Disney World

December 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

To help celebrate my parents’ upcoming 40th wedding anniversary, our whole family headed down to Disney World last week for a few days of fun in the parks. The kids had a good time, but I won’t lie — with three boys six and under, it was a lot of work.

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A lot of time was spent on buses, or waiting for buses, which led to several situations like this:

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It was nice being there while Disney was celebrating Christmas, since it added a more festive atmosphere. They know how to put on a show better than anyone else.

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You can find more photos from our trip on our Flickr account.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: , ,

The Nest Learning Thermostat

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’m a sucker for well designed products and for energy efficiency technologies. Combine the two, and you’ve definitely got my attention.

Yesterday, former Apple employee and iPod designer Tony Fadell revealed what his start-up has been working on for the last couple of years. It is, of all things, a home thermostat. Called the Nest, this smart thermostat is unlike any you’ve seen before. Yes, its design would be at home with any of Apples current products, but its functionality is what’s impressive.

Nest Learning Thermostat

The Nest has a number of sensors and some smart software that allows it to learn and create a schedule based on how and when you adjust the temperature. It can automatically sense when you’re away and make adjustments accordingly and guide you to make small changes that can save you lots of money. It’s also connected via Wi-Fi, so you can control it remotely with a phone or computer and have it automatically receive software updates to improve itself.

Steven Levy has an in depth Wired profile on the Nest that details the product’s inspiration and the impressive team that created it that is well worth the read:

Fadell got the idea for Nest Labs when he was building a green home in Tahoe. A long-time aficionado of architecture, he threw himself into the details of house design. His domicile would be as gorgeous as the products he worked on at Apple, endowed with the same love of detail. When it came to HVAC — the industry acronym for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning — he worked with architects to drill sophisticated geothermal wells to regulate temperature. Everything was looking great. And then the architects presented him with the options for the thermostats that would adorn the walls of his perfect home.

They sucked.

“What was wrong with them?” he now says. “They were ugly. They were confusing. They were incredibly expensive. They didn’t have half the features you would expect for a modern thing. None of them were connected, so they didn’t talk to each other. I wasn’t able to remotely control them. In Tahoe, you want to be able check on the temperature of the house or turn it on before you get there. Because it’s really cold in the winter. I couldn’t do any of that, and I was like, Why is this?”

So Fadell started researching.

This sort of thing is really excites me, so while I’d love to pre-order one right now, the $250 price tag makes me hesitate. Hopefully they’ll be able to bring costs down the first year and make it a little less expensive, because this looks like a great product that could make a big difference to the environment.

Filed Under: Energy Tagged With: , , ,

Steve

October 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I was shocked last night when, after dinner, Casey took a look at the Facebook updates streaming down her page, and said, “I didn’t know Steve Jobs died.” I suspected the time would come sooner, rather than later, after he resigned as Apple CEO in late August, but I don’t think anyone thought the day would come this soon.

It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such a day-to-day impact on people’s lives as Steve Jobs. The technology he helped design is in the hands of millions of people around the world. My mind boggles at the amount of creativity unleashed by Apple’s products in the hands of everyday people.

Steve Jobs the businessman will always be remembered for his return to Apple, and the remarkable turnaround he led starting with the iMac. By taking Apple from near bankruptcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world, he has proven himself in the marketplace like no one else.

But as much as I appreciate Steve the businessman, I will always remember him as Steve the visionary. His sense of design and his ability to say “no” are what gave us the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Instead of endlessly adding to products, he had the good sense to take away until they were left to their essence as an object. There are no better examples of this than the iPhone and iPad. Turned off, they are black sheets of glass. Turned on, they transform into whatever you want them to be.

Steve Jobs, Apple, and their products, have inspired countless entrepreneurs, designers, and developers to actually design products and not leave it as varnish to slather on at the end. The objects Steve designed and inspired are his greatest legacy.

Thank you, Steve.

RIP Steve Jobs

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With:

Bike Commuting

August 26, 2011 By 3 Comments

I’ve ridden more bike in the last couple of weeks than I have in the last 10 years.

Why? I had a really nice mountain bike that I bought myself as a college graduation gift, but I never rode it. It was great for hills and off-road, but not so good for city riding — the tires weren’t made for pavement, the riding position was awkward, and the seat hurt.

So, I finally took some pictures, wrote up a description, and posted it to Craigslist. Surprisingly, it sold the next day.

With some cash in-hand, I then got to start looking for a more suitable replacement. Since I intended on using it to get to work on a regular basis, I researched a lot of commuter bikes designed for urban riding and lugging stuff around town. My first choice was the highly rated Redline 925, but I couldn’t justify the over $500 price after nearly a decade of not riding a bike. But, I quickly found a solid alternative in the much less expensive Torker U-District.

