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Cutting the cable

I’m an entertainment junkie. I own hundreds of music CD’s, books, movies and am an early adopter of Blu-Ray. My usual routine once my two youngest children are in bed at 8 pm is to plop down on my couch, put my notebook on my lap and use that while watching my pretty 60″ TV.

I’ve received my TV content from DirecTV for the last ten years since we built this house – primarily because I’m a huge (American) football fan, and my team, the Green Bay Packers, are out of market where I live and DirecTV has a monopoly on the NFL package to be able to watch my team.

I’ve been happy with the television service (even though it’s the most compressed of all high-def signals) but their customer service is atrocious. About once a year I have a run-in with them that gets my blood boiling, but the other 364 days of the year I don’t have to think about them – it just works.

Almost a year ago I got a great deal on a Mac Mini and bought it to try out Boxee. I’ve ripped my music and movie collection to my NAS and Boxee gave me the ability to stream that straight to my TV plus their collection of Internet content I could stream as well, such as The Daily Show, Hulu and more. My best friend uses Plex, and both Plex & Boxee are based on the XBMC upstream code which does an awesome job of playing back any file you throw at it.

I’ve loved Boxee – the user experience has only gotten better from the Alpha to the Beta that launched today (the screenshots don’t do it justice). I’ve thought about, but never very seriously, getting rid of DirecTV and going Internet only. With Netflix streaming (both in Boxee and on my Xbox 360), Hulu and other apps available in Boxee, there’s a lot of content I can get if I’m willing to be patient for DVD releases of my favorite shows that I can’t watch in real time.

And then in early November, my DirecTV high-def DVR started to die. And it was a painful experience having to call in to their tech support once a week, rebooting my box every few days until they finally agreed to swap it out a month later (I pay $5 / month to lease the box from them – I don’t even own it!) I was pretty frustrated with the entire process, and this is a long enough story as it is, so I won’t go in to all the details, but when I received my bill in early December and found out they charged me $20 to replace the box, I was livid. They never bothered to inform me of the charge or asked for permission in charging me, and you may think “It’s only $20!” – but when I called to ask them to refund it, they refused – so I asked them to refund my $100 monthly charge for November as my box didn’t work and I didn’t feel that I received the service I paid for and they still refused, I started to think about all these options.

After a long conversation with my wife on the advantages and disadvantages of not having cable or satellite (she doesn’t watch TV anyway) I’ve decided to cut the cord. I’m lucky enough to have a nice HDTV antenna on my roof right next to the satellite dish and all the coax terminates at one spot in the basement, so re-wiring won’t be tough.

We spend just under a $100 month on DirecTV (cheapest package, 3 boxes for 3 TVs, DVR service and HD service). I figure with a small investment in buying some new hardware it will pay itself back in 3 months (considering I had already bought the Mac Mini a year ago):

  • HD Homerun: Dual tuner off-air HD tuner with a network jack that any PC in the house can connect to for watching or recording live TV: $150
  • HD amplifier & terminators: $35
  • Digital converter boxes for the other 2 TVs in the house to get off-air: $20 each off Ebay
  • Elgato EyeTV PVR software for Mac: $80 (maybe, see below)

The one kink in my plan is I realized that if I buy the EyeTV to record TV on to the Mac Mini it can only record one show at a time, even though I have a dual-tuner HD Homerun. There are a few shows like NBC Thursday night comedies and Fringe on Fox that I like that air at the same time, so that’s a challenge. One of the major reasons I bought the HD Homerun is the fact that’s dual tuner but also that it has a network jack and works on Linux. One option is to install MythTV on an older computer and use that. MythTV has native support for the HD Homerun and I can mount my NAS via NFS and just point Boxee at it, though there are some questions whether Boxee and XBMC can read the .nuv files that MythTV records in.

It’s a pretty cool time seeing these convergence devices come to life. The Internet is evolving to add video content, whether it’s TV shows like Hulu or movies & DVD on Netflix. CES is happening this week and seeing the Boxee Box, Popbox and Iomega set top boxes only support this point. There are still some challenges – I’m going to have to give up watching my favorite football team, live sports on ESPN, and waiting to watch some of my TV shows until they release on DVD, but I think it’s worth trying.

