Brandon Aaskov

Too Many Hobbies

Roku

It's even smaller than that.

Right after Christmas, I took my Amazon gift cards (my family knows me well) and got myself a Roku box. I actually used Boxee on my Mac Mini for a while, which is great for playing pirated content (not that I do that), but didn’t have a Hulu+ integration or Amazon Instant Videos. I was really looking for the latter since my PS3 and XBox 360 handle Hulu+ and Netflix already. I’m also a big Revision3 fan, and I know Boxee and Roku both support that “channel”.

So, I took the plunge and tried out a new device. As I’ve gotten older, lazier, and gotten a massive TV, I decided I was sick of watching movies on my computer and dealing with a configuration that only I understood and could setup (my friend Kyle J. Norris understands all too well how bad this used to be for me).

First, it’s small. The device is so crazy, super small for what it does. Which is great, because it’s easy to hide. Roku offers three different boxes depending on your needs. I got the top of the line one because it wasn’t that much more and I want to develop on it as well. Mine has a radio frequency (RF) remote, but I’m not sure if the other two offer this – it’s unclear if they’re all RF but only the high end one supports motion control, or if only the high end one is RF. Anyway, that makes it even better that it’s easy to hide since you can control it without being in line-of-sight. Second, setup was painless. Once I tied it to my accounts (Hulu+, Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo) everything else was a breeze. I browsed some channels, and added some stuff I’ll probably never watch.

The device is always on, which some people complain about. There’s no off button, but when it’s not being used it barely sips power so I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

If you have a PS3, the Netflix and Hulu integrations are pretty much the same – nothing crazy there. If you have an XBox, then you probably don’t realize the Hulu integrations are better on other devices. Ignorance is bliss. But what really sold me was the Amazon integration. Not necessarily because I’m a Prime member and can get things free like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, but because I can rent things easily. I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t mind shelling out $1-$5 to rent something since I don’t do it all that often. Most of what I watch I get through my subscription services, but when I want to watch Christmas Vacation and I don’t own it, renting it for a couple of dollars is a great option. I realize that the Apple TV also lets you rent movies, but then you’re anchored to that device or another Apple device (which doesn’t actually bother me). What I don’t like about the Apple TV is that it barely integrates with other third party apps.

The quality is great, by the way. The Roku 2 XS supports 1080p and when I’m watching Luther (my latest fix) on Netflix, New Girl on Hulu+ or renting an HD movie from Amazon, the quality is great. Reading reviews you’ll see comments in regards to the quality of the stream, but I don’t think people understand that their internet connection is likely to blame, or perhaps they don’t understand how rendition switching works.

I have my Roku wired directly to my router. I like to hard-wire devices that can be, but it does come with WiFi built in. I actually used it in that mode for about a week and I honestly see no difference in quality. Only once in the past month have I seen the stream pause mid-movie to re-buffer, and I’m very satisfied with that rate.

Lastly, the Roku has a USB port for flash drives and external hard drives. I’ve read a few mixed things about support for codecs and containers, or even hard drive types. For instance, I read somewhere that hard drives that need their own power source (i.e. aren’t powered off of USB) won’t work. Mine is powered off of USB, so I didn’t test that. What I did find, to my surprise, is that it played just about everything I wanted it to. Most of the content I was playing were HD rips of things in H.264 wrapped in an MKV container (if you don’t know what that means, then this paragraph probably doesn’t apply to you). It did take a long time to scan my drive, and going back up a folder and then back down caused it to re-scan, which is frustrating. However, it is about 500GB of movies, which may not be the case for most people. There are services like PlayOn that will allow you to stream videos like that from your PC, but I didn’t test that out because… well, because I didn’t care. I’m trying to simplify my setup, not complicate it.

In short, it’s a great device to move you off of your computer, even if you’re only using it to rent movies off of Amazon. It’s inexpensive (relatively) for what you get, and it seems like publishers and content providers more readily provide their libraries to Roku than they do the Boxee box. Don’t get me wrong, I love Boxee, but I think Roku hits the sweet spot for the consumer market.

TextMate: Shifting Right or Left Issue

Every so often I switch text editors (no vim or emacs for me, sorry) just because I want to try something different and see if I like it. I have always had TextMate, but I never used it seriously for developing. (I’m going to rant before getting to the issue I discovered, so jump down if you’re just looking for the solution).

I was using Coda for the past couple of years because of it’s nice GUI, simple FTP integration and Subversion integration. But then I stopped using Subversion in favor of Git (along with GitHub), and there’s no support for that. And then I basically stopped using the FTP feature since I’d rather deploy projects in a more official way – even zipping the project and unzipping on the server works better. Then, I realized there was no way to use spaces instead of tabs, so it started shopping elsewhere.

