I received my "private beta invitation" from hulu.com a couple of weeks ago and I've been thoroughly impressed from day one. It has a great selection of shows, a near-perfect user interface, and fast, high-quality video.

For those not familiar with Hulu, it started out as a joint venture between NBC and Fox to showcase their primetime shows and has grown beyond that.

Here's what I like about Hulu:

• Great show selection.
• Simple, easy-to-use, uncluttered user interafce
• Automatically resume playing a show right where you left off (even recovers from browser crashes)
• Full-screen viewing option
• Descent video quality: you will notice macro-blocking and the lower frame rate in full screen mode, but it is by no means distracting, especially if you scoot back from your screen an extra foot or two
• HD Video: this will eliminate all quality complaints, but it's only available for a few movie trailers at this point
• Commercials: there is one 30 second commercial every 15 minutes. Not bad. And all of the commercials are for the same company, so you kinda know what to expect when it is commercial time, which makes them almost enjoyable. Yes, you read that correctly, I was actually enjoying that Toyota commercial by the end of the show.

You can catch episodes of Firefly, Heroes, The Office, Scrubs, Chuck, 30 Rock, House, Battlestar Galactica (new and classic), Rosewell, Arrested Development, Journeyman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mary Tyler Moore, and many, many more.

Conclusion

It's great entertainment when you need a break (such as from visiting your family over the holidays.) Sign-up for an invitation now; it took me about a week to receive mine. In the meantime, you can view shows on openhulu.com.

Just Playing Around

And finally, one of the coolest features is that you can embed your favorite shows into your own website. Instead of simply posting about how great a show is, show an episode. Here are some of my favorites:

Firefly: Perhaps one of the best science fiction TV shows ever shown on network TV. You can watch the entire series online; here is the first episode:

Roswell: I'd never watched a single episode but noticed its high rating on Hulu. I watched the pilot and decided that I missed out on a great series. This is definitely something I'll be watching via hulu. Here is the pilot:

Journeyman: NBC has apparently canceled this show (yet decided to keep the unwatchable Bionic Woman remake alive.) I think people found Journeyman too difficult to follow, especially if they missed an episode. Out of all current shows on TV, I thought it has/had the best theme song and background music. Maybe watching it online will cause a revival. Here's a clip from Episode 8:

I've been unimpressed with Windows Vista on my new Thinkpad T61 so I decided to give Ubuntu Linux a try, despite the fact that there are a few programs I would be missing (Slysoft AnyDVD HD for DVD decryption, TiVo Desktop for extracting files from TiVo HDs, Philips Pronto Edit for updating my Pronto, etc.)

I pre-read this excellent wiki article atThinkWiki.com. As the article mentioned, I did have problems with a blank screen when the CD booted, but the optional Safe Graphics boot option solved that. The installation was very easy. For the first time in the 20 or so times I've installed Linux, I wasn't worried about accidentally partition my hard drive incorrectly and deleting my existing Windows installation. The wizard took care of resizing existing and creating new partitions automatically.

Unfortunately, I ran into to way too many problems to use Ubuntu 7.10 on a daily basis. Some of these may be resolvable, but not without a lot of work. Truthfully, I don't care to devote that much time to it. Here are the issues that are making me stick to Windows Vista:

• The wireless will not connect. I'm using a Linksys WRT54G router with the Linux-based DD-WRT firmware the the plain old WEP encryption. I can see the wireless network, but I can't connect to it. There is no error message and indication how to resolve it. I connected via a wired network and downloaded all the updates, but it still wouldn't connect.
• If I reboot without powering off, the sound card "sticks" and repeats the first 2 seconds of any sound, over and over and over, until I shutdown.
• The sound card continually "chatters" in the background. It sounds like muted Morse Code, perhaps caused by some type of driver interference. Muting the speakers makes no difference. It doesn't do this in Windows.
• The display brightness can't be adjusted once the nVidia drivers were loaded. I can't use the advanced Compiz desktop without these drivers, so I'm missing out on a feature either way. There is a work-around to adjust brightness from a terminal window, but I'd really just rather use the hot keys.
• Tapping the upper right corner of the touchpad caused Ubuntu to switch to a different desktop. But I couldn't consistently pick the right or left desktop; it was random selection. Worst of all, it happened accidentally far too often. I'm guessing this would be a very easy setting to find, but there were too many other issues at this point for me to look into it.
• The Ubuntu boot menu gave me two identically-named options for Windows Vista. The first turned out to be the automated recovery partition and didn't really have anything to do with booting Windows. I know it's easy to edit the config file, but it would have been nice if this were correct from the beginning.

In the end, I'm beginning to feel like this is the best laptop hardware I've ever owned but I'm still is in search of a great operating system. The default Windows Vista Home Basic is OK, but I still have a couple of programs that need XP. And there is still the temporary freeze and "chuck-chuck" sound from the hard drive every 30 or so minutes. But still, it's much better than the Ubuntu install.

To be honest, I'm starting to regret not going for a MacBook Pro. It could dual-boot to Windows when necessary, and I'd be able to run OS X the rest of the time. The purchase would have cost about $800 more, and that is a large price difference to justify, but I think I'd be more pleased with the overall experience.

Update (26-Feb-2008): I've spent more time messing with Ubuntu and am much more pleased with it than I was initially.

• Wireless Works: I was able to get the wireless working flawlessly, no script or configuration required. My problem was due to confusion with the Ubuntu network protocol naming (WEP Passkey vs. WEP HEX, etc.) Too bad it doesn't auto-detect the network type and then try the password you enter to figure out phasskey vs. hex vs. decimal. But at least I finally figured out what was needed and got it working.
• Screen Brightness works: Following the thinkwiki article, I installed ENVY (after multiple unavailable package problems were resolved) and got the latest nVidia drivers, which allows screen brightness to be adjusted.
• Sound Problems Disappeared: The sound problems went away after a few reboots / updates. I don't know what the deal was. I had to switch the default volume control (in the upper nav bar) to control the speaker volume instead of the microphone volume, per the think wiki article.
• System Dock: I installed the AWN (Avant Window Navigator) dock and highly recommend it.
• Touchpad Config & App Launcher: The advanced touchpad configuration tool QSynaptics and keyboard application launcher Gnome Do are two other must-haves.
• Unresolved: I installed Skype (after adding the skype repository) but it will not detect sound from the internal or an external microphone. I can make calls and hear people, but they can't hear me. I worked on this for an hour and gave up.
• Unresolved: Going into sleep mode or hibernate mode causes bad things to happen. It might resume the first time, but never the second time. I have to hold the power button down and reboot. Power management is terrible.
• Unresolved: There is no native AccurateRip compatible CD ripping software; dbPowerAmp Music Converter for Windows has no equal. There is no DVD ripping software that nears the reliability (every DVD protection scheme) and functionality (re-authoring) of AnyDVD and CloneDVD.
• Conclusion: If you have the time, you can get a pretty OS install from Ubuntu. But it's going to take time and I'd rather spend it other ways. Vista Basic is horrible. I'm going to switch to either Vista Ultimate or XP as both do more of what I need with less effort. In the end, I think a Mac hardware and OS is still the best option: great hardware, great software, less time messing with stuff, but at a higher monetary cost.

I've tried several different Amazon S3 file managers and had settled on the free S3 Firefox Organizer. But then I tried Bucket Explorer. Not only did it do everything I needed it to do, it introduced to me new features I didn't know Amazon S3 supported. If you're like me, you love free and open source software. Bucket Explorer, once out of beta, will be a commercial program. I'm not sure what the final price will be, but assuming it costs less than $40, it is a program worth purchasing. Here's why I'm recommending it.

