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2010

I have seen the future of TV

…and it is the ESPN app on the new Xbox 360 update that was released today.

I’ve been in the beta for the new Xbox 360 dashboard for the last month or so, and with its release today, the embargo on blogging about it has been lifted.

Since I cut the cord and got rid of cable TV last February, the one thing that has been missing is sports. I’ve been tied to whatever the four major networks want to shovel at me. And I’m a sports junkie. I’m a huge (American) football fan, cheering for both the University of Wisconsin Badgers and Green Bay packers, and as soon as football season ends I dive right into college basketball. Having been a DirecTV customer for ten years I would pay hundreds of dollars for the NFL Sunday ticket and the March Madness packages. I’ve also started getting back into MLB the last few years cheering for the Minnesota Twins. And this summer I could only watch them on Sunday afternoons – the only time they were available over the air.

The ESPN app on the Xbox 360 changes all of that. It’s amazing – especially for college football. Branding the app as “ESPN3”, it’s a repackaged version of ESPN360 with more content available live and on demand. If you have ESPN as a cable subscriber, you’ll get to watch the game they pick for you at 11am (CST) on Saturday. With ESPN3 on the 360 you have access to every game ESPN has rights to – 4 or 5 games at 11, and about the same at 2:30. Using my IP, they did blackout the 2:30 p.m. game if it was on ABC but I still had access to all the other games. And the best part was, you could choose to watch it live or you could start at the beginning if you were tuning in late. On the 360, ESPN3 offers full DVR functionality – you could pause, rewind and fast forward. A number of games are also archived for a few days and you can watch them on demand after the game was over. It was fantastic watching the Badgers beat the Buckeyes a week ago on ESPN3 – without having to pay for cable TV.

Other content available includes NBA games, a number of second tier college sports, and selected ESPN content. There is no NFL content, including Monday Night Football games – not a huge surprise, considering the draconian rules the NFL has to protect their brand. The available ESPN original content is the only thing I’m disappointed with. You only get some highlights and clips from SportsCenter – I didn’t expect the whole show, but I did expect more. But where it really lets me down is ESPN shows like Rome is Burning, Around the Horn, E:60 and PTI (especially PTI!) aren’t available. They might have one or two clips from each, though with the official launch today I can’t find PTI at all. I don’t know if it’s a rights issue that they don’t show these original shows as they features clips and highlights from the sports broadcasts themselves or why they’re not available, but I had hoped for more original content. And the updates too those clips, at least during the beta, weren’t very timely.

The only catch with ESPN3 on Xbox360 is you have to have a broadband provider who has partnered with Microsoft. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing it has to be someone who offers TV service of some kind. My dashboard shows co-branding with Comcast as I have Comcast cable internet service.

As a college football fan, and general sports fan, this fixes the one major downside I had in cutting the cable. It’s an awesome experience. Live and on-demand content available at my fingertips. This is what the future will bring once the content providers figure out their new business models. If they do.

Oh, and the Netflix app in today’s update finally added the ability to search so you don’t have to use your PC to add titles to your Instant Queue. Finally!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Taking Snowy for a Walk #4 – Meet the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

Photo: “Untitled” by Rach

We are just two weeks away from the Boston Summit which is also the site of the upcoming Snowy Hackfest. We’re cooking up all kinds of plans for the hackfest. Our goals include:

  • An HTML5 mobile client
  • Integrating note editing into Snowy so you can edit your notes in a web browser
  • Focus on the user interface

In other news, Snowy 0.5, “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel”, was released on Monday to coincide with the GNOME 2.91.1 release and Tomboy Online was updated to Snowy 0.5. There is a method to the madness in Sandy’s choice of release names – I have a GNOME sticker (or stickers) as a prize to the first person who can tell me. (Contest not open to Snowy developers. Must be a resident of Planet Earth. Other rules and restrictions may apply but probably not. I’ll pay postage.) Version 0.5 was a minor bugfix release – expect lots of big changes after the hackfest. (Note I just say after – can’t hold me to a date!)

We received some new UI mockups – check them out on the wiki! Here’s one:

Tomboy Online mockup

The second wave of alpha invites went out on Monday. If you’re on the list, you just got a bit closer to getting our invite! Thanks to our alpha testers, we’re getting some great feedback via email and Bugzilla. Keep it coming!

Lastly, I was added as an administrator to help with new account activation. Commence evil genius laugh.

About Snowy: _Snowy is a web-based viewer for your Tomboy notes. It’s written in Python using the Django web framework, and is licensed under the AGPL.

Tomboy Online is a deployment of the Snowy software on GNOME servers, intended to provide free note sync and online note access to all Tomboy users.

Please check out our website here: http://live.gnome.org/Snowy

  • in Digital
  • 1 min read

How much should an album cost?

Fast Company has coverage of The City music conference, where Rob Dickens, the former head of Warner Music in the UK argues that the success of the MP3 single necessitates radically slashing album prices.

Dickens’ theory is albums should cost about $1.50 to increase impulse purchases and combat piracy.  Interestingly, he predicts that major albums could go on to sell 200 million albums – or double what Michael Jackson’s Thriller sold.

Read the story and look at the graph between album sales and individual track sales.    You can pretty much see the rise of iTunes.

As someone who is an unabashed fan of albums, I love the idea.  I don’t buy music singles and I don’t even really make playlists – I buy and listen to an artist’s whole album at the time.  And I also agree with the price – the bulk of my impulse music purchases are Amazon deals – either daily deals for $3 – $4 or one of the hundred $5 albums they rotate monthly.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Help Bryen out

I can’t think of many worse ways to start a week than to read Bryen’s blog post this morning about having his equipment stolen as he travels to the Accessibility conference and hackfest. I was impressed to see how many of my friends shared the post in Google Reader to pass the news on.

