I got to be an early alpha tester on Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon 2.0 update. Nick has now made it available for wider testing via his blog (and previously the NewsGator support forum, though it wasn’t bloggable then) and it’s worth checking out.

The key things that I really dig about this update are:

• A hierarchical treeview for subscriptions. I find this much easier to navigate than the “one group/folder at a time” approach of earlier versions. It’s also easier to manage subscriptions in different groups.
• The “attention” stuff that lets you see what you’re spending the most time reading. I have far too many feeds in FeedDemon currently and it’s rare that I can keep up with all of them on a regular basis. Using some of these tools, it’ll be much easier to trim down my subscriptions to a manageable level. The reporting tools from the 1.6 beta (especially the dinosaur report) is good for this also, but there’s a distinction between “feed that updates infrequently” and “feed that has high value for me”. Some blogs update very infrequently, but when the do I want to pay attention to them.

Anyway, with the cat out of the bag, go forth and give it a shot. Nick has always been very receptive to feedback, so now’s the time to put it through its paces and report what you find. I’m still using 1.5 on my “main” machine, but I’m finding that the machine that’s been running the various 2.0 alpha builds has been getting more and more use.

Due to being in the “right place at the right time” last week at a local Circuit City, I was able to score an Xbox 360 Premium bundle. To start the games collection, I also got Project Gotham Racing 3.

Wow. This is an impressive device… not just from the gaming perspective (though the graphics for PGR3 are stunning), but also from the UI and “media” angle. It was easy to get up and running and converting my old Xbox Live account to run under the 360 took just a few minutes. The Xbox 360 can also talk to Windows XP machines on our home network to stream music and photos, so we’re considering it in place of the Tivo Home Media Option (which we like, but it has its limitations). If you’ve got a Media Center PC on your network, you can even stream video and use the 360 as an “extender” device.

Once I had it up, I spent nearly an hour and a half tinkering in the “Dashboard” before I ever put the game disc in. The Dashboard has a ton of things to explore:

• Lots of settings for customization and themes. I didn’t see a way to create custom themes, but there were lots available in the Xbox Live “Marketplace”.
• Set up your “gamer card” to include an avatar, which type of gamer you are (recreational, family, “underground”, etc), and other identity info. Again, I didn’t see a way to add your own avatar/icon, but there seemed to be plenty available through Marketplace.
• The hard drive came preloaded with one Xbox Arcade game (Hexic), a bunch of music files (most of which were from artists I’d never heard of… no surprise), and a handful of video files as well. Plenty to browse while you figure things out and it’s easy enought to delete them if/when you want to reclaim the space.
• You can rip your own music to the hard drive for listening (including listening during games, like the original Xbox), but even cooler was plugging in my Ipod and having the media page on the Dashboard instantly recognize it and provide a UI for playback — including playlists, genres, artists, etc. With that capability, I probably won’t see much need to rip discs directly to the drive. The console has 2 USB ports on the front and I get the impression pretty much any sort of USB device is fair game for media photos and music.
• Also in the Xbox Live Marketplace, you can download demos, trailers, and other things. Some for free and some require “Microsoft Points” (which you can buy through the console or apparently get preloaded cards at some retailers)… more below.
• Tinker with the music and photos using the Windows Media Connect application on an XP machine. Once it’s set up, the 360 recognizes song files, playlists, and photos and, like the Ipod, has a metadata-driven approach to navigation (artists, genres, albums, etc). This is in contrast to the Tivo’s “file system” approach to navigating music and photos on a network.

So then I put in the PGR3 disc and was blown away by the graphics and gameplay. I played PGR2 a lot on the first Xbox, but was never particularly great at it. The UI is fairly different with the new version, but there’s no question it’s a huge step forward in terms of visuals. You can pause the game and go into “Photo Mode”, which lets you fly around the track and take pictures with control over color, exposure, shutter speed, aperture, focal distance, and so on. The only downside I saw with PGR3 over the previous version was when trying to find a game on Xbox Live. With the previous version, I could tell it to search based on similar skill, range of cars, cities, tracks, type of race, and several other parameters. With this version, it seemed that I only had two criteria to choose from — type of race and the city. I’d have preferred to specify the car class (so I could use the car I’d practiced with offline) and skill range. My impression is that that the new Xbox Live system is more “skill” aware than in the past, so maybe that’s being factored in behind the scenes (didn’t help me from getting skunked, though).