2011 Torker U-District

Both the 925 and the U-District are nice, simple, single-gear bikes with flip-flop hubs that allow you to convert them into fixed-gear bicycles if you supply your own cog. I would hesitate to recommend one of these if you lived in a place with lots of elevation changes, but in super-flat Grand Forks, it’s not an issue.

Torker U-District Rear Wheel

I ended up buying the U-District through our local bike shop, who speical ordered it and built it for me. It’s a lot of fun to ride. So far I’ve primarily been using it to commute to work a few days a week, and it works great for that. The 2.6 mile ride takes me about 12 minutes, which is just about twice what it takes me in my car.

I’m so glade I was able to make the change to a more comfortable bike designed for the type of riding I do now. I’m not sure how much, if any, winter riding I’ll do with it, but I look forward to many miles with it in the non-snow seasons.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,

How Netflix Angered Most of its Customers in a Single Day

July 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Earlier today, Netflix published a post to its blog that said, in some of the thickest PR bullshit I’ve ever read, it was raising prices splitting its streaming video plan from its DVD plans, resulting in a 60% price hike for most of its customers:

First, we are launching new DVD only plans. These plans offer our lowest prices ever for unlimited DVDs – only $7.99 a month for our 1 DVD out at-a-time plan and $11.99 a month for our 2 DVDs out at-a-time plan. By offering our lowest prices ever, we hope to provide great value to our current and future DVDs by mail members. New members can sign up for these plans by going to DVD.netflix.com.

Second, we are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into separate plans to better reflect the costs of each and to give our members a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan or the option to subscribe to both. With this change, we will no longer offer a plan that includes both unlimited streaming and DVDs by mail.

You see: This is about “offering our lowest prices ever” and giving “our members a choice”. It’s win-win. Except that our plan (unlimited streaming and one DVD out at-a-time) which used to cost $9.99 a month will be $15.98 starting in September ($7.99 each for the streaming and DVD plans).

Why the huge price increase?

Last November when we launched our $7.99 unlimited streaming plan, DVDs by mail was treated as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan. At the time, we didn’t anticipate offering DVD only plans. Since then we have realized that there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs both from our existing members as well as non-members. Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs. Creating an unlimited DVDs by mail plan (no streaming) at our lowest price ever, $7.99, does make sense and will ensure a long life for our DVDs by mail offering. Reflecting our confidence that DVDs by mail is a long-term business for us, we are also establishing a separate and distinct management team solely focused on DVDs by mail, led by Andy Rendich, our Chief Service and Operations Officer and an 11 year veteran of Netflix.

The reason why there’s still tons of demand for DVDs by mail is that, as good as Netflix streaming is compared to its competition, its selection is dwarfed by the number of titles in the company’s disc catalog. The best recent numbers I could find put streaming titles at about 20,000 and DVD titles at over 100,000.

Prior to the streaming-only plan offered late last year, you paid for the right to rent DVDs through the mail and members got internet streaming as a free add-on. It seems that pricing was more honest — DVDs are where you find the newest releases1 and a deep catalog of TV shows and classic movies. With its much smaller selection, streaming was a still a novelty.

However, it’s in Netflix’s best interests to get as many people onto its streaming plan as possible. From estimates I found online2, it costs Netflix about $1 to send a DVD to a customer when you factor in postage, handling, infrastructure, the cost of the disc itself, etc. On the other hand, it costs them 3 cents to stream a standard definition movie and 5 cents to stream it in HD.

As you can see, the profit margin on video streaming is clearly must higher than it was with the company’s old business model. One way to accelerate the trend toward streaming is to do exactly what Netflix announced today — jack up the price on the DVD plans so they’re unattractive to customers and hope they stay with the streaming-only plan. Then, continue to increase prices on the DVD plans every year until they’re so high, no one subscribes to them anymore and Netflix can happily close its warehouses and announce its service is available exclusively through streaming.

I have no doubt they want to get there as soon as possible, but in the mean time, it sucks to be a customer. We do watch most of our Netflix videos on our Roku box, but the streaming selection is still not that great. You need DVDs if you want to see new releases or if you want to work your way through HBO series’ like The Wire. The copyright holders don’t seem to be interested in making those things available on streaming, and it’s hard to say if they ever will.

The thing is, we don’t even get many DVDs through Netflix, so I don’t even care that much about the “Unlimited” aspect of the plan3. But to remove the option to get a few movies a month and then charge a lot more money for it — well, it sucks. Maybe they could grandfather us longtime subscribers on the two discs a month plan instead — I’d be satisfied.

Addendum: Peter Kafka over at All Things D had an article on Wednesday that backs up my theory on Netflix’s motivation for this price increase:

Reed Hastings’ company [Netflix] says it’s a cost issue. If people are going to use both his DVD-by-mail service and his Web video streaming service, he’ll need more money to support both businesses. That’s probably true.

