Update on The Man with the Golden Voice: Two Years on

I came back across an old post about Ted Williams, the Man with the Golden Voice as I was browsing some older posts. After watching the YouTube video which launched his story, I wondered what happened to him. I remembered that as time passed, more information about Ted came out. It was a sad story with so many sides. A real life story. Not the ones you see on news shows that try to sugar-coat or simplify a person's life. Problems with his estranged children. His distance with his mother, whom he later reunited with. 

Well here is the update. The best part of this story is that it is not a fairy tale. It's still real life fraught with real challenges. 

WDTV Problem Averted

As you may know, I love my WDTV. While not the most functional nor flashiest of the streaming set top boxes, it does what it does for me very well. Well enough that my 4 year-old is now able to select what he wants to watch from a list by himself. If that isn't a testimony of ease-of-use, I don't know what is.

I had two surprises recently with the WDTV box. The first was when I restarted it. Well, I accidentally pushed the power button to turn it off. When it came back up, it asked me whether I wanted to update the firmware. Now that was a pleasant surprise. The WDTV's warranty was over as it has been over a year. So to see a new update being offered was nice. Restores my faith a bit in companies that stand behind their good products in our increasingly disposable world. I reckon they wanted to update codec and probably get rid of the MediaFly option in the Internet section. However, I really wanted to watch something so I said no, knowing that I could do it manually at a later date.
Some days later I decided to update the WDTV's firmware. But this time, when I tried doing it manually, it said that it didn't find any updated firmware. I was upset and thought there was something wrong with the WDTV box. Worse still was the thought that whatever was wrong with it, required the new firmware to fix it.
I checked WD's website and found that a newer firmware was listed as being available. So that meant there was something else that was happening. But on some pages, it listed that my current firmware was the most updated version. I was confused. Since Western Digital does make several variants of the box for different reasons, I reckon that I had just looked at it wrong. So I went back to the page where the newer firmware was listed and downloaded it. I read up on how to do a manual update. But every where there was a description of how to do it, there was a strong suggestion to do it automatically.
How can I do what's right with so many conflicting messages?

New Google+ Pages Updates

Scan here to get the
MyWatchList Google
Currents Edition

This site has had a Google Plus page for ages. But it ended primarily for stuff that I found on YouTube. So it was called Wandering YouTube. I've had some good feedback on it and continue to add stuff. But the G+ page was named MyWatchList like this site. So it got some people confused that I was just reviewing YouTube videos.
So to clear the confusion, this site now has 2 Google Plus pages (sort of). There is a new WanderingYouTube G+ page. Stuff that I find interesting on YouTube will be posted there.  The MyWatchList G+ page remains. It'll be for all of MyWatchList stuff, including Wandering YouTube. Wandering YouTube posts will appear in the MyWatchList G+ page so you don't have to subscribe to both. The Wandering YouTube section on the  MyWatchList on Google Currents will be updated accordingly.

Tech News Today & TWIT - Getting your (daily) tech fix

Starring: Tom Merrit, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, Darren Kitchen and Jason Howell
Category: News
I was a big fan of TechTV despite discovering it just before it got gobbled up by G4. I watched re-runs of the ScreenSavers and CallForHelp with Leo Laporte not only because of the tech content but because it was done so well. For once, tech shows that rise above the cable public-access quality and lasted more than a few minutes. It was not only a good tech show, it was a good show. Entertaining and informative. It didn't look down on the audience but instead got them involved.

But it was not to last as the G4TechTV basically gutted the tech content in favor of games and testosterone-orientated shows. The TV executives wanted the TechTV viewers (which were in the millions, according to Wikipedia) but not the shows, apparently. Which is bizarre because aren't people watching because of the shows? Is there any surprise that the viewers like me left when their favorite shows were cancelled? It was apparently a surprise to the executives at G4.