Anyway, there have been just two things that I’ve come across that I don’t really care for.

Xbox Live Marketplace “Microsoft Points” for themes/icons: The idea here is that you prepay for points and can use them for things like themes, avatar, “arcade” games, and even to change your gamertag (the conversion factor for points to USD makes this change cost about $10… good enough to discourage constant changes to gamertags, but cheap enough to consider once if you hate the one you picked a couple years ago). Anyway, I was surprised to have to use points for things like themes and avatar icons. For the arcade games or things like music videos, having a micro-payments system makes perfect sense (a la Itunes). But do I really want to pay money to use an EA Sports-branded FIFA 2006 theme on my 360? A DOA4 theme? On the themes front, I also didn’t see a way to preview themes in advance of purchasing, but since I was going to shell out points to get a theme, it didn’t matter. Maybe down the road for an Arcade game or two, but not for themes and icons.

Xbox as Media Hub on multiple computers: After installing Windows Media Connect on a couple of machines in the house, I just had to choose which folder(s) on each machine were available on the network and which devices (the 360 in this case) could have access to those folders. Then in the “media” portion of the Dashboard, you connect to a machine to view the photos or listen to the music. This all looked great and definitely has the potential to replace Tivo’s Home Media Option for us (and we use the heck out of that Tivo feature)… except that the Xbox 360 UI won’t let you connect to more than one machine at a time. In our case, we have one computer that has all of our music on it (roughly 35GB)… it’s the one we run Itunes on and sync the Ipods with. However, we store all of our digital photos on a separate machine (maybe 8–10GB here). But in the 360’s Dashboard UI, you choose either “Music” or “Photos” and then you see a computer. That’s right, one. Singular. Uno. If you want to connect to another one, you have to first go to the Dashboard “System” UI and disconnect the first one, and then you go back to Photos or Music to connect to the new one. I did some Googling around to see if I was missing something somewhere, but couldn’t find any resolution. For now, that makes it enough of a pain to impact the Wife Acceptance Factor. I tried mapping a drive from the “music” computer to the “photos” computer and then making that drive available to Windows Media Connect on the “music” machine. This works, in that the 360 could then fetch photos and music from the same connection, but fetching photos in this way wasn’t very speedy (at ~4MB each). I really hope the Xbox team is working on a way to let the 360 “see” more than one machine running Media Connector on the network.

On a related note, I also found the UI for browsing photos to be inefficient. In that UI, it actually shows all directories that contain photos, even if those directories are subdirectories elsewhere. In this case, the “file system” approach to UI seems the best way to go… we organize our photos by year, then month, and then a descriptive folder name (e.g. “\2005\06\Elizabeth’s Birth”… on the 360, you’d see a browsable folder for “2005”, another folder for “06”, and a third for “Elizabeth’s Birth”. This makes it unwieldy when you have several folders named “Soccer Games” under different year\month combinations — you just see multiple folders named “Soccer Games” in the UI and can’t tell which year/month each belongs to.

Thankfully, both of these issues are software/service related… if Microsoft opts to, it can roll out updates to address these (and more). Even as it is, though, the 360 has really impressed me.

Within the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to use the del.icio.us service more and more. It’s called a “social bookmarking” service… and while brief, it’s not the best way to describe it. A (wordier) description would be “an online service that lets you bookmark sites and assign descriptive tags to those sites.” The “social” angle comes up in that your bookmarks are shared by other users of the service (they also provide some “antisocial” settings).

A tag is essentially a keyword that you define and you can use multiple tags for a single bookmark. If you’re familiar with Flickr for photos, it’s a similar service for bookmarks. Not coincidentally, both Flickr and del.icio.us have been purchased by Yahoo — Yahoo’s loving tags these days.

When I first checked it out last year, I thought it was a cool idea but I’ve got over a thousand bookmarks in Firefox. I’m fairly anal about categorizing them into folders and the thought of going through all of that to assign tags and descriptions wasn’t appealing. On the other hand, synchronizing those between machines and different browsers can be a hassle… and they’re not accessible from other machines. Enter the “del.icio.us Loader for Firefox” by Julian Bez. With this tool, you upload your Firefox bookmarks.html file, assign some tags, and run it. It will show you all the bookmarks it found in the file and let you visit each, add/remove tags, etc. I found that splitting my bookmarks.html file into multiple .html files made this process easier. It took some tweaking, but it was worth it when it came time to assign tags.

