namely, my recently assembled mac mini media center.

first, the relevant equipment:

» a Philips 23PF5320 23-Inch Flat Panel Widescreen LCD TV, which i’ve had for a number of years. positives: it’s a great picture, it’s just the right size for our apartment, and it has a vga pc port. negatives: it’s older, it doesn’t have a digital tuner, and it only has dvi, not hdmi.

» a 1.83ghz core 2 duo mac mini with a combo drive, which we purchased recently. i chose to get a mac mini rather than an apple tv because i wanted to be able to watch internet video content (hulu, and the like). positives: came with leopard, just works perfectly with no hassle, no viruses to worry about. negatives: although it has a dvi port, it doesn’t play nice with the dvi port on the tv, so it’s hooked up via vga.

» elgato eyetv hybrid, which is both the digital tuner that the tv lacks, and a dvr to record shows. positives: perfect picture, easy to use software, easy installation. negatives: none.

» philips fr994 receiver, which i’ve had for i think 8 years or so. positives: new enough to have digital audio inputs, wide variety of other inputs, programmable display. negatives: so old that there’s no video inputs or controls, only audio.

i can’t tell you how perfectly all this works together. the hookups are: mac mini vga to tv vga port, mac mini audio out to digital port on receiver, elgato eyetv hybrid usb stick plugged into the back of the mac mini, antenna coax lead screwed into the hybrid. i get broadcast tv, dvr, and internet video all in 1080i hd and 5.1 surround sound, and the only monthly fee i have is the internet access from the cable company. i don’t care about cable channels, so i don’t pay for them and i don’t feel i’m missing out.

i’ve ripped all of my cds, so i don’t need to use the cd player anymore. everything’s in itunes on the mac. and if i did need to play a cd, i’d just stick it into the mac mini and play it. same with the dvd player. we have a vhs player/dvd recorder that we used to dub a lot of kirk’s old tapes, but there’s no need now. just stick the dvd into the mini and play it.

if i choose to get cable somewhere down the road, the hybrid can work with the cable channels, with or without a cable box.

at some point i may want to get an all-in-one remote like the logitech harmony one, but for now i’m good with the remote for the receiver + keyboard and mouse.

i think i’m covered on entertainment for the forseeable future.

usually i’m pretty sensible about these things. if yesterday you had asked me what to do, i probably would have told you to wait to update. make sure everything is working properly. give it a day or two. but i got caught up in the hype. i figured that as important as this was to apple, and as much as they had advertised and flogged this new phone + new software, they would have their act together. i assumed that updating our original iphone to the new software would be seamless.

boy was i wrong. kirk sat all morning fiddling with this. the last email i got from him seemed to indicate that the phone was updated and activated, but still wouldn’t sync because itunes is still down. so i’d guess that he has a working phone, with no contact info etc. on it. which apparently is better than some people.

should i have obeyed my common sense and told kirk to wait? you bet.

should apple have hyped this new phone + new software to the moon and back, like they did? you bet.

should apple have been technically ready for this onslaught, the one they created? you bet.

will this be a non-issue tomorrow? i’d guess so. i certainly hope so.

look. it ain’t a pacemaker that we’re talking about. small children will not lose their lives because the iphones won’t update smoothly. but it irks me that, due to apple’s lack of preparation, kirk wasted the morning of his day off, and probably still hasn’t finished syncing the phone. lots of people are angry about this, and it’s because a) apple markets themselves as the easier technological alternative, which amplifies their missteps, and 2) people love their damn iphones and are pissed when they suddenly don’t work.

hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, because he’s leaving for reading, pa for sunday and monday, and it would be nice if he had a working phone to take with him.

update: took my 2:00PM afternoon constitutional, which just happens to take me right past the action. at the at&t store at 54th & 6th, there was a security guard at the door letting people in a few at a time, and ~50 people in line. said security guard was getting yelled at by an extremely old man clutching an iphone who couldn’t connect to itunes. security guard nonplussed. at the flagship apple store on 58th and 5th, a few hundred people in line, stretching around the corner and down 58th by fao schwartz. calm and orderly — i think the store may have been closed to all but iphone shoppers, but i’m not sure about that.

update 2: kirk just called. from his fully functioning iphone. that has all the contacts and info loaded on it. perfectly normal. what’s the big frigging hullabaloo?