Here’s what’s more true: Reed Hastings doesn’t want most of his customers to pay more. He wants them to pay less, and drop DVDs in favor of a streaming-only service.

To recap: Yesterday, Hastings kept the price of his streaming-only video service at $8 a month. But he raised the price of his companion DVD-by-mail service from $2 a month to $8 month, which will push many subscribers’ monthly fees from $10 a month to $16 a month.

Unless they stop using DVDs. Which seems to be what Netflix wants. Even though they haven’t said so out loud, to date.

  1. There’s currently a 28 day delay before most new DVD releases are available on Netflix. ↩

  2. I’ll see if I can dig up the source for this. ↩

  3. Unlimited DVDs on the 1 out at-a-time plan works out to, at most, eight discs a month. ↩

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , ,

WWDC 2011 — Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud

June 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apple held their annual World Wide Developers Conference last week, and as usual, they kicked it off with a keynote address Monday morning. If you want a full overview of what Apple announced, this video condenses the two hour event down to just eight minutes. I’m not much for rehashing what’s already been covered in-depth, but I have a few things to say about the main topics covered in the keynote.

OS X Lion and the Mac

There’s a lot to like in the next version of OS X, available sometime in July for just $29. If you have hardware that supports it, there’s really no reason not to upgrade1.

Over the years it has become increasingly clear that desktop computers are still too complicated for non-geek people, and Lion does a lot to simplify things by borrowing ideas Apple has learned from the iPhone and iPad. The influences of iOS on Lion are everywhere in this update, and after some initial skepticism, I’ve come around to thinking this is a Good Thing.

While some people see iOS replacing OS X in the near future, the amount of effort Apple put into Lion leaves me with no doubt about its future. The Mac may no longer be the center of the “digital hub”, but it certainly has its place in the Apple product line-up.

Sadly, this is also the first version of OS X that will not run on our five year old iMac. Its main use for the last few years has been to serve as an iTunes server for the household, so it’ll likely get replaced with a Mac mini when it comes time to buy a replacement.

iOS 5

As a three month owner of an iPhone 4 and a one month user of the iPad 2, I’m really excited about iOS 5. A few of my favorites:

  • The new notification system is a welcome upgrade to the old interrupting style,
  • Reminders looks good enough to replace 2Do as my default to-do list
  • The systemwide Twitter integration will be handy
  • Wi-Fi sync means I can charge my iPhone in the bedroom overnight instead of docking it with the iMac on the other side of the house

One thing that wasn’t covered at WWDC that I hope will make it’s way into the final version of iOS 5 is Nuance–based speech recognition. The current technology is quite limited and often produces some laughable results. It’d be great to, for example, listen and reply to text messages using only my voice while driving.

iCloud

Apple iCloud

I have mixed feelings about iCloud. On the one hand, it’s going to be great to have a consistent way of saving and sharing documents between the iPhone and iPad. On the other hand, its other features are a lot less useful if you currently depend on other third party services for syncing and sharing.

The killer feature for me is Photo Stream, which automatically sends new photos to iCloud then will push them to your Mac and other devices. I’m terrible about keeping our iPhoto library updated, so this will pretty much eliminate that problem.

The idea of iCloud document storage looks good too, but I have questions about how it’ll work in practice. In particular, if I create a document in an app, is that data tied to that program forever, or can I easily open it in another app? My current setup — plain old text files saved in Dropbox — seems to be the least risky way to store things, and I’d be surprised if iCloud could improve upon this.

Moving onto contacts, calendar, and mail, I’ve been a long-time user of Google’s services, which are each considered to be the best in their classes. Moving these over to the iCloud alternatives would be a big downgrade. For people not already using Google’s apps though, these will be simpler alternatives.

Finally, there are iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match. The former will automatically push new iTunes music purchases to all your devices, while the latter brings this feature to all your other non-iTunes music for $25/year. The key thing to me with both of these features is that you need to download these songs to all your devices, taking up potentially scarce storage space on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.

Looking at my iTunes library, I listen to — at most — 10% of my music on a regular basis. This easily fits on my iPhone using Smart Playlists, so there’s no need to have all my songs available on Apple’s servers. In addition, I haven’t bought a track through iTunes for over three years — I’ve been a happy Amazon MP3 customer since then.

Now, if Apple were to offer a streaming service with access to their entire music catalog on all my devices so I could painlessly listen to new songs, that I’d be interested in. Rdio offers this right now for $10/month, and I’ve been tempted to give it a try.