So now I can go to my del.icio.us page from anywhere (as can anyone else) and get at my bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici

If I want to quickly get at all items that I tagged with a certain word, I just use this format: del.icio.us/jdonnici/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

If I want to see everyone’s bookmarks for a certain tag, I use this format: del.icio.us/tag/[tag_name]. Like this or this.

Tags can be concatenated together with the “+” plus sign like this: http://del.icio.us/jdonnici/dotnet+sqlserver 

Finally, I can subscribe to various del.icio.us feeds in my aggregator, including a specific tag or a specific user. This makes it easy to see the things that other people are finding interesting. There are lots of other tools that I’ve yet to tinker with, including an “Inbox” for tags and the ability to tag something as being “for” another user (presumably making it show up in their inbox). I can also go to the main site page and see both “recent” and “popular” bookmarks.

For Firefox, I’m also finding the del.icio.us Firefox toolbar extension to be invaluable. It puts a shortcut on your toolbar to your tags, as well as a shortcut that opens a tagging window for the current page you’re on. Clicking that lets you tag the page and even shows you suggested tags based on what others have used for that same page.

As I said, I’m just getting started but I do see how this could be a MUCH better way of managing bookmarks and coming back to useful content than the old bookmarks file and/or Favorites directory. It takes some work up front if you have a lot of bookmarks… and I can see how keeping your tags clean and consistent is pretty important (the site provides some tools for removing and renaming tags). But it’s free and seems very much worth the effort.

2005 is over and it was a bittersweet year… on the one hand, I got a promotion at work and our second daughter (Elizabeth) was born in June. She’s gorgeous, all smiles, and is probably the happiest baby I’ve ever seen (her big sister, Allie, was also a happy baby but knew how to get your attention when she wasn’t happy! She’s 6 and that hasn’t changed).

On the other hand, my grandmother passed away this year and that’s been very hard for me. We were very close and I’ve always felt that she’d just “always be there”. My grandfather, is doing as well as can be expected given that they were married for 59 years.

We ended the year with our annual holiday pilgrimage to northern California. It was Elizabeth’s first time flying and she did just fine. Both the girls travel well, but it’s very hectic travelling with two little little ones – especially around the holidays. Whether we make the trip next year or stay home and start our own holiday traditions remains to be seen.

In any case, I’m excited about 2006. Things are good at work, at home, and we’re all healthy. I certainly can’t ask for anything more than that.

A recent issue of Business 2.0 magazine has a feature with a number of top executives and business world celebrities (Balmer, Zander, Cuban, etc) providing advice and insight. Most of them are the typical “power of positive thinking” type of thing, but a couple of them were really pretty good:

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail. — Eliot Spitzer (NY Attorney General)

I really like this one because all subtlety is lost in email or IM. It’s so easy to fire back a quick response without reading it from the recipient’s perspective… and without the benefit of tone-of-voice or facial expressions, statements that were meant to sound neutral can seem overly direct or even derisive (I think this is especially true for tech professionals, many of whom are either very direct to begin with or not always strong on social subtlety).

Sometimes, you just have to pick up a phone or walk down the hall to make your point — in addition to making sure that the message is received the way it’s intended, it’s also often faster. For all the convenience of email and IM, the lack of subtlety and clarity often means it takes three and four replies to get a point across. So what might be a five minute conversation in person takes an afternoon to resolve via back-and-forth messages.

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. — Warren Buffet

This one struck me because it’s so easy to go through the day bouncing from one task to the next without thinking about the big picture or how the outcome of those tasks is received. If you’re planning your day with accountability to a larger audience in mind, you’re more likely to focus on the right thing instead of just the next thing in front of you. It’s not hard to imagine that larger audience — your company’s management, its shareholders, your customers, your family, etc.

A week or so ago, we added ourselves to Tivo’s priority list for their new online applications and Yahoo partnership. The software update arrived within the last couple of days and I spent some time yesterday tinkering with it.

