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Archive for January, 2010
Adventures in Dumping Cable for Internet TV, Conclusion
Catch Up with Part 1 here (background)
Catch Up with Part 2 here (researching & purchasing all the components)
Whew! So hooking everything up wasn’t so hard, actually, although the sound gave us some trouble. First we connected the mini-DVI converter to the HDMI cable (images in part 2). Then the computer from the mini-DVI port to the HDMI connection on the back of the television.
Here’s where we ran into trouble with the sound: we had the wrong audio cable. I don’t actually understand why, but no matter which of the red & white connections we tried on the back of the TV, from the “headphone out” jack on the Mac mini, we couldn’t get sound. After too long, we realized we needed a cable with a headset jack on both ends. One end into the “headset out” on the Mac mini and the other into the “headset in” plug on the back of the TV. Finally, sound from the computer out of the TV speakers! But we also have surround sound so then we needed a cable that had the “Y” red & white connections on both ends. So, one set of red & white plugs into the “out” section (near the cable connection) on the TV, and one set into the receiver for the surround sound. Now, sound from the computer coming out of EITHER the television speakers OR the surround sound system. Success!
Now, the Mac Mini doesn’t come with a keyboard or a mouse, and we certainly could have bought them, but they are expensive and I didn’t really want a keyboard & mouse in my living room. In one of the articles I listed yesterday, we learned about a free software called Teleport (free), and we installed it on both of our MacBooks. It actually works quite well to allow us to control the Mac Mini with the keyboard or trackpad on either of our MacBooks. I recommend it. I also just learned about Mobile Air Mouse Pro for iPhone which apparently will allow me to do the same thing from my iPhone, instead of having to use one of the MacBooks. Here’s a review from someone at MacWorld doing exactly this. I’m excited to try it. The only remaining problem is that the icons and words on the 40” TV screen look very tiny and are difficult to see from the couch. I just discovered these instructions and I’m hoping that they help.
With the antenna and tuner we’re getting all the major network channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and PBS. All of these seem to come in well without any adjustments to the antenna (we just have it sitting on top of the entertainment center, and it’s in the interior of the house, not near a window). We also get the CW, however we realized that we did need to adjust the antenna to get this to come in better, but with a few corrections it now seems to come in just fine.
The Eye TV software plus a subscription to the online TV Guide (inside the Eye TV software, free year one, then $19.95/year) allows us to view what’s on, and record shows to watch later. However, we can only record ONE show at a time, and I haven’t seen a warning that tells me when I’ve got two shows set to record that conflict. It seems to just pick one, and we’ve missed a couple of recordings due to this. However, the network websites run many full episodes online for a period of time. Also, we CAN watch a recorded show while a live one is recording.
We cancelled cable (Yay! Savings of $88/month) and have been using this set-up for about 2 weeks now, and we’re still getting used to it but it’s a surprisingly small adjustment.
The next item on my agenda is to look into software that I believe will aggregate video and music from the web and stored on my hard drive and allow me to browse and select it for viewing/listening all from one place. I have learned of two: Boxee and Plex. I read this review that concluded that Plex was better, so I downloaded that. However, there is no user guide, everything is a video and the software is not intuitive. So I have not taken the time to watch the videos yet and so I haven’t figured out how to use it, so that subtracts points from Plex in my book. So far it seems to be no trouble to go to a website (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, or a network site) to find whatever shows I want, but I do think it would be convenient to view my choices in one place.
I would love to hear any comments/feedback you have on this whole experience, if you’ve done it, or if you’re planning to try it. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have found it helpful!
Adventures in Dumping Cable for Internet TV, Part 2
Catch up with Part 1 here)
We forged ahead with the laptop repair, and luckily, Best Buy ended up solving the initial dilemmas for us. When the laptop came back for the 4th time still broken, they agreed to honor the terms of the Black Tie Warranty and replace the computer. I opted to take the value in a Best Buy gift card, and this was enough to purchase a Mac Mini (we decided on the lower-end $599 version), plus about half the cost of a new TV.
Now, buying a new TV presented a challenge in itself because I didn’t know anything about the new technology: 720p or 1080p? 60hz or 120hz? LCD or Plasma? What brand is best? After looking on Consumer Reports, speaking with the very helpful Home Theater staff at Best Buy, and measuring the space in the house where the TV was going, we decided on a 60hz, 1080p, Toshiba LCD HDTV. Here are the reasons in a nutshell:
- we were told that a plasma TV presents a far superior picture, however plasmas start at 42” and we were confined to a 40” or smaller due to the spot we were planning on putting it.