I pinged Stormy to see if there was something we can do and and she let me know my co-worker Stephen Shaw was already on it. Stephen has set up a Pledgie to collect donations to help Bryen out. I’m pretty excited as I went out to lunch and after coming back I see we’re already halfway past the goal!

I first met Bryen almost a year ago at the first GNOME Marketing Hackfest in Chicago. It was great meeting him in person and understanding how he used GNOME gave me a better understanding for how important GNOME’s support for accessibility is. Since then, I’ve worked and talked with Bryen about GNOME marketing and openSUSE marketing and have really enjoyed working with him.

If you have a few dollars you can spare, please think about donating. Thanks!

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees Announced

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees have been announced for 2011.  While there are a few good nominees, including the Beastie Boys, Neil Diamond and Tom Waits, there are the not so good.  That list would include Bon Jovi, the J. Geils Band and Donna Summer.  While each of them have contributed to the history of rock & roll, let’s put them in perspective of some of the groups and artists snubbed by the Hall of Fame:

  • Peter Gabriel
  • Depeche Mode
  • Black Flag
  • The Replacements
  • Rush

When you consider that list, especially with Rush having been snubbed for over 10 years now, the Hall of Fame needs to re-visit their process.  It will be interesting to see who is actually inducted in a few weeks.


  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME 2.32 Screenshots needed

The GNOME 2.32 release notes need your help!

If you have a GNOME 2.31.x development environment, I’m looking for 2 or 3 screenshots:

  • GNOME desktop with either Nautilus (and some files and folders cut and ready to be pasted) OR 2.32 desktop with Empathy showing meta-contacts
  • Empathy with meta-contacts
  • Nautilus with some files or folders cut and ready to be pasted

When using the GNOME screenshot tool, you can select the entire desktop or the application with focus. No effects should be applie and you may need to turn Compiz off with some distros (otherwise the window borders aren’t visible).

A couple guidelines:

  • Screenshots must use the Clearlooks theme, a GNOME background / wallper and the default GNOME icons
  • The icon in the GNOME menu on the panel must show the GNOME foot, not a distribution logo
  • Your GNOME panel should be as clean as possible (If using Ubuntu, do not show the messaging menu in the panel)
  • If using openSUSE, your panel needs to be on the top
  • Your screenshots will be licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license

Sorry for all the rules! You will receive attribution in the release notes. Email them to me at pcutler at gnome dot org. Thanks!

Taking Snowy for a Walk – Issue 3: What users want

We launched the sign-ups for the upcoming Tomboy Online alpha last week. As part of the sign-up process we included a brief survey asking what features those signing up were interested in and to rate them on a scale of 1 – 5, which 5 being very interested.

We asked them to rate the following features:

  • Free note synchronization for Tomboy
  • Sharing my notes so other users can read them
  • Editing my notes from my desktop web browser
  • Native Android app (Tomdroid)
  • Native iOS app
  • HTML5 offline client (for all mobile desktop browsers)
  • Editing my notes from my mobile device (browser, native app, whatever)

Here are the results:

Tomboy Online Features

(If it’s hard to read, here is link to the png file too, squint really hard)

It’s a fairly small sample, but I’m still please to see so little interest in iOS and a huge interest in Android and HTML5.

Snowy was approved for a hackfest at the Boston Summit. The hackfest goals include match up nicely with the survey results. The goals include:

  • Mobile client for accessing and syncing notes
  • Implement UI / Design via CSS
  • Implement a text editor
  • Implement note sharing between users via the web interface
  • Prepare Tomboy Online for Beta release

And if there are any companies that want to help sponsor the hackfest, please let me or Stormy know!

We’re excited to be working on a web service that integrates with the GNOME Desktop. We have one bug to fix that’s delayed the alpha launch slightly. Thanks to everyone who has signed up and we’ll get the invites out ASAP.

  • in Hardware
  • 2 min read

The Needle Doctor is moving

The Needle Doctor, Minnesota’s premier retailer (and online retailer) of everything related to turntable hardware, is moving.

After I first bought my turntable in April, I had gone on a buying spree of used records.  Most of them needed cleaning and I also needed something to get the dust that would build up on my cartridge.  Doing some quick Google searches, I kept coming up with links to the Needle Doctor.  I was pretty excited to realize they were in Minneapolis.

One afternoon I printed out directions (yes, I live way out in the ‘burbs) and took Zoe, my six year old daughter, along for the ride.  We get there and I realize I didn’t need directions – they’re located in Dinkytown in the heart of the University of Minnesota campus.

Whether you need something cheap and basic like cleaning supplies to a new turntable to $1200 cartridges, the Needle Doctor has it.  When we visited, there were 3 or 4 people working up front and another 2 or 3 in the back of this tiny store front.   The customer service rep answered my questions (and confirmed I had picked out the right cleaning solution!) and took care of me.  After the sale was completed, I realized I had forgotten to pick up a 45 adapter for my turntable.  After I asked, he reached into a drawer and tossed me a used one free.  Now that’s service!

The Needle Doctor has everything online – I highly recommend them if you need to pick anything up for your turntable.  I’ll make sure to be visiting their new location – especially as it cuts down on the drive by 50%!

Make sure to read this article as it has more detail than the City Pages article linked above and gives you a feel for what Dinkytown used to be.