Hulu Charging for Content

There's been a lot of message traffic recently about Hulu charging for its content as early as 2010. Here's what I think: whoop-de-doo.

I use Hulu ALL the time. It's my personal DVR. I watch Hell's Kitchen, FlashForward, Cougar Town, The Office, 24, and soon LOST all on Hulu. I may have regular TV on my TV but I never look at it, I just watch everything via Hulu. So if Hulu threw up a required cost of programming, say $5-10/month, I'd happily pay it, assuming two things:

1) NO advertising. One of the worst things of Hulu is watching a 20 second clip with a 30 second advertisement. If I'm paying for content, I don't want ANY ads.

2) Let me cache videos before watching them! Streaming can be dangerous as it requires quality bandwidth on-demand. Why not leverage my bandwidth when I'm sleeping and download the videos I want to watch during the off hours? This would be a killer feature and something that is technically feasible, it just needs someone to pioneer it.

What they should do is split up Hulu's viewer base into two camps: those who will pay for premium content and those who won't. Those who refuse to pay should still get to see basic content, but be forced to watch advertisements every 10 minutes or whatever. Those who pay for content should get NO advertisements, get access to premium content like HBO, and also be guaranteed the highest quality viewing experience. This might mean downloadable (vice streaming) content, and perhaps even portable viewing options (e.g. iPhone Hulu). HBO does have some great shows so I'd love to get those as well.

Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. Gone are the days of ancient cable programming: welcome to the world of on-demand, downloadable high-quality programming.

Mac Media Center (MMC)

The new Mac Mini was announced recently by Apple, and I was sad to see the results. There are a few things that Apple could do to make Apple the absolute final, uber solution to my media center desires, and it's so painfully close that I was legitimately angry at them for not taking even more dollars.

Idea 1: Add a Blu Ray device to the Mac Mini. Yes, Blu Ray won the war over HD DVD, and Apple in fact endorsed it a long time ago! But sadly even the most recent Macs don't have Blu Ray. Steve Jobs calls adding Blu Ray to its lineup a "bag of hurt," which may have more to do with cost than anything else (is there anything else that could matter?), but the fact remains that people all around the world are still buying PS3 just to watch Blu Ray movies on their big TVs. I don't even own a single PS3 game, but I sure do have the device to play Blu Ray films.

Idea 2: Add HDMI to the Mac Mini. Even if I managed to buy an overpriced external Blu Ray player, I still am hitting an issue that my TV wants HDMI so badly, but the Apple won't give it up! Come on Apple, seriously, FAIL. It's like you don't want the Mac Mini to be a media server. What, Apple TV should be instead? Yeah right, it doesn't even have an optical device.

Idea 3: Provide a subscription-based rental service. I pay for NetFlix happily, but I want to live in a world where I can subscribe to movies and "rent them" through a download service. I select my movies from a list, prioritize them, and my device downloads the first three in order. When I have the movies I can transfer them to my iPhone or store them in some other portable format so I can take them with me on the road and watch on my laptop. I watch them, re-watch them, whatever, until I want to "return" the movie, at which point the computer deletes the movie and downloads another one. And I pay $20/month for this. No more optical media! Millions of dollars saved in postage. Why don't we live in this world?

There really needs to be a digital video format that can store a full DVD/Blu Ray as a single file that can be loaded and optionally DRM encoded to make the Hollywood idiots happy.

Apple could make this device, and all of my other devices (iPhone, MacBook Pro) could connect to this device as the central oracle of my media life.

Snow Leopard Auto-Detects Printer?

I travel a lot between the office and the apartment, both of which have printers. Whenever I go to print on my laptop at either, Snow Leopard volunteers the correct printer -- I don't have to toggle back and forth between a default. This is a minor but totally awesome feature (I think) that looks for one of the installed printers and uses the one that matches. How awesome is that! I haven't once had to choose which printer to use in the last month since I've installed Snow Leopard.

Love you Mac!

SITREP - post-op 28 hours

My sinus surgery was yesterday morning, and since then I've been drifting in and out of a wake state and loading myself up on tasty plant-based soups with pain-killer and anti-biotic chasers. So far I don't feel particularly different but I'm told it will take a while for all of the effects to manifest.

In the meantime, life is well out here in Mordor and there's a big party at Weathertop tomorrow night. I'll still have my little bloody Hitler mustache as a result of my surgery, but otherwise I should be fine to socialize and enjoy the celebration of one of a coworker's tour downrange. I hope I get to go someday...

The Final Battle in the Sinusian Wars?

It's 12:10AM on October 15, 2009. In 5 hours, 50 minutes as of this sentence, I'll be waking up and hailing a cab to Sibley Memorial Hospital in DC. Around 9 AM I will be given general anesthesia and put to sleep while a doctor drills up my nose with an endoscopic device. While the 80 minute surgery proceeds, she will attempt to clear out the blocked nasal passageways that have plagued me with headaches for the last eight years (we traced its origins to fall 2001 at Cornell).

The pain feels like a weight of 2lbs is sitting on my forehead, specifically in the areas below, between and directly above and to the center from my eyes. Conveniently, those areas are also covering three of the major sinuses: the maxillary, the ethmoidal, and the frontal sinuses. This pain is a constant 3 or 4 on a scale of 10, so while in short bursts it's not bad, played out over 8 years it's become a Chinese water torture. Eating poorly or smoking or drinking will push it to 6 or 7 on the scale, air travel pushes it to around 8 (which sucks since I love traveling), and SCUBA diving pushes me up to 10 where I can barely keep my eyes open from the pain.

Will this surgery be the magic bullet that finally lets me get back to living? I do certainly hope so. It's become my only desire, my sole obsession, and nothing else matters. If this doesn't work, well, I'll have to reconsider my game plan, but I am hopeful it will make a significant advance in that direction, and the scientific signs are pointing to this potential.

Anyway, I'm going to bed down now. I'll post on this computer later this week after surgery, and if it works I'll post every possible keyword so others might have the ability to fight their sinuses and end this suffering.

The final battle in the Sinusian War is about to take place and we're only a few hours out.

So long, Earth. Catch you on the flip side.

Using Cntrl-Tab in Terminal on Mac OS X

I love OS X. Love it. Other than my company's software, OS X is the only other piece of software I've seen in this decade which really excited me. (iPhone, too, but that's just a reduced form of OS X) However even with an amazing platform like OS X, there are always a few minor annoyances that sometimes cannot be resolved, but sometimes can. This is a case where it can be resolved.

I'm very used to switching between tabs in Safari/Firefox using CNTRL-TAB, but this does not work in Terminal by default. I couldn't figure out how to set this correctly in the preferences and the online responses were lame, but fortunately someone at the Shire knew the answer. This is for everyone out there who is searching the intertubes for an answer to this question.

Just follow these steps:

1. Open System Preferences => Keyboard

2. Go to Keyboard Shortcuts

3. Click on "Application Shortcuts" on the left

4. Click the little "+" to add a program

5. Navigate to Terminal (it's hidden in Applications/Utilities)

6. For the Menu Title type "Select Next Tab"

7. For the Keyboard Shortcut type ctrl-tab

8. Click Add. You're g2g!

Here are keywords for the crawlers: Mac Terminal OS X app cntrl ctrl control tab tabs switch toggle shortcut snow leopard