- almost all of the 37” & 40” TV’s were 1080p
- we were told that you most notice the benefits of of 120hz if you are planning to use the TV primarily to watch sports and play video games. We weren’t doing much of either of these, and looking at the 60hz side-by-side with the 120hz in the store, we saw no difference, even when sports was on.
So, the computer and home theater staff at Best Buy were very helpful and we were told that we would need an audio cable to run from the Mac Mini’s headset jack into the television, plus an HDMI cable to connect the TV to the computer. Also, the Mac Mini has a Mini-DVI port so we needed an HDMI to Mini-DVI converter. (We learned later that this was the WRONG audio cable – see Conclusion).
Best Buy had only the HDMI cables, and they were very expensive, between $50 and $120. I didn’t know which one to buy so I launched Safari on my iPhone in the store and discovered this article on CNET which said that expensive HDMI cables are a rip-off and you shouldn’t pay more than $10 for one, so I knew we weren’t going to buy them there. Other Apple converters were $29.99 at Best Buy, and I’ve paid that price at least 4 times (for use with various MacBooks), but they didn’t have the one I needed so I then I went to Google on my iPhone to find the converter. I landed at an Amazon page that offered the converter AND a 6 ft. HDMI cable for $9.97 (yes, $9.97. I think what I saved in just this one instance almost covers the cost of my iPhone.)
So, we were taking the computer and the new TV home but would have to wait to hook it up until we received the cable and the converter. At this point I also did some research on USB tuners for Mac and most sites pointed me to the Elgato Eye TV Hybrid, and in reading about this I became convinced that since digital channels are free over the air, our tuner would better pick up what was available if we got an antenna to amplify the signal. So included in my Amazon order was also a digital antenna and the Elgato tuner. This was not an insignificant investment as the total cost of my Amazon order was almost $200. And I learned that shopping around for antennas pays off too because I almost ordered it from another site for more than $75, and found that Amazon was offering the same one for $36.
I’m not actually sure if I really needed the antenna, and I’m also not sure if the audio cable I got is the best way to get sound from the computer to the television. But I will find out, because finally all the orders came in (it only took a week with standard shipping) and I’m now ready to move on to the next phase of my Adventure in Dumping Cable…trying to get it all hooked up and working. Stay tuned for Part 3!
Adventures in Dumping Cable for Internet TV (Part 1)
Ok, so this is not exactly a post about productivity, but if you use your imagination a bit you might be able to see how this could come under the heading of “efficiency”….
I used to be much more into television that I am now, and for a long time I have been paying for cable TV services that either I am not using, or I am getting/could get other places.
So I decided to see if I could really have all the TV I wanted without cable.
I quickly learned that this is not necessarily an easy task, but as with most things, the more I have learned, the easier it is becoming.
This was my initial plan…my husband had a 3 year old laptop with a battery problem, and it was about to fall out of warranty. He had not wanted to have it serviced up until this point because Best Buy said they would have to send it out for two weeks. Given that the laptop was older, and was a Windows PC, I thought I would buy him a gift of a MacBook (yes, this was partially selfish on my part because I wanted to move us toward a Mac-only household.) So I bought the MacBook with my Best Buy card, which offered an interest free payment plan for 18 months. I figured that once his old laptop was repaired, we would use it for internet on the television (a media center), and we would come out ahead on the MacBook payments once we weren’t paying for cable anymore.
Our living room TV was a 10-year old, 32-inch analog with only S-Video connections. The old laptop had an S-Video connection too so we were all set there. This would allow us to watch Netflix (with a $9/month subscription), Hulu (free site for aggregating online TV), and the network stations online, at least. Not a bad start, but I was concerned about giving up the DVR (digital video recorder) since not everything is available online when we want to watch it.
