Roku XD|S

I have been interested in streaming content for a while. I have installed PlayOn and the tubeCore Windows Media Center plugin to view TV content. This is not an ideal experience.

With tubeCore, the user interface to browse the list of shows and episodes is pretty simple. For example, the meta data about the episodes is not shown. Also, I was never able to get reliable streaming though PlayOn and tubeCore.  Often, I would need to try to play a stream twice in order for it to play successfully.

The Roku XD|S looked like it would be a perfect way to watch content that is available on-line.  With the Roku, you have easy access to Netflix streaming, Amazon Video On Demand, Hulu and other content.  I like the hardware, as it is very quiet, and is small enough for me to use on any of our TVs.

The setup was pretty painless, and I was up and running with several of the content providers within 30 minutes of starting the setup process.  Where the content partners provided HD content, the picture quality was good.

Glympse

A while ago, I wrote about On My Way.  This application allowed you to share your location, and that person could see this location updated in real-time.  That application is not available anymore.

Glympse is a new free application that allows you to do the same thing, but it has some interesting features:

• Ability to set a time limit, where sharing of your location is automatically stopped.


• Ability to mark recipients as "favorites", to make it easier to initiate sharing


• Ability to set a destination, where sharing will automatically be stopped when you reach that location.

 

Multiple Chrome profiles on Mac OS X

Sometimes I want to use two different Google Chrome instances, with different sets of Chrome extensions.

This page has instructions for setting this up on Mac OS X

Rumor: Microsoft TV

There are rumors that Microsoft will introduce a video streamer box at CES this year:

http://twitter.com/#!/slashgear/status/22224742257790977

I think that this could be a pretty good product that I would like. I think that this could be something that would help simplify my setup.

Announcement hopes:

Here is what I hope the announcement will be:

• The box will be about the size of a Roku or Apple TV


• It would run a version of Windows that has been stripped to only allow Windows Media Center to run.
  
  
  
  • Windows Media Center already supports Netflix streaming
  
  
  • Windows Media Center plugins would still be allowed to run
  
  
  • This would help prevent software conflicts
  
  
  • The box would automatically update itself from Microsoft's servers
  
  
  
  


• These devices would also be Media Center Extenders
  
  
  
  • This would allow you to buy a few of them for a house, and be able to watch the same content in all rooms.
  
  
  
  


• There would be two SKUs.  One with a hard drive for content, and one that would only stream content from other sources.
  
  
  
  • The SKU with the hard drive would allow the user to store content, and playback from the local hard drive.
  
  
  
  


• These would also support Zune Marketplace to get access to video and audio content (as the Xbox 360 does).


• These devices would also be UPnP AV client.


• These would support USB or UPnP TV tuners, to allow viewing or recording (for the SKU that has the hard drive) of TV content.

Since Microsoft already has the Xbox, this device would need to be cheaper than the existing versions of the Xbox.  I would think that the version without the hard drive would be $100, and the version with the hard drive would be $200.

Pie-in-the-sky hopes:

Jumpscan

Jumpscan is a service that lets you share your contact information with others.  With Jumpscan, you enter your contact information, and some of the usernames for various social networks, and they create an online profile for you.  Then they will generate a QR code for this profile page.

I don't understand the usefulness of this service. If my purpose was to create a QR code to share my contact information, I would just create QR code that has my information in vcard format.  This would allow the QR code to be useful, even when there is no data connection. Or, if I wanted to include a url, I would just encode that in the QR code.  If I wanted to share my social network information, I could include a link to my about.me page.

Here is the QR code generated by Jumpscan, which only links to my profile page on Jumpscan.



Here is a QR code with the same information encoded within it:



[via Lifehacker]

Memolane

Over the past few years, I have used several online services.  I use flickr and Picasa to store photos.  I also use Twitter and TripIt. With all of these sites, it is hard to get a consolidated view of these disparate sets of data.

Memolane is an interesting site that lets you view your online "lifestream" chronologically, in a single unified view.  I like that you can go back in time and see what you were doing on certain dates.



It looks like Memolane is having a problem importing my Twitter feed, but once that problem is fixed, I could see using this as a visualization tool.

Instapaper

I find interesting content while using my phone, either from my6sense or by finding links on Twitter.  Often, I don't want to read the content on my phone, either because I don't have time, or the form factor of my phone doesn't make it easy to read long content, so I would save it for later reading.

I had used Gmail to save these urls.  I setup a filter to automatically archive and add a "Bookmark" label if the message came from one of my accounts, and it had the "bookmark" keyword in the subject.  This works well, though it the experience going through the bookmarks is not ideal.

The type of experience that I ideally would like would be similar to the New York Times Chrome App, and the Flipboard experience.  These present content in a clean, visually pleasing way.  The closest experience that I have seen to this, for bookmarks, is with Instapaper.

Instapaper is a service that lets you save pages for you to view later.  They have a bookmarklet that you can use to save any page that you are viewing in a browser.  When viewing the list of saved sites, the presentation is a simple list.  There are some interesting features, that I like:

• When viewing content, you have the option to view a Text-only version, which strips all extraneous formatting.


• You can have content downloaded in Kindle or ePub format