The content companies are going to have to evolve. They’re going to need better customer service and better ways to allow consumers access to content. (And I’m willing to put up with the movie studios stupid rental window on Netflix if it means more streaming content). My hardware arrived today and now I’m off to start installing all this stuff….

eBook Readers & the Publishing Industry

I’ve been wanting an eReader for a while. When the Kindle first launched, I was in awe. I quickly sat down and calculated the number of books I buy in a year and compared that against the cost of a Kindle and the savings of buying an e-book for $10 vs. the hardcover price. Let’s just say there wasn’t much of a savings. I finally got to touch a Kindle at GUADEC this summer, and my mind was made up that I had to have an eReader in the near future.

I love tech gadgets and am an early adopter. I also love content and media, and own hundreds (if not over a thousand now) music CDs, hundreds of movies (including Blu-Ray that I bought over 2 years ago), and tons of books. My bookshelves are full to bursting in my office, and I have boxes of books stored in my closet without room to display them.

I’ve waited patiently debating an eReader. I travel once or twice a month for work, and having an eReader would definitely save space. This week, my flight was delayed hours on Tuesday, and then canceled later that night. I had finished the book I had brought an hour after getting to the airport, and then bought another one swearing in my head the whole how I wished I had a an eReader.

The good news is that when Barnes & Noble announced the nook last month that I pre-ordered one. As much as I love Amazon (I buy almost everything there now – movies, music, books and electronics) I found the nook more aesthetically pleasing as well as it was running Android, and the formats they’re using seem a bit more open than the Kindle. (My nook is supposed to ship tomorrow, still crossing my fingers with all the delays they’ve had for the last week or two!)

But now comes word that the publishing industry doesn’t get it and is fears change and the changing financial models. It’s rumored that Amazon loses $2 per eBook bought, and now we are hearing the publishers want to delay new releases 4 months after the hardcover comes out but before the paperback comes out. When will content companies figure out that not giving consumers what they want is bad for business?

There are authors (Iain Banks, Chuck Palahniuk, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman) that I will always buy the physical copy. I want to continue to build on my collections and there is a tactile difference in having a physical book. But I will buy many more books once I have my nook. I’ve already been adding to wishlist on bn.com for the moment my nook arrives. I have dozens of posts tagged “books” in my RSS reader that I want to buy. The fact that they’re slightly cheaper as an eBook and no shipping is nice, but having immediate wireless delivery right to my eReader is even better.

So the publishers are worried that Amazon (and to a lesser degree Barnes & Noble) have set a pricing ceiling of $9.99 per book. We’ve been through this argument before – the record industries felt Apple had set a similar ceiling that songs were only worth $0.99 and now we’ve seen new releases and popular tracks increase to $1.29 this year. And that’s ok. I worked in the retail industry for 15 years and have been through anti-trust training a couple of times. The publishers can set their price and the retailer can sell it for whatever they want.

If the publishers are so worried, why are they not raising the cost of the books? If Amazon is losing $2 per book, that means the cost to Amazon is $12. If the publishers raise it to $15, it will make the retailers re-consider whether losing more money is acceptable. While the publisher can’t dictate the actual retail price sold, they do have options. And lowering the cost after it’s been released a while happens all the time across all retail categories. There is no reason that months after the release the cost comes down and the retailer can re-price, at say, $9.99. This is seen all the time in the movie space, though rarely in music. Now that we are starting to have competition in the eReader space there are all kinds of tricks the publishers can do to partner with the retailer to save the retailer money on the back end as well, including marketing development funds, sell through credits and more.

But for the publishers to flatly state “We won’t release an eBook for 4 months” won’t make consumers happy. Nor, in my opinion, will it make consumers buy a hardcover once they’ve invested $200-$400 in an eReader. I’ve learned this lesson – I rarely buy a movie on new release day for $20-$30 when I subscribe to Netflix and know if I wait 3-6 months I can probably get it for $10-$15 on sale (I just got Watchmen on Blu-Ray for $10 last week!).

At this point, it’s difficult to read the future. These statements from the publishers could just be posturing as they dig in for negotiation with the retailers. But I’m not hopeful. There are plenty of lessons for content providers to learn from in the music battles of the last 10 years. And if there is one lesson they should employ, it’s to extend and embrace the new models rather than try to prop up a dying business model. Change is hard – and if consumers want to buy more books because they have an eReader, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to figure out how to do that, rather than making it harder for consumers to buy from them.

