The Techcrunch "Editorial Independence" Drama

If you have not been following it - here are quick links

Posted by MG Siegler

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/the-end/

Michael Arrington is leaving not leaving not sure

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/editorial-independence/

Erick Schonfeld is the new Editor

Paul Carr leaving

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/last-post/

Erick Schonfeld accepts Paul's resignation

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/paul-i-accept-your-resignation/

iTunes - That's Entertainment

That's embarrassing...

Boxee and the art of watching movies

(Image courtesy - www.boxee.tv)

Finally got myself a boxee box (Dlink Boxee Box) after an endless discussion with myself. And the fact that my good friend and neighbor happened to be in the US at that time had absolutely nothing to do with it!

Amazon did a fantastic job of delivering it in 2 business days and I had the boxee with me in 4 days from the time I ordered it!

I'll be honest and say upfront that I was disappointed with the initial experience. I did use the Boxee app a lot in the US - the experience there was fantastic.

Setup was good and quick - but it did take a few hits and misses for it to pick up movies from my Linkstation Live LS-CHL. Lack of DLNA (uPnP) definitely was disappointing. I had to connect to the SMB share by typing in the IP Address and then it worked fine. The fan noise is also almost a deal breaker for me. I am sensitive to noise and any humming is definitely a no-no.  There's a good discussion on this elsewhere on the web...

Other things that didn't go well:

• No Power-on button on the remote!
• Standby mode just switches off the display - everything else (including the fan) is pretty much on in standby mode
• User experience through the remote was ok - with the keyboard on the reverse side being the face-saving point
• iPod Touch remote  app did not work (still does not - need to figure out why)

All was not lost however - and things started to change the moment I upgraded it to the latest version. Contrary to most folk (or at least from what I've read on the web) - I love the new interface. Since I mostly watch locally stored movies - it was a joy to watch Boxee play any format that I threw at it!

I even tried an online video - it was a Nat Geo/Discovery kind of movie and it played beautifully (took a few seconds to buffer - but the video quality was great!).  Even my VCD stored format plays decently through the Boxee. The browser app is a mess - but gets the job done. It is a pain moving the mouse around through the remote.

For improving the boxee box experience - some suggestions I would have:

 - Have a sleep mode that will only be woken up by the remote
 - A new browser app (I might build one myself)
 - Power button!!!

Overall the gizmodo review pretty much sums up my experience - "Good at one thing - bad at everything else".  I think the box is slowly growing on me - although it is far from being a cord cutter I thought it would be...


Links:
http://www.boxee.tv/

Apple refreshes the MacBook Pro line

As highly rumored, Thunderbolt (earlier called Light Peak) makes its way into Apple's MacBook Pro family.  A quick look at what is new:

• Intel Sandy Bridge - quad core i5 and i7 on the 15inch and 17inch models (13inch gets dual core i5 and i7 options)
• AMD Graphics (Radeon HD6490M on the 15inch and AMD Radeon 6750M on the 17inch models) Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics on the 13inch one. Goodbye NVidia!
• HD Camera (for better Facetime)
• Thunderbolt I/O
• Multi-Touch Trackpad

There is no Display Port (not even mini-HDMI/DVI) - and that's what's interesting about Thunderbolt (apart from "speeds up to 10 Gbps"). You can now connect devices with HDMI, DVI, and VGA over DisplayPort interfaces to the Thunderbolt port. Of course, this means a whole lot of HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort adapters to buy! Nothing surprising here - given Apple's penchant for getting you to always buy some kind of adapter.

All other things are pretty much the same - aluminum unibody, glass display and trackpad, although an intriguing thing is that Apple has not gotten rid of the Firewire port. With Thunderbolt coming in - I would have pretty much assumed that Firewire would die out...

Overall, the 15inch model looks highly tempting! I wish the 13inch one got these specs - I would have arranged for the small crack on my existing 13inch white Macbook to take its toll faster, thereby "forcing" me to upgrade ;-).

On a side note the 13inch White Macbook doesn't seem to have got any serious upgrades.

Which one will you be buying?

Links:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/apple-refreshes-macbook-pro-family-with-sandy-bridge-processors/

Back to blogging!

Back to getting this updated after almost nine months (nothing symbolic here to see - move along :-).

So what have I been doing you ask? Here, in no particular order, is a list of things that have kept me reasonably busy

• Switched from a full time job to a part-time consultant!
• Gadgets - acquired an iPad (no surprises), upgraded my Macbook to 4GB RAM (no I did not buy the RAM from Apple, but it is Mac Certified), upgraded to Snow Leopard, realized that I lost iPhoto (and couldn't find the original DVD for re-installation), waited for the Mac App store to buy iPhoto, tried to buy an Apple TV (thrice, without luck and now targeting a Boxee box). Also installed iWork and am getting used to Pages, Numbers and Keynote!
• Became a fan and avid user of Dropbox.
• Upgraded my Broadband (BSNL) to a 4Mbps plan! I'm getting upto 3.2Mbps on that - so can't really complain. Although the upgrade process caused some downtime on the internet (1 weekend - apparently BSNL changed the username password and forgot to inform me :-)
• Got healthy - got a bicycle, joined the gym (on and off  - mostly off).  

