Circa/Rollabind cover material, or A4 covers  read more »

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?

iCal to Schedule Mail  read more »

Pre-defined Quicksilver hotkeys  read more »

Daily log?  read more »

Idiocracy - not as good as Office Space  read more »

repeating to-do items in iCal?  read more »

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.  read more »

011: Interview: Peter Hughes | The Merlin Show

Click To Play

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.  read more »

Email Overload - Not At My Desk All Day  read more »

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):  read more »

Multi-tasking in the NYT  read more »

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).  read more »

Can TaskswitchXp show the number beofre the list of the app?  read more »

Available Keyboard Shortcuts  read more »

Designing my own work week (academic) ?  read more »

Geekiness factor  read more »

GTDInbox Firefox extension, anyone use?  read more »

"white noise" sound files to reduce distraction?  read more »

Trusted Systems,The HPDA, and Availability  read more »

How SEXY would this app be?  read more »

Hi guys,

Some time ago I posted in a topic about FusionDesk, a new task management desktop application that I created. It was suggested to me to post it in a separate topic so more people see it.

FusionDesk has both a paid and a free version, so I am sure everyone can benefit from it. It is elegant, easy and flexible. It was designed with GTD in mind, but is definitely not limited to it. You can download it from here.

Any feedback is welcome.

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.

Mac GTD app  read more »