Bucket Explorer is a Java-based GUI for managing, uploading to, and downloading from buckets on Amazon S3. It is not designed to backup local computers (Jungle Disk and S3 Backup do this); it's designed for those sharing and managing web content. So if you plan to use Amazon S3 as a Content Distribution Network, Bucket Explorer is targeted at you. For those not familiar with Amazon S3, the attraction is inexpensive and unlimited storage, inexpensive and unlimited download bandwidth, and ultra-high reliability.

Because it is written in Java, it runs on Windows, Linux, and (currently in private beta) Macintosh. I'm generally skeptical of Java application stability, but I've been using it for a few weeks and it has been 100% reliable. It includes the basic features you'd expect, such as bucket creation and access control list modification (for public sharing of files.)

What impressed me most about Bucket Explorer is support for advanced features, such as:

• Enable logging for buckets and store logs in a different bucket
• Retrieve the public URL of files
• Temporarily share private files publicly with a link that auto-expires after a specified time
• Create virtual folders within buckets

The more I used Bucket Explorer, the more I learned about the capabilities of Amazon S3. I did identify a few addition features I'd like to see. Here is a summary of my suggestions:

• Refresh local file listing (without switching to one directory and back to the original)
• Ability to rename local files (currently have to do this in Windows Explorer)
• Have the option to auto re-connect to the last bucket on startup (instead of re-entering it each time)
• When right-clicking a file, have the option to copy the torrent address to the clipboard (just like you can with the Public URL)
• I have my own domain pointing to an S3 bucket; it would be nice if these buckets could be flagged to return the custom domain URL instead of the default Amazon URL. Not sure if this "use different URL info" might be a setting stored on the local PC or a config file stored in the bucket itself. Either way, it would be a useful feature to have if you plan on using the custom domain name.

I sent these suggestions to the developers. I wasn't sure if they'd acknowlege my suggestions or not, but I almost immediately received an e-mail back from them:

THANKS for the feedback. Its the feedback from users which keeps us motivated to work on the product. All of your suggestions are excellent. We collected all the feedback provided till August 30th, and we are trying to release one version with that feedback by end of this month or latest by Monday / Tuesday. Once that release is out for public beta, we will start working on all the change requests that we got in the month of September.

With this type of response, the future of Bucket Explorer appears to be very promising. To see it in use, you can go to their site and view the demo. If you use Amazon S3 for sharing content, I think you'll want to give it a try. According to a forum post, if you provide them with design/feature feedback during the beta period, you'll receive a free copy of the initial release.

As I stated in an earlier post, Google Reader is the best RSS Feed Reader on the Internet. However, it is not perfect. And the more I use it, the more potential for improvement I see. Here is my list of what I'd like to see changed with Google Reader:

• Lack of Different Default Views for Sites: Some websites (such as Digg.com) have hundreds of posts each day. For them, I'd like the default videw to be the List View, where it shows only the post title and the first 20 or so words from the entry. This is a much more space-efficient view and allows for quicker browsing through the headlines, since with this many entries, you're going to ignore most of them. But for sites with only a few entries, say less than 10 or so unread items, I'd like the default view to be the Expanded View, where the entire content is shown for each post. I don't like having to switch between views based on which feed I'm viewing; there needs to be a way to specify a default for each feed or specify it based on number of unread posts.
• Too Many Entries for Some Sites — Show me the Best: As I stated above, some sites have way, way too many entries for me to read all of them. Right now, I have 754 unread digg.com articles, and that's only because I used the "mark all as read" feature a day or two ago. Truthfully, I will never, ever take the time to read all of these entries and I probably should just delete my subscription to that feed. I wish Digg would provide a feed listing only the most popular of the popular stories, but they don't because they want people on their site voting up articles. So I wish Google would implement a tracking system for high volume sites, so that the most popular unread items are at the top of Google Reader, rather than the most recent.
• Too Many Entries for Some Sites — Only Show the Latest Stories: If Google Reader won't show me the most popular stories on "high volume" sites, at least autoamtically mark the older posts as "read". I'd like to see a per-site option to show "only the most recent ### number of posts."
• No Images When Using Google Reader in Offline Mode: First of all, I have to say that having an offline viewing mode for a browser-based application is awesome! I installed Google Gears, clicked the "offline" icon in Google Reader, and all the feeds could be read without an internet connection! Unfortunately, all of the offline feeds had the pictures omitted. Sure, having pictures would require more cache to be used on my PC for the offline content, but a picture is worth 1000 words in most cases, and the omission of pictures makes reading some posts worthless.