Banshee Documentation

I’ve been working on Banshee documentation on and off for the last few months (ok, more off than on) but as I get more comfortable writing in Mallard and the recent discussion in getting Banshee on the GNOME release cycle I am motivated to get this to done.

The most important part of writing documentation (or writing in general) is the planning phase. A few of us on the Docs team did a first pass at planning the topics that should be in the user help of Banshee in Google Wave, and I’ve copied that over to the GNOME wiki.

If you use Banshee, please give it a look – are there any topics missing that you think a user would want help with? Writing user help in Mallard gives us the ability to organize topics into groups – for a good example, check out the Empathy help. What’s missing? What would you organize differently?

Do you want to help? Have you written about Banshee features before? Let me know – either add content to the wiki page or post a link as a comment on my blog. If you have written a howto for Banshee, we’d love to include it – the new GNOME help is CC 3.0 licensed, so it’s easy to add from other sources, as long as it’s licensed as CC-SA 3.0. Please don’t feel you have to know how to write documentation or use Mallard – you can create a sub-page on the wiki for the topic and I will be more than happy to help edit it, convert it to Mallard and commit to git. Right now the important thing is to make sure we have the topics right and get some first drafts of the actual help created. I appreciate all help and would rather not do it all myself if at all possible!

There is a Banshee Docs branch on Gitorious – if you do know Mallard and want to help let me know and I’ll get you added to the team. If you don’t know Mallard, let’s start writing some howto’s in the wiki!

GNOME Journal Issue 17 out!

I’m two days late blogging about the latest release of GNOME Journal (and thanks to Danni for mentioning it!).

This is a very special issue written by women in the open source community. It’s the first time we’ve done a themed issue and all articles are by women in the open source community. Also, with the exception of Danni and Stormy who have written for GNOME Journal before, all are first time writers for GJ!

Women in open source (and the IT industry in general) is a topic I’m passionate about, having seen it first hand in a few different ways. My wife worked in the IT industry (at the same employer I did) for 8 years and I also helped manage the Geek Squad at Best Buy for a number of years before leaving 2 years ago. Having over 10,000 computer technicians there was definitely a lack of diversity and talent, including women, which is / was a focus area for the organization.

I’m proud to have helped manage the release (though it was a bit later than I had hoped due to my lack of time management skills). The idea for this issue came from the GNOME Women community, and they found the writers and drove this issue. Thank you!

We have eight articles in this issue (a record!):

  • Telepathy, Empathy and Mission Control 5 in GNOME 2.28
  • Telepathy Overview
  • The Un-Scary Screwdriver
  • Where are they now? The Participants of the 2006 Women’s Summer Outreach Program
  • Easy Breezy Beautiful GNOME Shell
  • GNOME desktop testing automation and how to use Mago
  • Epiphany from a – not so experienced – user perspective
  • An Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

We also had a number of new editors help out, and I’d like to personally thank Zonker and Sumana for all their help in making this release happen.

Go read it now!

Google Wave

Almost two months ago, Nigel Tao posted on his blog offering Google Wave invites to the GNOME community. I commented and requested some invites for the Documentation Team, with Nigel graciously granting the request, and he asked for some feedback after using Wave for the last month and a half or so.

Some of the feedback that I shared with him, in no particular order:

  • We in the Docs team have used Wave to do document planning. (Before writing anything, the most important thing you can do is plan, plan plan). Wave has been really useful that each member of the team will edit the Wave with the topics for the help file we plan to write, and then use the reply feature in the Wave to add comments. Especially being a distributed team, with two of us in the US and 2 in Europe, it’s been helpful. A wiki page would work about the same, but the fact that you can have the main Wave used for the document and see the feedback and comments in-line is nice.
  • We really haven’t used Wave for real-time collaboration, with the exception of doing last month’s meeting minutes for our monthly team meeting. I do like Wave for a use case like that better than Gobby, especially with Wave’s ability to add bullets and formatting.
  • One nice thing about Wave when doing documentation planning was how easy it was to add the lead developer of an app we were doing the planning for. He was then able to review what we were planning, and add feedback and suggestions.
  • One of the challenges in using Wave at this point in time, is the limited number of people using it. I think as it expands and grows, the use cases and adoption will grow exponentially.
  • Other things I’ve used Wave for include some of the GNOME Marketing hackfest planning and projectmallard.org planning. It’s helpful, and as mentioned above, I prefer Wave over a wiki, especially when formatting text such as bullets.

