Orb DVR

I just ran across this on the trusty Gizmodo feed. I was pretty skeptical about it as I've seen some stuff like this in the past and they just didn't work all that well.

I loaded it onto my computer and gave it a shot. A little strange to setup, but certainly doable. I setup my laptop in the same room and gave it a shot. Seems to work pretty well. I've got a couple of things to work out, but so far so good.

Orb DVR Everywhere: Take That TiVo With You: "If you have TiVoToGo and a TiVo Series 2 DVR, Orb DVR Everywhere will let you stream programs from that TiVo to any Web-enabled mobile device, PDA, or PC. It will also let you access music, photos, or video from your PC.

And, if your PC has a TV tuner, you can watch live or recorded TV from that, too. It's a free add-on to the company's Orb software for Windows XP.
-Gizmodo Blog Entry

So if you're interested check it out at www.orb.com.

Google Reader learns to share

Google Reader learns to share

This is an interesting feature that Google has now added to their RSS Reader program. I've decided to give it a ty here on my Blog so that everyone can see what I'm recently marking off as "stared" items. Keep in mind that I don't "star" a lot of things currently, but what I do I find honestly interesting. Take a look on the sidebar and see what I'm finding interesting in the wonderful web.

Mom always taught us to share and now we know why: it's fun. Google Reader, which keeps track of websites you like to read regularly, just added the ability to share what you like to read with your friends.

Smart Playlists suggestions

This was a blog entry that I ran across through Lifehacker. It shows some pretty good ideas on how to create custom smart playlists in iTunes so that you can get a good mix of stuff you really like, stuff you haven't listened to in a while, and not get over run with the same old stuff.

Be smart about your Smart Playlists:

Blogger Andy Budd has posted a tutorial detailing how he sets up his iTunes Smart Playlists in order to get the most out his music library.

I currently have 3476 songs in iTunes which works out at around 12.4 days worth of music. This may seem a lot, but considering how much time I spend on the computer, I burn through tracks with surprising ease.

One of the problems with this is keeping your music collection interesting.... The way to achieve this is by utilising smart playlists, however it can be quite difficult getting the right balance.

For the rest see Andy's blog.


Update: 9-APR-06 -- I've been using this new playlist idea for a while now and just LOVE it. I highly recommend doing something similar if you have a large music collection to help you find some of those missing favorites out there.

iTunes CPU Hog??

Personally I love iTunes. I think it's the best digital audio system out there. I'll also be the first to admit that there could be something better that I don't know about, or haven't tried, but that's always the case with anything.

This entry is just a quick one about a problem that I recently had that I've atleast found a partial solution too. From doing some Googling out there it appears to be a fairly common issue.

The main issue was a sound distortion problem that has crept up over the last 1-2 weeks on my computer. I used to have pretty good sound out of my computer, but lately it's started to get crackly, or even hang up, every once in a while. Always seemed to be either when the CPU was cranking (which was a lot) or when some smaller program would have some sort of audio alert go one. (Skype was the big one for me.)

I couldn't figure out what could be doing it because everything was working. But those are the ways of Windows I guess. So I started to think it was the sound card and/or driver. I had already replaced the speakers with a set I knew to be good from working on another computer. Unfortunately my sound card was an OEM version and I couldn't get it updated. I completely removed it, rebooted, shut down, re-installed it, rebooted, loaded the driver automatically, etc and no luck.

I even reinstalled iTunes and Firefox and Skype to see if maybe there was a conflict. Nothing.

I even did an on-line chat with the help desk at HP (relatively helpful by the way) and they wanted me to do a system restore to the point before this started happening. I was already to do it this weekend, but was not looking forward to it.

So finally (why I didn't do this first I'm not sure now) I started doing some Googling. And I just decided to search for iTunes CPU because I was getting a ton of problems that were annoying me with iTunes locking up my CPU for literally 5-10 minutes after I shut it off.

Recently I'd updated my iTunes library with even more of my CDs and I was up to about 28Gb of space and over 6000 tracks. I was thinking maybe this was causing a problem. It turns out to be related.

iTunes has an XML file that it updates and basically tracks your entire library. This starts to get pretty big and so it takes a bit more time to deal with it. Generally it's not a real problem. However, my virus program apparently is updating it on a live basis everytime something goes to it and then does a complete scan when it's loaded, or shut off. That's what appears to be locking it up.

Somebody had a good suggestion to put a limitation into the Virus scanner so that it doesn't scan anything in your iTunes Music Folder and so I did that. I also shut off the virus scanner for opening or closing files (not programs) and that seems to have solved the CPU issue.

I still get the occasional crackling, but I think that maybe a related issue to when the CPU is going on something else so I still have some digging to do. But for all of you people (Mac or Windows) that have a problem with the CPU usage on iTunes you may want to look into the issue of the Virus scanners.

-Kent