  1. Lion drops support for Rosetta, so you’ll no longer be able to run applications written for earlier PowerPC-based Macs. This will affect some long-time Mac users. ↩

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With: , , , ,

Living in Tim Pawlenty’s Fantasyland

June 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As we get ever closer to the 2012 primary season, I’m watching the GOP Presidential campaign with a growing sense of amusement. The announced candidates and the unofficial contenders are so profoundly unserious that I have a hard time believing they mean half of the things coming out of their mouths.

Still, words have consequences, and it looks like the GOP Presidential hopefuls are now in a mad dash to the Right in order to win over the Tea Party crowd. This leaves little hope for a moderate candidate in this race.

[Read more…]

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Five Months Later: Chrome OS and the Cr-48

May 17, 2011 By 3 Comments

Five months ago I wrote about the Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook prototype I had received from Google. I’ve been using it almost every day since then and was planning on giving an update after six months of having it. But, at Google’s IO conference last week, they announced the availability of Chromebooks for purchase beginning June 15th, so I decided to share a few thoughts while Chrome OS is getting some extra attention.

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In which we consider the oft-rumored Apple HDTV

April 19, 2011 By 1 Comment

The fundamental question Apple always wants an answer for before entering a new market is “Why would someone buy this instead of what’s already out there?” I don’t think there’s a good answer for that if an Apple-branded HDTV is just a big screen with built-in Apple TV functionality.

– John Gruber

For years, there have been rumors of the imminent release of an Apple-made HDTV. The topic came up again last week when AppleInsder published a report speculating on the launch of this device in the next year:

Such a product could be paired with a subscription service to iTunes, allowing users to access content and services at a flat subscription rate that would negate the need for a cable box and digital video recorder. However, [Brian] White’s note gave no indication of potential features of such a product. Apple also has a great deal of experience with high-definition displays on its iMac desktop, including its big-screen 27-inch iMac, first released in 2009.

In the ensuing discussion over the weekend, the case for Apple making a big screen TV by Harry McCracken, and to a lesser degree, Chris Dixon, came down to the following argument:

  1. There are rumors of an Apple HDTV
  2. When there were rumors of X before Apple announced X, some analysts said Apple would never make X (where X = the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch)
  3. Apple made X
  4. Therefore, Apple will make an HDTV

I have no doubt that Apple could make a beautifully designed television if they set out to do it and that a nontrival number of people would buy it. Still, there isn’t a good reason for them to make one.

Yes, that big piece of glass is important, in that it’s what we stare at once we’re on the couch — much like the LCD monitor sitting on your desk. Because that’s what an HDTV is — a big computer monitor for your living room. But once it’s plugged in and turned on, it disappears and the video on screen is all that matters.

And that video has to come from somewhere. For most people, that place is a cable box or a satellite receiver, so they’re viewing experience is determined by that box they rent every month. A TV made by Apple isn’t going to change that. Adam Lisagor:

The TV is not the screen with seven different inputs for your players and boxes and game machines. The TV is the content and the buttons we touch to get to that content. That is, the TV has historically been the cable box, and Apple has merely hinted at changing this.

The only way to improve that awful experience is to avoid it by routing around the cable/satellite providers. And in case you missed it, Apple already has a way to do this through the $99 Apple TV. Plug that in, and you’ve got an Apple experience and content available through iTunes and Netflix. Marco Arment puts it well:

A bigger problem is that Apple prefers to offer fully integrated products, but a modern TV is just one component in a mess of electronics and service providers, most of which suck. Apple doesn’t want their beautiful, it-just-works TV to need to interact with Onkyo’s 7.1 HDMI-switching receiver, Sony’s 3D Blu-ray player, Microsoft’s game system, Comcast’s awful Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, Canon’s newest camcorder, the photos on your point-and-shoot’s SDHC card, and your Logitech universal remote. (The need for TVs to have a more complex remote than the Apple TV might be fatal alone.)

The Apple TV, as a single-featured set-top box with one take-it-or-leave-it output, avoids all of those complexities and delivers one Apple integrated experience — iTunes — to your TV. That’s it. Single-purpose, done well.

So what could an Apple flatscreen offer over the combination of your current television with an Apple TV plugged into it? One less box, I suppose, but then your eight year old will eventually be stuck running software almost a decade old. No, if Apple continues to pursue this hobby, it’ll be on the content side, so that you’ll eventually no longer have a need for the other boxes plugged into your TV.

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With: ,

Why You’ll be Buying an iPad 2

March 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

First, an admission: I was wrong. Last year I said I didn’t think the iPad would be a commercial success, but it clearly is. I also said it was a just a bigger, faster iPod Touch, but it’s obvious that the large 9.7 inch LED screen makes all the difference.

Despite a clear use case for its place between the laptop and the smartphone, the iPad has captured people’s imaginations and validated the market for tablet devices. So, you think this would pave the way for the “iPad killers” and the cheap imitations that inevitably follow any successful product launch. Except one year later, this still hasn’t happened yet.

[Read more…]

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