Day: March 25, 2007

I stopped by the Apple store today and got a good look at the Apple TV. They had 3 on display for playing with in addition to one in the front window.

It was generating a fair amount of traffic and the Apple associates were certainly willing to bend anyone’s ear who was willing to listen.

I wasn’t willing to listen and they left me alone, but I got to overhear what they were telling others. It was nothing that you haven’t heard before about what it does and how it works, etc.

I did run the unit through its paces and… well, for what it is – an iPod for your TV – it appears to be well positioned as a real consumer electronic device and not a geek-only lash-up like previous attempts have been (and still are.)

The menus and, in particular, photos from iPhoto were gorgeous. Music from iTunes was about as exciting as watching an album cover. I’d much prefer the iTunes visualizer. (The Apple TVs in the store were not hooked up to audio.)

The videos were… not so good. I watched some Battlestar Galactica and Pirates of the Caribbean, both of which looked like something one might download from a bittorrent site and not something you’d paid good money for. That’s an area I think that iTunes really needs to improve before people will widely accept this. I’m not a video snob and the quality was very noticeably pixelated. On the other hand, if you’re used to looking at digitized videos of that quality, it’s just fine.

The hack sites on the Apple TV are running wild and it looks like there’s lots of “innovation” going on with the product only being out a couple of days.

Looking at what I’ve seen so far, I wonder if the following is possible:

• Replace HD with larger unit
• Implement SSH and SFTP
• Get Java running
• Install Azureus
• Configure Azureus to monitor a designated torrent directory, auto-download those files and place them in a designated outgoing directory
• Enable Automator or AppleScripting
• Building a script or action to auto-convert XVIDs to H264
• Incorporating those items into the Apple TV side of the synced files, bypassing the need to put them in iTunes.

With a configuration like that, one could SFTP a torrent file onto the Apple TV and it would eventually show up automatically on the Apple TV ready-to-watch.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, iTunes, Mac, OSX, Technology, Television, Video

Scientific American: Ask the Experts => Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?

I’m not going to apologize for this totally geek moment. I found this article about time fascinating. I’ve always wondered why we used 24 hours and 60 min/sec increments, but never bothered to research it.

I can remember as a child spending hours trying to develop a workable metric time system. 10 hours a day? Too few. 20? (10 day, 10 night) Not really metric. 100? Ridiculous.

Thanks to documented evidence of the Egyptians’ use of sundials, most historians credit them with being the first civilization to divide the day into smaller parts. The first sundials were simply stakes placed in the ground that indicated time by the length and direction of the resulting shadow. As early as 1500 B.C., the Egyptians had developed a more advanced sundial. A T-shaped bar placed in the ground, this instrument was calibrated to divide the interval between sunrise and sunset into 12 parts. This division reflected Egypt’s use of the duodecimal system–the importance of the number 12 is typically attributed either to the fact that it equals the number of lunar cycles in a year or the number of finger joints on each hand (three in each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb), making it possible to count to 12 with the thumb. The next-generation sundial likely formed the first representation of what we now call the hour. Although the hours within a given day were approximately equal, their lengths varied during the year, with summer hours being much longer than winter hours.

I also found it fascinating about the Egyptian duodecimal system.

Back in the 70’s when Schoolhouse Rock was airing, they had a multiplication segment on base 12. They posed that we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers but that an alien with 12 might use a base 12 system (inventing 3 new numbers to replace 10, 11 and 12, which they called – if I recall correctly, “dou”, “dec” and “el.”)

What’s interesting is that it firmly fixed in my brain the notion that it was basically impossible for primitive humans to have naturally developed a non-decimal system. Yet, here we have those clever Egyptians and a base-12 system. I could see how they easily could have had a base-8 system instead if they’d only used the two knuckles actually on the fingers and not the one at the base. Would naturally using an octal system have made the development of digital computers simpler? I wonder.

Technorati Tags: Astronomy, Books, Science