Most of the new stuff is found under the “Home Media Option” section of the menu (called “Music, Photos, and More” now) and it falls into a couple of categories:

1. Yahoo Services
2. Games
3. Online Media

Yahoo Services — In this category were things like Yahoo’s Traffic, Weather, and Photos. Basically, you just use Tivo to log into your “My Yahoo” account. After you supply a zip code (or even multiple zip codes), you get a weather forecast and current traffic reports. I don’t have any pictures in the Yahoo Photos services, so I didn’t test that but the weather and traffic seem to work fine. It’s not quite as fast it would be through a browser, but it’s workable.

Games — There are three games on the menu now, all of which are single player games and can be played with just the remote. One of them is a “Connect 4” clone, one is a “Jawbreaker” clone, and the third is sort of like a one-person Scrabble game where you make words to earn points. High scores are recorded for each game. It’s kind of a novel idea, but I don’t see anyone playing a whole lot of games with just a Tivo remote. It also suffers from speed issues.

Online Media — Under this category are a Podcast retriever/player and a client to listen to Live365 Internet Radio.

First, the podcasting interface… it works, but is just barely useable. Up front, there are a few categories (Entertainment, Technology, News, etc) and each category has several podcasts already in it. You can also enter your own URL, which is horribly slow and painful with just a Tivo remote. Try entering http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php by navigating one letter and symbol at a time. Tivo really needs to provide a better way to subscribe to podcasts via URL — maybe using the Tivo Central Online service or the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs.

Once you’ve subscribed, you see a list of the shows/episodes for the feed, along with a little graphic (if the podcaster provides it in their feed) and brief description of the show. You can then hit Play to listen. Unfortunately, your controls for playback amount to “Play” and “Stop”. You can’t fast-forward or rewind and there’s no way to stop something at a certain point and then pick up at that point later. I suppose if you really want to hear a certain podcast show, it’s passable but I don’t see this getting adopted very widely until its much easier to subscribe to feeds and control playback.

On the Live365 Internet Radio front… it’s not bad. You see a list of genres and then a list of the internet radio streams under each genre. The streaming was a little choppy at first, but it seemed to settle down and stay consistent once it was running for a minute or two. I didn’t find a lot of great stuff on there, but I’m not much of a broadcast radio listener.

Overal Impressions

It’s an interesting first step and I really like that Tivo is planning to take advantage of the broadband connections that many people have in their homes. I hope we’ll see more experiments like this. The main issues with this first release that I see fall into two categories:

Interface Speed – It was noticeably slower to navigate through the online options and menus. I couldn’t see whether it improved over time through caching, but even navigating around an on-screen keyboard to enter a URL was pretty slow. It’s frustrating when your button pushes aren’t registered right away, so you push it again, only to have the cursor then jump twice at once.

Remote Control – I’m hoping that they soon make it possible to set up options or subscribe to podcasts via either the Tivo Central Online web interface or via the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs (for the Home Media and TivoToGo capabilities). Otherwise, these new features will get very limited use, at least in our house. It’s just too much of a pain to do things character by character using a standard remote control.

Last weekend, our Tivo Series2 box started making a very high pitched ringing/squealing sound. It didn’t seem to bother Michelle much, but was quick to give me a headache. Even worse, it was that “your hard drive is on its last leg” type of sound.

I got behind it and verified that it wasn’t the fan making the sound, so then I was faced with a decision. Do I wait it out and see if it passes? I tried this for a day or two, but it was driving me up a wall. Do I go buy a new hard drive and swap it out? I could, but all the directions I found online make it look like more of a project than I wanted to get into. When it involves opening another computer and swapping drives on an IDE channel, booting to Linux floppies, and command-line partitioning… well, I could work my way through it but I’d rather not.

I head over to www.tivocommunity.com, where the hardcore Tivo folks hang out, and came across a site called www.weaknees.com. They seemed to have a good reputation there as a busines and were also pretty active on those forums helping people out.

On their site, I found a 160GB replacement drive for our model Tivo… for $159. Sure, I could get a bigger drive at CompUSA for this much, but their offer was great because:

• The drive was already set up to be plug and play with Tivo — including the latest Tivo OS already installed.
• They included instructions (PDF) for swapping out the drive, complete with lots of pictures.
• They included the two Torx wrenches I’d need to open the case and swap the drive.
• They took PayPal, had it in stock, and their shipping was reasonable.