In his harshest criticism yet of his former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama said he was “outraged” by Wright’s comments at the National Press Club Monday, and “saddened by the spectacle.”

personally, i’m guessing that wright chose to fall on his sword to a degree — to get out there and make comments so outrageous that obama would have an opportunity to really put some distance between them. obama has been less than forthcoming about all this, i think. and i have to admit that the people who can’t understand why he stuck with the church have somewhat of a point. i know that church does not equal pastor, and there’s a new pastor now, and you should be going to church for the institution more than the personalities involved.

still. maybe this will precipitate a clean break between the two. let’s hope so.

in any case, better sooner (now) than later (october). there’ll always be a percentage of people unable to separate the two in their minds. hopefully this will mitigate the damage that’s been done.

i want that small squidgy thought floating in the back of my mind — “perhaps hillary is more electable after all” — crushed mercilessly.

update: just remembered what this was — obama’s sister souljah moment.

» the apple tv can stream photos and music to your tv. i can do that with the wii and wii transfer.

» the apple tv can show me you tube videos on my tv. using the wii’s browser, i can watch you tube videos on my tv as well.

» the apple tv can feed me audio and video podcasts. i can’t do that on my tv, but i’m not sure i need to. i need to look at the video podcasts that are out there and see if they are compelling.

» the apple tv can let me buy tv shows and rent movies. the buy tv shows bit intrigues, but the rent movies part doesn’t. netflix is cheaper. you can rent hd movies using apple tv, but i’m not sure there’s enough of a visual difference between regular dvd quality and hd quality to make that a reason to shell out the apple tv bucks.

although the apple tv does make me pretty sure i’ll never buy a high definition/blu-ray dvd player. i would buy an apple tv first, i think, and just rent the hd movies if i for some reason just had to have high definition movies.

but i don’t think i do need them, especially since i’m viewing content on a 23″ lcd screen. and i know i can bittorrent shows and movies and encode them and transfer them and burn them and whatnot, but who the hell has time for that? and anyway, call me a nerd, but i like to keep it legal.

i am attracted by the slickness and the interface, though. although there’s much of the apple tv’s function that i can presently replicate, it has a cobbled-together feel and doesn’t work perfectly.

for a while, i thought i might like to get a mac mini to hook up to the tv, instead of the apple tv. but you can’t rent hd content using a computer, only the apple tv, because of the copy protection inherent in the hdmi connector which the computers don’t have. even though i don’t think i need hd content, i think you buy hardware looking forward, not back. i don’t want to lock myself into not being able to get hd content. so, it’s apple tv, or nothing.

with a caveat — my tv doesn’t have an hdmi connector, just a dvi connector. if i can’t rent hd content with the apple tv hooked up that way, it’s a non-starter. i’m not buying an apple tv and a new tv as well.

i’ll do the taxes (we might get a big hit this year), let the dust settle, let others be the guinea pigs, and then we’ll see.

at the macworld expo, which begins monday. this year’s theme? “there’s something in the air”.

my guess as to what’s in the air?

updated displays that connect wirelessly.

pulled that out of my ass — i have no idea. but it would be cool, and the technology is there.

» next tuesday is the stevenote at macworld, which means lots of new apple stuff to potentially spend money on. in case you just stumbled here, i’m a big apple fan. what could get me to blow the dust off of my wallet? perhaps an updated 3g iphone — kirk could get the new one and i’d take his old one. perhaps something more useful than apple tv to hook up to the hdtv, since we don’t have cable tv. maybe it’s the whatever-they’ve-come-up-with-that-noone-has-thought-of. maybe the wallet stays intact.

» i’m starting to get more political again — i find myself going to more and more political news sites and blogs. i get geared up every election cycle, and this one promises to be no different. i’m sure to bore you with my mumblings and rantings, but i gotta be me. still liking that obama guy. but i may change my mind. maybe i’ll even vote republican this year. it could happen. you never know.

» via kottke, a great article by kevin smith about his new movie, “zach and miri make a porno”. anything by kevin smith is a must-see for me (chasing amy is on my top-ten favorite films of all time), but with a title like that i can hardly wait.

» have a great weekend! i mean it. no excuses.

we have a mac in our “home office”, which is in fact a shallow closet. elsewhere in the apartment, we have a wii, and we have the wii hooked up to the hdtv, and we have the wii hooked up to the home theater. and the mac and the wii are on the same network.

enter wii transfer.

for a $19 shareware fee, which i paid and so should you when you use shareware, this little program feeds music, movies, photos, and browser bookmarks from your mac to the wii’s internet browser. so if i want to listen to itunes music through the stereo, or watch a downloaded video file on the hdtv, or watch a slideshow of my iphoto pictures, i can now just fire up the wii, use the wii’s browser to pull up the content, and bob’s your uncle, as they say in paraguay. it installed easily with practically no configuration, and worked perfectly out of the box.

there are a couple of minor drawbacks. you can’t play purchased drm-encoded video, so all my wonder showzen episodes bought in itunes stay on the mac. and audio files don’t stream yet (they are copied over to the wii on the fly), so you run into wii memory issues with large audio files. no radioshift yet.