Then I learned that USB “tuners” (for carrying digital tv signals to your computer) typically come with PVR (personal video recorder) software. However, there were two problems here…the first is that tuners pick up the digital channel broadcasts that come over the air (for free), provided that you also have a screen (monitor or TV) that is capable of receiving the digital stations. Our TV was analog, so it was not. The second problem was that most tuners were made for either a PC or a Mac. Remember my desire to move to a Mac-only household? I figured that we could use the 3-year-old laptop until it died (which we honestly didn’t expect to be more than a year or so), and then get another set-top box (Apple TV, Roku, another computer) to stream internet television in our living room. After doing some research on these, I decided on a Mac Mini, because it has all the features of AppleTV plus all of the benefits that result from it being a full-blown computer. So I didn’t want to invest in a PC tuner, only to have to buy a Mac tuner later. (The August edition of Mac Life Magazine put this bug in my ear to begin with, and you can see some of that article here. Other articles that were really helpful to me are here, here, and here.)
Ok, now that you have some of the background and preliminary information, the story continues in part 2…
How to Sync Outlook Tasks with your iPhone
UPDATE: 7/28/11: This post refers to syncing Outlook for WINDOWS (all versions, as far as I can tell) with your iPhone. It covers using ToodleDo (the free way) and using ToDo by Appigo ($4.99 as of today). Since this post, I can recommend another way to sync tasks to iPhone either from iCal for Mac or Outlook for Windows, and that is 2Do by Guided Ways Technologies. It works well and there are instructions on their website. I have not yet found a solution for syncing Outlook 2011 for MAC tasks directly with iPhone. I did find this article about syncing to iCal and if that works successfully, you can then sync tasks from iCal to iPhone via 2Do or ToDo. I can not speak to how well it works. These difficulties, to me, are sufficient reason to recommend AGAINST Outlook for Mac as a productivity solution. For other suggestions of productivity tools for Mac users, see this post and this post.
I used Outlook to run my life for almost a decade, and the majority of the training I do is still using Outlook as the support tool. I am a fan and think it is a very powerful PIM (personal information manager) that can easily handle the complexity of your life. The one shortcoming is if you need to share calendars or other information, you need to be running an Exchange server and this doesn’t make sense for everyone (however you can sync your Outlook calendar with Google and share it that way).
A question I get a lot is how to sync Tasks in Outlook with an iPhone. I found an article online with detailed instructions for doing this and got permission to repost it here. It comes from Daniel B. Curran’s excellent how-to blog. Below are his instructions. I hope this helps. If you try this and run into any snags, I’d love to hear about it. And incidentally, I’m using To-Do (the app he mentions) to sync Tasks with iCal and I am VERY happy with it – well worth the $10 in my opinion. You can read about my experience with that here.)
Here is Daniel’s Post:
Let’s start with how you can sync your Microsoft Outlook Tasks to your iPhone for free.
I have read several articles about how to do this but I found the process to be convoluted. Let me make it very simple.
Step 1. Set up a free account at Toodledo.com The direct link for a new account is right here.
That should have taken you about 15 seconds. Let’s move on to step 2.
Step 2. Close Outlook, download Chromatic Dragon’s Toodledo Sync Application and install it.
Almost done! The sync application will want your Toodledo ID number. Leave it open on the tab that wants the ID number.
Step 3. Log into Toodledo and from the menu on the left select Account Settings. On that page you will see your Unique ID, simply copy and paste it into the sync program that you left open.
On the Synchronization tab you can change your Automatic Synchronization to whatever works for you. I don’t add tasks very often so once every 60 minutes is fine for me. To close the Options window select File -> Close. You will see a green checkmark icon in your tool tray. Right click it and hit Manual Sync.
Outlook is now synchronized to ToodleDo.
Ready for the iPhone part?
On Your iPhone, go to the App Store and Download ToodleDo for $3.99.
<end Daniel’s post>
Open ToodleDo on your iPhone and select “Settings” and log in to your account.
You should now see all of your tasks on your iPhone in the ToodleDo app.
Further instructions if you have been through Empowered Productivity Training from RegainYourTime.com:
In the Chromatic Dragon ToodleDo Sync Application on your desktop, open “Options.” (You may have to find ToodleDo in your System Tray in the bottom right corner of your screen, right click on that, and select “Options.”
Select the tab that reads “Mappings.” Select the following options:
Then select the “Folders” tab and click “refresh folders and enable.”
Now select “File – Manual Sync”
Your Outlook tasks should now be grouped by categories on your iPhone app by selecting “folders” from the Home Screen.
I hope you have found this helpful. Good luck!