After that, combined with the dilution of other tech news websites and periodicals, I lost interest in tech journalism altogether, finding tech news to be too much marketing, very little information. I began a long distrust of technology journalism as the articles I came across were either too biased, too opinionated and one-sided and too copied from a press release. In fact, the only tech magazine I regularly read is Linux Format and the occasional Wired Magazine.
I few months back I got a WDTV Live. One of the Internet content services that came bundled with the box is MediaFly. I loved watching NBC Nightly News on it because it was like watching it on demand whenever I wanted instead of having to sit there waiting. It also had a Technology section where I found This Week in Tech, where Leo Laporte hosts a roundtable talk show on the latest in technology and trends. The first episode I watched, he had John C. Dvorak, Steve Gibson and Jerry Pournelle, tech personalities from the  early days of (my) computing. It was both nostalgic and interesting, as they have lost none of the edge they displayed back in the day. In fact, I don't remember Dvorak being so snarky. However the format was over an hour long and bit too involved. I found that it was a good watch to sit down with but not so much to accompany me for the day. I tend to stop and focus on the discussion going on. Don't get me wrong. I still watch it but only when I can.
Browsing through the Technology section, I found an entry for Tech News Today. What attracted to me first was one of it's hosts was Sarah Lane, another TechTV alumnus. She hosts the show with Tom Merrit (who is the anchor, I guess) with Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell. They would report on and discuss the day's tech news. There would also be live guests or guests who Skype in. What interested me was that although they reported on the day's tech news, most of it originating from press releases and postings, they review them intelligently and brings them down to earth, stripping away the spin. They brought it down to "what does it mean to you" sense. The TNT crew does so with a sense of humor and clear sense of how important the news was in the big scheme of things. The show would have sections discussing forthcoming events, interesting slightly non-tech news and have special coverage of major events. At first, I found it strange for them to have hosts that rotate in and out as well as guests but later found out that it was because the studio was too small to accommodate everybody.

NextNewNetworks is now YouTube Next

, youtubeIf you have read my recent post on the great WDTV, I wrote about the Internet media experience with services like MediaFly and Flingo. I also mentioned that a part of this was the high quality content on NextNewNetworks (delivered by both MediaFly and Flingo). Apparently someone else also agrees because now they are part of YouTube as YouTube Next.
You can read the gory details here. Will the Internet/YouTube eventually break the big 3?

I love my WDTV

(Update 21 Sept 2015 - scroll down) Some while ago I bought a Western Digital WDTV Live. Its a box that I bought to connect to the TV to play movies files, show pictures and play MP3s. What I didn't expect was an Internet media experience. When I had bought it, I saw reviews praising it for it's ability to access YouTube. It does what it says on the tin but with a few exceptions. YouTube, in it's efforts to appease media publishers, added an attribute to videos that it streams to limit where it can be played. So, a few media publishers who allow YouTube to stream their content have limited them to be played only on the computer. Which means some content on your YouTube playlists may not be playable on the TV. I understand the existing concept of charging separately for content that is broad-casted on TV. The model is that a media publisher, usually movie studios and primetime TV networks, make money on distribution or syndication. The more times they can sell a show to show on TV, the more money they make. The Internet throws a spanner in this machine, especially YouTube. The media publishers haven't figured out what to do with them yet. They saw what happened to the music industry and don't relish the same fate. So in this mess, the result is that you can watch a video on YouTube on the PC but not when you connect it to a TV. I have been thinking about this for some time now and I think I'll get back to it later in another post.
Like I said earlier, the WDTV Live provides a rich Internet media experience. At least it is one half of the puzzle. I also just got a high speed Internet access, running in multi-megabits per second. This made other Internet services that came with the WDTV came alive, most notably Mediafly and Flingo.
Mediafly is a site that allow you to find and manage podcasts, both video and audio. It provides a way to build a list of favorite podcasts so that you don't have to wade through a huge list every time you want to listen or watch your favorite show. The site divides the list of podcasts into categories to make them easier to find. However, this does not make finding one that you tune in regularly to easier to find because the list shows the most recent show first. So the playlist feature is useful. It also provides community interaction so that you can recommend your favorite podcasts to others. There are lists for this like Most Recommended by categories. The kicker is that I can "link" my WDTV to my account on Mediafly and have the same lists appear on the box. Which is like making up your own channel. With the high speed Internet link, the wait is almost nil and almost no buffering. Point to show and it comes on. - Updated: Unfortunately, MediaFly is no longer available.
Another surprise is Flingo. While it also organises podcasts, the content available is now expanded in to other media publishers, including Internet-focused on like nextnewnetworks.com and Revision3. I do know that those are also available via podcasts and directly on the browser. But to have it on the big screen TV is a lot of work. It means hooking up the laptop to the TV (cable tangle alert). I even have a MythTV project completed and later abandoned. In short, compared to the standard TV experience, it is a chore. The WDTV reduces the entire process to a. crash on couch and b. click the remote. Flingo behaves more like a cable or satellite service. The channels are set by them, you can't create a playlist. But you can set up your favorite channels. To make up for this, you can 'fling' videos or links to the WDTV when it is on 'Flingo-mode' from the PC. It's like the thing they do on NCIS LA.

A Shift Online

I you have read some of the past posts you would notice that there are large gaps between posts. There are a log of reasons. Work. Family. In general Life.
Also I haven't been watch that many movies of note and only recently been back watching TV series. Reality TV really turns me off. Most of the time I end up watching the TV series on DVD.
But when I took a close look at what I was watching, I realized that I was watching online videos more and more. Youtube mainly, movie trailers on Apple.com on occasion. So I'm adding online videos that I have been watching to the list of the movies and TV series that I am posting.
So here goes.