• Last, definitely not the least, Co-founded Entrib Technologies!

iPad - Review of Reviews!

So the iPad has been out for a week... "No!" I hear you say - "it's out tomorrow (Saturday) - have you been smoking pot?".

Well - it's out today (Saturday) for the common masses (actually, let me correct that) - for the the "Early Apple Adopters", but it has been out for a week for some very select tech reviewers (before you start - No, I did not receive one - contrary to expectations). Hey - I can dream, can't I.

Since I can't post a review here - I thought I'll do a "review of reviews".

I got the basic list from here - (The Apple Blog).

Here are my thoughts (in the order that I reviewed)

Read David Pogue's review for the NY Times first. Good take on doing two reviews effectively: one from a tech perspective and the other from a layman perspective. Not much depth - but good reading.

I then moved on to Stephen Fry's review for Time Magazine - loved the review, if only for the complete background and the humor. Also loved Jonathan Ive's take on why No Camera, No Flash, etc. Obviously we are talking total Apple fanboi here - so not much negative. The whole review is more on philosophical lines, and  I totally get where he is coming from. Makes me want to get the iPad today!

Next, on to Walt Mossberg's review, by far the most boring review. Actually put me to sleep while reading.

The PC Mag review is a true technical review - listing all features in detail. Even talks about stuff like the ambient senser light detector, etc. By far the most comprehensive review out there. Must read.

Also liked the Houston Chronicle review - especially the quote “Speaking of my wife, prior to our iPad’s arrival she said she didn’t understand why anyone would want or need an iPad. Now she just keeps saying, ‘No, you can’t have it back.’” I can pretty much visualized the same scene here at home.

Speaking of which, my request for an iPad got turned down by the bitter better half. Tried the - "let's get it for Mom" approach, that too didn't work as mom overheard and shot that down as well :-(

Any suggestions? Need a good convincing excuse reason to get an iPad. Now!

Quest for the right DNS Service

So I've (had) been using OpenDNS for the past year or so. It worked great for me in the US - and I wanted to continue using that here in India as well. This is a tale of domain names, pr0n sites (or my attempt to provide a safe internet at home), latency, youtube and privacy.

To those not in the know, DNS or Domain Name System, essentially maps a name like www.google.com to the actual IP address of the machine(s) that www.google.com resides on. So instead of remembering 209.85.153.104 you remember www.google.com. I'm simplifying this - but it gives you a fair picture.

The DNS lookup happens through a series of servers on the internet. When you configure your computer (or your router) to connect to the internet - you specify something called as a Primary DNS and a Secondary DNS (some routers even offer a Tertiary DNS). Usually these DNS servers are hosted by your ISP.

Sometime down the line there came third party DNS servers like OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) - based on a freemium model. Recently Google also launched their free DNS service (8.8.8.8).

The big question is - Should you be using one of these? Or do you stick to your existing DNS service.

When in the US - I had started using OpenDNS - primarily because it offered better response times, some level of adult content blocking (by virtue of not resolving said domain names), and well, I like to try out new stuff!. The adult blocking worked well in the US - but India was another story and I'll come to that in a bit.

Thus began my quest to answer the question "Which DNS Service should I use in India". The network at home looks something like this. I setup OpenDNS - and things seem to be working fine - till I noticed youtube performance not really being upto mark. I even got my broadband speed upgraded to try and deal with that - but the problem continued.

BUT,  I asked myself the same question that you're wondering - how does a DNS service make a difference to overall throughput? You're right - it shouldn't (apart from the time delay introduced due to the initial lookup), but what happens is this: If you observe the bottom of the browser window - when you click on a youtube video - you will see a series of look-ups happening - this actually will slow things down if your DNS takes time to respond to each of the look-ups. This article explains this in a more detailed manner. Essentially, as per the article, there was a problem early on with OpenDNS and youtube. I was not sure if that was also affecting me. The other problem I noticed was that OpenDNS did not block adult sites as effectively as it did in the US (I was just testing - honest!).

Around the time I was struggling with this - Google announced the launch of their DNS service - so I quickly switched to using Google DNS (hey - google pretty much knows everything about me - so why not even everything I browse as well :-). I did notice youtube performance improve - a couple of days after I switched to Google DNS. 

Still not being truly convinced - I continued the quest for the perfect DNS for my network and ....I 'll conclude the results of that in my next post: Benchmarking different DNS servers (expect some nice graphs in that one :-).