Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

So I saw today on Slashdot that Netflix is offering streaming movies. It looks pretty cool because you don’t have to pay anything extra to get 18 hours of streaming content a month. You can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, until you hit 18 hours. I’m not sure if you can pay more to get more monthly hours or not, I’m sure that will be an option eventually.

This has, more than anything else, made me want to get some device (Apple TV, Xbox, etc) that will allow me to stream movies from my computer to the TV, preferably over a wireless connection. In the past (before today), I wasn’t all that interested in these solutions because I don’t have a huge library of movies, nor do I want to maintain a huge collection. Now that Netflix can host my collection for me, connecting my TV to my computer makes a lot more sense.

A couple questions still remain though.

• Is it possible to stream a netflix movie from my computer to the TV?  There is a special movie player that you have to use and I don’t know enough about streaming content from the computer to the TV to answer this.
• What’s the maximum quality we can achieve?  DVD?  HD?  It says that Netflix will detect your connection speed to determine the quality it can give you, but I would be willing to wait 10 - 15 minutes to buffer a higher quality movie.
• What’s the selection like?  The screencast above mentions that Netflix currently has ~1000 titles available.  I’m assuming that will continue to grow.

So we’ll see what happens, I’m not sure what it would cost to get a decent streaming solution from my computer to my TV, but hopefully I can get something eventually.

We just finished up the rest of our tasks for the next release of my project at work on Friday, and it feels great to be done right before getting a couple days off for the holidays.

I recently got my Amazon S3 account setup so that I can use S3 to backup my computers at home. I initially was trying to use a combination of JungleDisk, WebDrive, and robocopy to manage the backups. JungleDisk is the interface between S3 and windows, WebDrive allows you to map your S3 account to a network drive in windows, and robocopy is what I use to mirror my local directory structure on S3.

This solution was “ok”, not great cause it was complicated, but it got the job done. WebDrive also is not free, so it would cost money after the trial period ran up (~$50 I think).

Then, JungleDisk released a version that included built-in drive mapping support, which was great because that made the solution free beceause WebDrive was now out of the picture.

I was having some trouble though, because while I was testing my backups, I noticed that files were being uploaded each time I would backup, even though the files hadn’t changed. I came across this post by Scott Bellware about his switch from JungleDisk to S3Drive and I think I found the cause of my issues, the JungleDisk cache.

So I’ve now switched to S3Drive which also has built-in drive mapping support and no cache so its really a “WYSIWYG” way to manage your S3 account; you can be sure that what you see is actually whats on Amazon’s servers. While I liked the encryption feature in JungleDisk, I agree with Scott that I like having a simple mirror of my directory structure rather than encrypted files that need JungleDisk to function.
I’ve got my new laptop backed up on S3 as well as the server in the basement, all thats left is the desktop in the office, which is going to be ~25 GB when you put in all the pictures that Erin’s got on there. I’m still debating whether or not to backup all of our mp3’s since that will add a lot of space, but its so cheap its tempting.

We’re leaving for my parent’s house in about an hour, so I’m going to start the backup when we leave, so hopefully its done by the time we get back tomorrow night.

Instead of going to the gym today, I opted to try a local beer that just recently started selling their beer in cans at the liquor store. Previously you could only get Surly from several local bars, but now I can bring the goodness into my own home. I bought a 4 pack of the Bender, which is their brown ale, it’s fantastic. Think New Castle but with a richer flavor and a little more carbonation.

While I had the camera out, I also snapped a couple pictures of Bob the Boxer, we’re dog sitting Erin’s parents’ dog for two weeks while they’re on vacation. He’s about a good a dog as you can get, in spite of his constant slobber, because this is how he spends his days, nestled up against the leg of a table.

Erin and I just got back from vacation in San Diego last night, we were there for 5 days visiting my sister and her husband, and our friends who live near LA, it was a good time, pictures are up on flickr, thanks to Erin While I was gone I noticed Sam had commented on my post about date and time support in Ruby and had written a great post explaining the differences between the different date/time objects that Ruby has, as well as some more details about the “magic fields” in RoR, it really cleared up the issues for me, thanks Sam!