March, 2007

Ten Myths of the Apple TV: 5.1 Audio

Via my internet puppetmaster, Brian Hogg, comes another very good (and very long) piece from Daniel Eran on the Apple TV that runs down some of the details on 5.1 audio and attempts to clear up some ongoing confusion about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

So really, the Apple TV doesn’t need to decode 5.1 audio, it only needs to hand the surround audio stream to a receiver than can decode those formats. Can it do this…?

In addition to stereo cables, Apple TV also features a Toslink digital optical port. Since we can send raw digital audio data over the Apple TV’s optical output, can’t we send DTS digitally encoded 5.1 as well?

Of course we can. Download a DTS sample file in WAV format, drop it into iTunes, and Apple TV will happily sync it and play it. Unlike Pro Logic audio, it will sound like static over regular stereo speakers, but hooked up to a DTS receiver, it is decoded into 5.1 channels of sound and played back in real DTS 5.1 surround.

I don’t personally have a 5.1 setup so I have no way of verifying this, but I’m curious what you audiophiles are discovering – especially given that some of the Scott Bournes out there have cited lack of 5.1 audio as one reason for holding out on an TV purchase.

Any luck getting 5.1 working satisfactorily with your Apple TV? Is the lack of 5.1 content on iTS a dealbreaker for you?

Hack Attack: A beginner’s guide to Quicksilver - Lifehacker

Adam Pash has written a terrific introduction to Quicksilver that I recommend for folks who are still scratching their heads about what all the fuss is about.

Part of the challenge is the “layers of the onion” problem. There’s no explanation of what Quicksilver does that’s at once brief, accurate, exhaustive, and easy for new users to immediately grok; it really does reveal its delights over time, through repeated usage, and in proportion to your willingness to learn and experiment. Adam does a good job of acquainting new folks with the basic idea and the setup, then he walks through a few of the many bits of fu that have made this app the phenomenon that it is.

Quicksilver can be used to launch files and applications, manipulate data, and seamlessly plug into almost any application on your Mac so that you can perform actions as soon as you think of them in a few short keystrokes.

Also from our own archives, here are a few popular Quicksilver items from the extended 43 Folders family (including 4 video tutorials). And seriously: if you really still don’t see why QS is different, do watch the videos; writing about Quicksilver is like singing about a magic trick.

011: Interview: Peter Hughes | The Merlin Show

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In today’s episode, Merlin talks with Peter Hughes of The Mountain Goats about the logistics of wired touring, keeping a tour diary on LiveJournal, and why The Mountain Goats don’t have a MySpace page.

More links and info in show notes.

Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic - New York Times

Yesterday’s New York Times front page ran an article pulling together the results of several recent studies looking at how interruptions and attempts to multitask can affect the quality of work as well as the length of recovery time.

Here’s one bit that really grabbed me:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

And, from a PDF of another of the studies cited (“Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI”), here’s a telling snippet from the article’s abstract (yes, most of the rest of it is well over my head):

Since the new TV can handle video up to HD’s 720p resolution, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether the iTunes store will eventually start selling HD content, such as TV shows and movies. You can bet that the desire for that quality of presentation is theoretically out there (at least it is for this HD TV owner). The problem, as many folks have discussed at length, is that the file size for HD movies, in particular, may be prohibitively large for the garden-variety home broadband user.

As Greg Keene notes, “With simple math, we can extrapolate that a 2-hour movie would be about 3.9 GB.” That’s not only a substantially lengthy download for, say, a residential DSL subscriber, it also represents the investment of over 10% of the available space on the Apple TV’s drive (as well as, it should be noted, an equivalent chunk of space back on your Mac or PC’s disk).

Lower threshold links to stuff I wouldn’t want you to miss. It’s been quite a while since we’ve done some shorties, so what the heck.

• Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web. - I tried Inquisitor when it first came out, and, for some reason, it didn’t move me. But now, I love its smartypants, mind-reader replacement for Safari’s search bar. Sogudi is still my first love for ad hoc location bar searches, but the ability to add custom search engines to Inquisitor is hot hot hot. Free as in beer, too.
• Picked up one of these Behance notebooks the other day. It is very lovely and well-designed. Not sure if it’s a quantum functional improvement over a sheet of printer paper, but it’s definitely a classy piece of productivity pr0n. And the Helvetica! Ah the Helvetica.
• Service Scrubber - I’ve mentioned before that I think OS X Services are one of the most woefully under-utilized tricks in the current Apple world. But the actual Services menu can, over time get cluttered. This handy little donationware app will shut off Services you don’t want to appear in the menu and let you re-map the key bindings of ones you do use. Very handy.
• 010: Interview: John Vanderslice, Part 2 | The Merlin Show - John Vanderslice on high-volume email: “You can’t make sense of all that correspondence. You just can’t.”
• On the advice of my pal Katie Spence, I picked up Unstuck, which looks to be a pretty neat little book about generating ideas and then seeing them through into real “stuff.” Presented in a “choose your own adventure” style that makes for interactive fun. They also have a website that (with a bit of typo-correction and expansion) could turn into an excellent adjunct to the hardback edition (the book clearly wants to be hypertext).
• Gizmodo reports on less costly options for hooking up your new Apple TV. My take: A) it’s crazy for Apple not to include at least gratis composite cables for a device aimed at the fat part of the media-viewing curve, and B) the charlatans at Monster and their ilk should be horsewhipped for what they’re charging media noobs for cables.