One thing that took me a while to figure out, which I finally figured out with a suggestion from a friend via Twitter, was how to do public searches. I’m interested in buying a Droid phone, and I did a search for “Droid” waves which was pretty cool when the search results came back and I could see all the public Waves about Droid.

Is Wave an email killer? In my opinion, not yet, but it has potential. Wave, to me, has awesome potential for group communication, but I’m not sure I’d use it over email for one to one communication.

(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using a “proprietary” tool to do open source work. It was a test, and I like doing stuff on the cutting edge, so no comments in the blog about this please).

Thanks again Nigel!

Marketing Hackfest (Part 1)

I’m overdue in recapping some of my thoughts of the Marketing Hackfest. Overall, the hackfest was a success and now we begin the hard work in recapping everything we talked about, making it actionable and doing the work!

One of the best things about the hackfest, in my opinion, was the cross-section of people who attended. Each individual had different strengths and views of GNOME and it served to remind me of the different groups who use GNOME and how they use it.

I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard helping facilitate and I’m still sorting through all the notes we discussed. Somewhere Shaun has some video as well.

A lot of our discussion was centered on GNOME 3.0 and how we can communicate to our users and our downstream partners of the features and benefits of GNOME 3.0. If you think back to the email Vincent Untz sent this past April on behalf of the Release Team, GNOME 3.0 has three goals:

  • Revamp our User Experience
  • Streamlining of the Platform
  • Promotion of GNOME

That third goal is why we got together and the bulk of what we discussed. We touched on what GNOME 3.0 is; GNOME’s overall branding; marketing GNOME to users and how to improve our partnerships with downstream distributions such as Fedora, OpenSolaris, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

But it wasn’t all just discussion ’round the campfire! We did a lot of work on creating materials for volunteers who host a GNOME booth at a conference. We wrote the copy for a new brochure explaining what GNOME is; created a Frequently Asked Questions for those hosting a booth with answers to questions they should expect from conference attendees; and wrote core messages and speaking points when talking to attendees.

We also discussed in detail the Friends of GNOME program and did some work on an upcoming fundraising drive.

And lastly we’ve started to work on presentation materials for volunteers who may want to give a presentation on GNOME. We still have a ways to go to finish this work, but using the awesome template Vinicius created, we envision having a number of presentations available that can be used as building blocks for someone who wants to give a presentation on GNOME. Some of these include:

  • GNOME History (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (5 minutes)
  • Getting started using GNOME (5 minutes)
  • Getting started developing GNOME (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (45 minutes)

And lots of others – the above are just examples of templates with content someone could take and mix and match together to put together the bulk of a presentation they might want to give.

Lastly, we also spent some time talking about the GNOME Marketing community and how we can work together, communicate effectively, mentor new members and tackle some of our action items. We’ll start by having IRC Meetings where we can recap some of the discussion topics from the hackfest, discuss ideas from the community on improving how we market GNOME and hopefully have some of the community members volunteer to tackle some of the action items and next steps in creating marketing materials for GNOME. Look for the announcement in the next couple of days to help pick a time for that meeting, and similar to the Bug Squad, we’ll use Doodle.com to try and find a time that works for as many people as possible.

More to come!

GNOME 3.0 talk this weekend!

My scheduled talk at the Penguins Unbound LUG in St. Paul, MN has been moved up one week to this Saturday, November 14th at 10:00 a.m. (Minnebar, the Minnesota Barcamp was recently announced for November 21st conflicting with the meeting).

I will be presenting “An Introduction to GNOME 3.0” talking about GNOME, its history, and where GNOME is going with the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release next year. If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area come join in the fun.

I look forward to seeing you there!

GNOME Marketing Hackfest & Chicago GNOME Meetup

We are just days away from the Marketing Hackfest in Chicago, IL. Thanks to Novell and Google’s sponsorship, nine of us are converging in Google’s Chicago office for two days.

While we’re there, we’d like to invite any Chicago GNOME users and developers to join us for a drink or bite to eat Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at the Rock Bottom Brewery at One West Grand Ave.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Sponsored by GNOME

Mallard Documentation

Did anyone watch The Office last Thursday night? Early in the episode, Dwight gives Jim a wood duck with a walkie-talkie built-in so Dwight can spy on Jim.