Then I saw a nice little screencast by CSS Tricks going over some TextMate shortcuts via some extra bundles (Zen Coding, mHTML and mCSS). They were pretty cool, I started playing around, but most of all just started getting used to how insanely simple it all is (and that I can convert tabs to spaces easily and set my soft tabs to however many spaces I want). TextMate hasn’t been worked on in years, and I have no idea why. Coda has been pretty stagnant too. Maybe something about these editors makes them not very fun to iterate on. I also tried out Espresso, but that’s a bit too much GUI for my needs, though I like their browser where you can jump from method to method (not so great for all the anonymous functions in JS though). I used Aptana back in the day, but it was just too resource intensive for what I needed out of it, and I’ve never been a fan of Eclipse.

So, anyway, after watching that screencast I installed Zen Coding as it had some pretty cool stuff. But then I realized I couldn’t indent or outdent code anymore (TextMate calls it Shift Right and Shift Left and uses the shortcuts cmd + ] and cmd + [ respectively). You can still use Shift Right and Shift Left from the menu, but the shortcuts didn’t work. I found out this is because Zen Coding overrides those shortcuts for its own purposes. SHAME ON YOU ZEN CODING! Thankfully, it’s easy to fix. Go to Bundles > Bundle Editor > Show Bundle Editor and find the Zen Coding section on the left-hand side. Twirl down that section and you’ll see some of the shortcuts for the bundle. There are two you want to remove:

Once you remove the “Select Next Item” and “Select Previous Item” shortcuts (or remap them if you so desire), then you should be able to use the Shift Right and Shift Left shortcuts again.

jQuery’s Change Event Not Firing

I hit this annoying issue where listening to jQuery’s change() event would only fire when the input field I bound it to lost focus:

$('#search-form .term').change(function(){
  console.log('did this fire?');
});

You’d think that would fire when typing into the input field, but it doesn’t (it’s just a basic text input field by the way).

After some Googling and reading a bunch of stuff on Stack Overflow (god I love that site) and other sites, it seemed like this was a common problem with select elements in IE. Great. That doesn’t help me. I tried using bind() and live() instead of the change() method, but that didn’t work either:

$('#search-form .term').bind('change', function(){
  console.log('this only fires on losing focus');
});

$('#search-form .term').live('change', function(){
  console.log('this only fires on losing focus too');
});

Eventually, I found the answer. There are a bunch of different things you can pass in at the same to the bind method. What I found suggested the following:

'change keypress paste focus textInput input'

The answer on Stack Overflow suggests that it won’t fire multiple times, but it definitely does. What I ended up going with was this:

$('#search-form .term').bind('input', function(){
  console.log('YAY!');
});

It works even when you paste content too. Hell, yes! Thank you Stack Overflow and the rest of the interweb.

Pay Yourself, With Square


If you’re not sure what Square is, it’s this awesome startup in the valley (surprise!) and they offer payment processing on your phone. It’s remarkable what they’ve done in so little time, and it’s clear that in the coming years they’ll change the way payments are handled. You can sign up for their service for free, receive the device for free, and take payments, for free. They charge the standard 2.75% for credit card processing, but there are no one-time charges. Awesome service.

Moving along… Continue reading →

How Creative & Independent Is Milk?

If you’re unfamiliar with Milk, Inc., it’s a group of awesome people working together in the Mission district of San Francisco with the simple goal of creating 2-3 ideas a year and seeing what sticks. I love that idea for a company, especially with all this crap being churned out by startups that don’t deserve any money. Now, interestingly, Milk got a round of funding, but the money wasn’t put up by Kevin Rose. That’s fine… odd, but fine. Continue reading →

Renaming Your Bad Heroin

I was just watching an episode of Foundation where Kevin interviews John Borthwick of Betaworks. In one part of the episode, they both discuss the fragility of the first-launch of a mobile app. John’s advice for launching web applications is to get something in front of consumers immediately, and I agree with that. Kevin’s point is that it doesn’t work the same with mobile applications, and again I agree. Continue reading →

Using a Highgear Watch as an Altimeter

This summer I took Performance Design’s canopy course, and Jessica Edgeington blessed us with her presence and impressive swooping skills (awesome teach by the way). Over the course of the year I noticed a lot of staff at Skydive New England used Suunto Altimeter watches, and I had been shopping for one as well. However, the Suunto watches start at around $300, and they’re all pretty big and my wrists aren’t so much (I’ve just come to accept it). I saw Jessica wearing an altimeter watch I had never seen before, and she left before I got to ask what it was. Then, as luck would have it, that same watch became available on The Clymb for about half off that same week, so I bought it for $80. Continue reading →