Today Sonos announced the release of version 2.3 of their software, which adds support for Sirius Internet Radio. I was fortunate enough to participate in an early evaluation and NDA ends today; here are my thoughts on the latest software update. This is a win-win situation for both companies; the Sonos system becomes more attractive to Sirius customers and vice versa.

+

Review of the new Sirius Feature

First of all, I'd like to state that I'm not nor have I even been a subscriber to either XM or Sirius satellite radio. This is really my first long-term experience. I was never interested before because I didn't want to install anything in my vehicles and I didn't want to buy a single room home receiver and run the antenna to a nearby window. The Sonos software upgrade solves that last dilemma; there is no satellite radio antenna to mess with because all content is streamed over your broadband connection. This is similar to the Sirius streaming Internet radio feature available on a PC, but this it gives the simple multi-room listening experience for which Sonos is known.

I've listened to satellite radio in rental cars a few times and found the quality to be much better than FM radio. If I listened closely to music, I thought that I may be able to head some compression artifacts and definitely had problem with reception near underpasses. In my casual listening environment (a.k.a. my kitchen and living room — not my home theater), I noticed neither of these problems. The music sounded great and the connection was flawless.

It's necessary to mention the Sirius content as a part of the review. If you're familiar with Sirius, you're probably know as much about the content as I do. To me, but big advantage is the talk channels (interviews, news, comedy, Howard Stern, etc.) In 2 hours, I found more interesting news, comedy, and interview content than I had in the past 2 years of using my Sonos. The music was the typical genres you'd expect. To be honest, I enjoy my Pandora stations more than anything I found on Sirius.

Conclusion

If you're a Sirius subscriber or if you looking to add a bunch of great talk content to your home, the Sirius upgrade for Sonos can't be beat. It's by far the best way to add satellite radio to your home. The downside is the subscription cost. I'm not sure it's worth the $12.95/month, but I have a few more weeks of my trial subscription to decide. For existing Sirius customers who already own a Sonos or are thinking about adding Sirius to their home, the Sonos/Sirius combination is as good as it gets. But if you're focus is specific songs you can hear whenever you want, the Real Rhapsody subscription is probably a better fit. And and if you just want radio stations enjoy, Pandora is less expensive and customizes better to your individual tastes. The great news is that Sonos gives you all three options; pick which ever is best for you or you can just listen to your music collection and Internet radio and forgo the subscriptions costs all together — the choice is up to you.

Final Thoughts - Why I'm a Sonos Fan

To me, the most impressive aspect of Sonos is not the simplicity of setup, not the breadth of features, and the exceptional hardware and software design, but rather the fact that they try to implement features requested by customers. Case in point, Sirius Streaming Satellite Radio support was requested by a user in the Sonos forum some time ago. It's taken a little while, but Sonos made the request reality. Each software update seems to add support for customer-requested features. Off the top of my head I can name multiple features that started off as customer requests: support for FLAC, WMA, WMA DRM formats, support for the Real Rhaposdy and Pandora music services, and an Alarm Clock feature (click here for software revision history.) Customers ask for it and Sonos delivers. How great is their feature support? My Sonos music system is the only major electronic device I own where I have performed zero modifications. No third party software, no hacks, no work-arounds, nothing. It's that well designed.