009: Interview: Jeffrey Veen, Part 2 | The Merlin Show

Top 5 Things That Should Be Taught In Every School

I enjoyed reading this list and was especially into number five:

#5: Time Management

Speaking of other skills that can be utilized in any job and career is time management. The majority of students never really learn to value their time and mange it while in school. Procrastination is all too rampant (studying right before class, doing homework and essays the day it’s due, partying the night before the exam). This lack of time management often carries over into adulthood, which becomes a major liability.

Learn to make a to do list. Learn to prioritize. Learn to break things down into 30 minute blocks of time. Learn about actionable items. David Allen’s GTD system is your best friend here along with Dan Kennedy’s No B.S Time Management. Again if you’re unfamiliar with these people, Google is your best friend, but I’m sure the majority of readers will know what I’m talking about.

What would you add to the list of skills you think should be taught in school?

[ via: Anarchaia (3/14/07) ]

Enabling Quicksilver proxies and application menus | Celsius1414

Robert Daeley has posted an excellent appendix to yesterday’s screencast on Quicksilver proxies.

Because, like most Quicksilver power users, I run the app in full-bore, bleeding-edge mode with all the plug-ins installed, I tend to leave out some of the rubber-chicken-waving that new users need to go through to make advanced features work properly. Robert picks up the slack nicely with this swell tutorial. Many thanks!

Merlin Mann’s new episode of the Merlin Show posted yesterday teaches very powerful Quicksilver-Fu, enabling you to access the menu items of any application, as well as introducing the concept of proxies. These techniques belie the mistaken impression that Quicksilver is “merely” a program launcher — it is an application master. ;)

What isn’t clear in the ‘cast is the settings, downloads, and brand of incense you need to burn in order to make all of that happen. I’m pretty sure the below covers everything, but let me know if I missed something.

Read all of Robert’s article.

008: HOWTO: Quicksilver: Application Menus | The Merlin Show

Click To Play

Many of the most diehard Quicksilver fans don’t know “proxy objects” even exist. Proxies are a sexy way to build actions and triggers around abstract QS items such as “Current Application,” “Finder Selection,” “Album Now Playing,” and even meta-stuff like “Last Command” and “Quicksilver Selection.”

By making a trigger to “Show Menu Items” in the “Current Application,” you can get Quicksilver-based access to almost any pull-down menu in a given OS X app. In today’s demo, I show you how to bring this fast access to any of the bajillion drop-down menu items in Macromates’ Textmate.

If you enjoy The Merlin Show, please consider subscribing for free via iTunes or Democracy, or just point the “podcatacher” of your choice at http://feeds.themerlinshow.com/TheMerlinShow.

007: Interview: Jonathan Coulton, Part 2 | The Merlin Show

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I first heard about The War of Art from David Allen during our GTD podcast series last year. I finally picked up a copy a couple months back and read it in an evening. Like a lot of self-help books, it’s longer than it needs to be (and it’s not actually very long to begin with), but it does make some great points about what its author calls “resistance.”

Resistance can be thought of as anything that pulls us away from doing the work we know is most important to us. It takes many forms (including procrastination, fear, distraction, and negative self-talk), but the effect is often similar: we find or permit all kinds of barriers to keep us from becoming the person we want to be, or from completing the thing we really want to make. Whether that’s being a published author, a composer, a playwright, or a painter, our impulse to create constantly battles an impulse to do something else, or to do nothing – to not upset our weirdly comfy stasis.

This book came up twice in my recent interview with Jonathan Coulton; both in part one and today’s recently released part two. Jonathan strikes me as someone who has, so far, succeeded at talking down the resistance he’d faced, and now he’s doing what he’s great at, and, in his words, he’s working hard to become the kind of “true person” that he wants to be for his daughter.

006: HOWTO: Quicksilver: The Comma Trick | The Merlin Show

For Quicksilver fans, today’s episode of The Merlin Show includes a short screencast on how to do the (still-surprisingly-little-known) Comma Trick.

(Hint: As a Mac OS X screen demo, this is an episode you may prefer to watch at high-resolution)

Click To Play

(Sharp-eyed? How can you tell this wasn’t the first take? :-) )

Getting Things Done (GTD) for Scientists - MacResearch

I enjoyed this post by Drew McCormack on how he discovered GTD and has started using it for his work as a scientist:

The thing to realize is that most people don’t get lessons in organizing themselves at school or college, and they certainly haven’t been prepared for the rapid pace of modern life. GTD is nothing more than a few lessons on how best to organize things. At the center of it all is what could be regarded as a multi-dimensional ToDo list. The idea is to get every project you have, however big or small, out of your head and into the list. That allows you to relax about things, and be more productive at the same time.

“Multi-dimensional ToDo list.” I’m totally stealing that.

Also, I mention it here because this post provides that rarest of voyeuristic nerdthrill: getting to peek at how someone else is using Kinkless!

Any tips or stories from the science nerds out there on how GTD is and isn’t working for you?

We’re wrapping up our launch week of The Merlin Show with a terrific interview and a new feature announcement.

First, don’t miss today’s interview with Chris Wetherell, in which we hear how our favorite drumming Google engineer has learned to embrace email mediocrity and has created a “walled garden” using his Treo. Great stuff (and viewable from this page, after the jump).

Next, I wanted to announce the High-resolution podcast feed for The Merlin Show. It’s available for subscribing at http://feeds.themerlinshow.com/TheMerlinShowHi (or just subscribe via iTunes).