates in the background? This is a TV right? By adding new unneeded buttons and interface conventions somehow Google managed to make the controller (which is essentially a full keyword and mouse) more complicated than a keyboard and mouse. It's got ...

What my 11 year old son thinks of washing the car

Valve Springs? What about the Navigation System? or the paint?

Is it just me or do Apple and Facebook seem like a perfect pairing? Facebook has the web version of what should be the social bits of iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, and iTunes. In iLife, Apple has the desktop tools to enhance the social web experience. Apple also has the hardware and OS to make Facebook a much more integrated experience for users. Based on what I've seen of Windows Phone 7 Microsoft has got the idea. Facebook's advertising is just starting out. It would be a real winner combined with iTunes and Apple TV. Google is already going there. Apple needs a cloud presence and Facebook already lives there. They should move in together.

When I bought my LS460 the self parking and Mark Levinson audio options were bundled together. I wanted the audio but I didn't want the self parking so I decided against the whole package. A few months later I regretted not getting the self parking just because so many people asked about it and wanted to see it demoed. I realized that it was an option that made the car special. It was also clear that both the marketing and the feature itself had captured people's imagination. Now even though I wanted to have the option I still think that I wouldn't really use it. But I'm wondering what people that bought self parking have to say. Does anyone have something they can share? Do you use the self parking? Does it work? Is it just a gimmick?

More than 20 years ago I worked on an autonomous vehicle project. We had very little funding but managed to put something together that could follow roads, detect and avoid obstacles, and reach its target destination. Since that time I've known it would eventually be possible to replace a human driver with an automated system. There have been a lot of advances since that time with the DARPA Challenges demonstrating progress this decade. Honestly, I always thought it would be one of the big auto companies such as Ford, GM, Toyota, or Honda who would be the first to announce a significant real world demonstration. After all, they make cars, and they should have a lot of research dollars going towards automated driving. So I was a little shocked to read that Google is out on the roads with automated cars (probably for their "street view" application though they don't mention it in the blog post). Google is amazing! It's great that they see so many things as comp...

It's become popular to use Adobe Flash cookies for tracking user behavior. Generally, this is a way for websites and analytics companies to get around your browser privacy settings. Why? Because Adobe Flash has its own privacy settings that are overlooked by most users. You need to go to Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager to adjust your settings. Personally, I don't mind normal browser cookies because they are easily removable, controllable, and well known by most normal users. Also, browser cookies are really useful for web applications to keep track of things such as your shopping cart and login status. However these Flash cookies are a different animal. Check out this example called " Evercookie " which demonstrates creating a cookie that's very hard to delete. Is there really a valid purpose for this? Anyway, I turn off all storage for Adobe Flash on my computer because I don't trust it. My internet connection is fast and I don't care if I need ...

Someday... I want a navigation system that listens to me while I'm driving. One that can listen in on my cell phone or in car conversation and when someone mentions an address or phone number it queues it up ready to be used in some hands free friendly way. One were someone can text me an address and then I can tell the car to go there. I want a navigation system that learns about my travel patterns. Forgetting privacy for a bit, I want a navigation system to remember where I go everyday. Once it knows where I usually go it can guess where I'm about to go. It can scan ahead for traffic and warn me before I hit it. It can tell me about alternate routes. It can make suggestions for changes in my travel routine to save gas or time. I want a navigation system that's social. I want to be able share what I'm doing on the road with family and friends. I want it to tell me what music are other people listening to on this road. I want it to tell me what restaurants peop...

My Lexus just turned two years old. We've had a good two years together. Even though I can't use the navigation system I've always taken comfort in the fact that the rest of the car is pretty much perfect. However that all changed a month ago when we went to the car wash. I was sitting on my usual spot watching the cars go through the giant blow dryer. I saw my black Lexus come out of the big car washing machine. One of the car wash boss guys was looking at my car. He pointed to one of other workers, then to my car, then made a motion indicating that the car needed a redo. So my car went through the wash again. The second time through I looked closer at my car and noticed that some of the spots on the car didn't come off. Oh the horror. A Spot Where the Lexus Paint is Etched At home I got out the polish and  worked on the spots. I got most off. But a few remained. Check out one them in the photo. On a side note, it's surprisingly hard to get a good picture ...

I doubt you could have missed the Google search interface change today. I like the feel of it and appreciate that they are really using my broadband connection. Hooray! I wonder if Comcast is cheering about the additional bandwidth usage? The New York Times said "it's as if [Google] is reading your mind." I don't agree with that. To me it's more like Google is telling me what other people are thinking. Google says the new interface is speeding up your search activity. Maybe. Google is definitely speeding up the rate at which they can show me ads. That's probably the bigger deal for the company. As a shareholder I hope other investors think the same way. Even though I like it and despite all the hoopla, it's an incremental improvement versus the automatic query form filling they were doing yesterday. I'm disappointed because the change is so small. What I would have liked to see is Google going further and predicting what my next search queries wi...