Jim: Thanks for the duck

Dwight: It’s not a duck, it’s a mallard!

This had me chuckling thinking about Mallard documentation. For the record, mallards are a much more beautiful duck than wood ducks.

There’s been a lot going on in the world of GNOME documentation. Mallard has been getting a lot of buzz, in the #docs IRC channel, on Twitter and identi.ca, the mailing list and blogs. People have taken notice of the new Empathy documentation with its new layout and focus on topic based documentation.

Here’s just a few of the things going on:

  • We’ve expanded our monthly GNOME Docs meetings, and we’re practically meeting every other week now. We’ll be having a working session in our next meeting November 8th focused on what a new GNOME User Guide (Shaun hates calling it a User Guide!) will look like for GNOME 3.0. Shaun came back from the Boston Summit with lots of ideas and discussions around user help and the work we’ll need to do for GNOME 3.0.
  • Milo Casagrande, author of the new Empathy help, recently blogged about his experience in writing the Empathy help. He includes the process he went through, writing per page topics and also includes code samples. If you’re looking into getting involved in writing GNOME documentation, his blog is a must read.
  • For the GNOME 2.29 cycle, I’m committed to writing new Tomboy help in Mallard as well as adding help to Banshee for the first time. I’m starting with Tomboy as its help is a bit more basic than Banshee which has more advanced features. I’ve created a docs branch in Tomboy’s GNOME git and have been adding pages over the last week or two to get up to speed on Mallard. I have to say, writing docs in Mallard is ten times easier than Docbook. The XML markup just makes sense and is so much simpler than Docbook.
  • For Banshee, I have a git branch on Gitorious. I’ve checked out the code again after not working on it for a couple of months and have started working on it.
  • Nigel hooked some members of the Docs team up with Google Wave invites. It’s been interesting trying out Wave for collaboration for Docs writing. Not so much writing the actual documentation, but it’s been helpful for planning the pages, which is the most important part of any writing. With us half a world apart we haven’t really had a chance to use Wave for real time collaboration which I think it’s more suited for, but it’s been helpful. At this point a wiki would probably work just as well, but I do like the threaded view which makes it easier to see when changes or updates were made in Wave.
  • Shaun is off working feverishly on a new Yelp help browser for GNOME 3.0. Details are scarce at this point, but he seems excited.
  • We’ve also launched ProjectMallard.org. It’s our goal that the Mallard XML schema is used in more than just GNOME. It’s early in Mallard’s development so no big announcements, but it’s helpful to think about user help in FOSS on a greater scale. The webpage is just a place holder at this point, but we have plans to add information on what Mallard is, how to get started including code samples, tools, specifications, extensions and more.
  • We’re planning on having a GNOME Docs meetup in Chicago on November 9th prior to the marketing hackfest. Jim Campbell from XFCE might stop by but unfortunately Nixternal of KDE fame will be out of town.

Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Documentation. Stop by on IRC in #docs on GimpNET or join the mailing list, we’d love to share what is going on with Mallard and how we are planning to make user help a better experience.

GNOME Marketing Hackfest

Three weeks from today members of the GNOME Marketing team will converge on Chicago for two days of work, brainstorming and fun.

With thanks to Google for hosting us and Novell for sponsoring us, we’ll set aside two days to work on:

  • GNOME Presentation materials. We want to make it easy for for volunteers to represent GNOME at conferences, including presentations, booth materials such as banners and brochures for the GNOME Event Box and more.
  • Writing and reviewing content for the new www.gnome.org
  • GNOME 3.0 planning
  • …and more!

We have information up regarding the hackfest on the GNOME Wiki, including our hackfest goals, location information, attendees and more. (This page is a first draft, more details soon and thanks to everyone who has contributed to the page).

Want to come? Now is the time to sign up! The GNOME Travel Committee has been approving applications the last couple of days, and we have room for more. Plan on coming, but haven’t added your name to the wiki page? Please do!

We’ll also be having a GNOME Meetup Tuesday night, so if you’re in the Chicago area check back soon for location details. Chicago has a thriving FOSS community and I’m looking forward to visiting Chicago again.

See you there!