I emailed them some initial questions I had about what to back up and how current the OS was on the drive I’d get… I had a response in an hour or so telling me just what I needed to know.

So I went for it and WOW am I ever glad! It arrived yesterday and took all of 20 minutes to swap the drive, including the 5 minutes I waited for the power supply to discharge (recommended in their instructions).

Once the drive was swapped, it fires right up and goes through the guided setup. Best of all, it was whisper quiet.

The only potential downside with going this route is that you lose Season Passes, Wishlists, and obviously any recordings. But Season Passes are easy to write down and re-create, we don’t have that many wishlists, and there weren’t many recordings on there that we were too worried about (mostly some kids’ shows that can be replaced in an hour on Noggin). If there had been important recordings, we could have always used TivoToGo and burned a disc.

Your box’s Tivo service is unaffected because its tied to an account number that’s stored directly in the box’s hardware and not on the drive.

In any case, it was a great experience all around and I’d highly recommend using www.weaknees.com if you find yourself needing to replace/add parts for your Tivo.

So the conversion from .Text .09x to DasBlog seems to be complete. First, I started with the most recent version available on the SourceForge project site (currently 1.8.5223.2).  The conversion of posts mostly went just fine. To create the DasBlog content files, I used the RSStoDasBlog.zip project from Scott Hanselman’s site. After downloading the old site’s feed as XML, this utility went through and created all the dayentry.xml files that DasBlog needs. The trickier parts were in the details:

• I switched over to using FeedBurner to handle the aggregator feeds. It’s free, provides some good stats, and was an easy switch to make. DasBlog’s configuration allows you to specify a FeedBurner URL and will automatically serve that up whenever a request is made for the site’s feed. This was super-easy. You can subscribe to the feed with feed://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffDonnici .
• I created a new file at http://jeff.donnici.com/Rss.aspx, which was .Text’s old feed URL. The new file, simply provides an HTTP 301 redirect to the new Feedburner feed. This will ensure that any feed aggregator’s subscribed to the old .Text feed get updated to the new feed. This was also very easy.
• Then it became a manual thing… the conversion process doesn’t do anything with post categories. I actually like DasBlog’s handling of categories in that you can easily create them on the fly (as opposed to having to go to a separate Categories management page in the admin site). Unfortunately, the only way I saw around this was to go through old posts manually and apply the appropriate categories. I’m sure there’s a way to do this en masse, but it’s a one-time thing and writing up a script or utility to do it would have taken longer than the manual route.
• The next manual part involved going through any old posts that referenced other posts. In cases where I had a post that referred to an older one, I updated the URL for that reference to use the new DasBlog permalink. I also updated the few posts that had images or downloadable files on my server… under DasBlog, I wanted to use its content/binary folder so that backups of all content are a single-step. Here again, I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but it didn’t take long and is a one-time thing.
• That brings me to external links… Google, other blogs, and various wikis have links to the old .Text archives, which are now gone. I’m not sure what (if anything) that can be done to handle those… short of some sort of hard-coded 404 error page that has all the old URLs and their new URL and then handles the redirection. I know Google will update over time, but it’d be great if there was a clean way to handle the redirection automatically. I’ll probably slap together a custom 404 page so that visitors don’t get a generic IE/ASP.NET error page, but it’d be cool to have them just move on to the new address. Any ideas on that?
• I updated BlogJet with the new DasBlog settings… it has a built-in profile for DasBlog, so this was actually pretty easy. If you do this, don’t let the default profile’s use of /blogger.aspx throw you off — it works fine under the hood. I haven’t looked at the source, but it seems DasBlog’s HTTP handler catches that URL request and handles the web service calls automatically. I was pleased with BlogJet in the .Text days and it handled converting to the new system without a hitch. Very slick.
• DasBlog has a CAPTCHA system for discouraging blog spammers, as well as a “Blacklist” feature. I haven’t found any docs on how to use that Blacklist feature (looks like it used to be automated, but there were some problems with that), but hopefully a quick forum post will clear it up. I’m also surprised not to see an option to moderate comments.

I’m sure I’ll be tweaking settings over time as I learn my way around, but so far it seems good. I really like what I’ve seen so far of the DasBlog internals and it fits my needs great. Adding my own theme is the next step and hopefully the CAPTCHA system for comments will keep the spammers at bay.