but those are very minor quibbles. quibbles i can put up with when spending $19 for wii transfer, as opposed to $299 or even $399 for an apple tv. we listened to itunes playlists all weekend.

great stuff.

from the article:

Business school dude, listen up. Forget shadowing me. You’ll never be like me, because I’m one of a kind. I came out and they broke the mold. But if you want to learn how I operate, do the following. Quit business school. Go work at some shitty electronics company and learn how to source components. Travel to India and seek enlightenment. Grow your hair down to your ass. Take LSD. Smoke pot. Live on a commune. Sell your van and start a company. Put yourself in danger. Create a situation where if you fail you’ll be unable to pay your rent and you’ll be out on the street. Struggle to make payroll. Get screwed by suppliers. Learn to screw them back. Bounce checks. Run out of money. Go hungry. Be scared.

wow. i really wish i had the guts to do that. but i’ve resigned myself to the safety of dronedom.

i treat my mac the same way. applications only. i try not to install anything that modifies the system, even though these mods are authorized, as opposed to the iphone, where all mods are unauthorized. self-contained apps only, as much as possible. less trouble that way, come update time.

of course, the media coverage of the update makes it seem that the vast majority of iphone users are howling, wailing, and bemoaning the loss of their precious at the hands of the evil apple empire, which willfully turned their functionings into non-functionings.

give me a break.

if you are savvy enough to be able to unlock your iphone, which is in itself not the easiest of processes, then you should have been savvy enough to have found and read the admonitions of apple, who implored people not to update modified iphones lest they become unusable. that news was all over the internet for days before the update was issued.

and you are also savvy enough to have found and read the news that the dev team that produced the unlock method implored people not to update unlocked phones lest they become unusable, until they come up with a workaround.

and you are also savvy enough to realize that, if your phone is locked but you have installed third-party apps, you should heed apple’s advice, not install the update, and wait to see how everything shakes out. or, at the very least, restore your iphone to pristine condition before updating.

so, in spite of apple’s warning’s and in spite of the dev team’s warnings, these people updated their iphones anyway. guess what happened? in some cases, their iphones were unusable. unlocked phones were definitely unusable. gee, what a revelation. if only they had, somehow, been able to know.

oh, that’s right. everybody on the internet told them, but they didn’t listen.

if you don’t update your modified phone, will it still work? yes it will. the people with hacked phones who didn’t apply the update are still merrily using their iphones on tmobile or using their third-party apps or whatever, and are completely unaffected.

is apple legally responsible for the non-functioning iphones? hell no they are not. you can argue whether or not apple should have been a better corporate citizen in all this, and i personally think that it’s not only bad form but bad business for apple to have done what they did, but the fact remains that no one held a gun to anyone’s head and made them update.

is it legal to unlock or modify your phone? sure it is. it’s your phone. you paid for it. do what you want to with it. but when you modify your iphone, you are taking a step down a lonely road. no matter how small or insignificant the hack may seem to be, the first mod you make means that you are assuming full responsibility for maintaining the hardware and software, with whatever assistance the unauthorized third-party developers who produced the hacks you installed choose (or choose not) to provide. and it’s your responsibility, once you have hacked, to keep yourself updated on the status of that hack, and how the hack affects your use of your iphone.

responsibility. you assumed it when you hacked. you can’t then whine because apple bricked your iphone. apple didn’t brick your iphone. you did.

from the ny times article:

Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokeswoman, said that when people went to update their software with their computer through iTunes, a warning appeared on the computer screen, making it clear that any unauthorized modifications to the iPhone software violated the agreement that people entered into when they bought the phone. “The inability to use your phone after making unauthorized modifications isn’t covered under the iPhone warranty” Ms. Bowcock said.

from the same article:

Ross Good, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had added several programs, including one for instant messaging. After the upgrade, the phone went into a semifrozen state.

When Mr. Good called Apple, the reception was cool. “They said I put third-party software on my phone, and so it was my fault no matter what.”

Joel Robison, a systems network engineer near Seattle, said his phone stopped working immediately after he installed the upgrade. He said that when he took it to an Apple store, he was accused of having unlocked the phone. But he said that with the exception of one aborted attempt to install a piece of outside software, he had made no modifications to the phone.

“Their accusation was very damaging to my opinion of Apple’s service,” Mr. Robison said.

stop whining. start taking responsibility. apple did. the producers of your hacks did.

you didn’t.

update: daring fireball’s john gruber and i arrive at the same conclusion at independent times, but of course he states it more elegantly. hopefully his broader reach will prompt some people to think twice about their entitlement.