The Insomniac Coder

Image via CrunchBase I have been struggling for months with performance issues whenever I try to play NetFlix HD streams on my laptop. It doesn't matter which version of Silverlight, or browser, or even using Media Center, it will always choke the machine. Replacing the GPU is of course is out of the question, and the machine is just a year old, I need to get at least two more years of work out of it before I can justify picking up a new one. The sad part is that if you don't take into account the HD streaming issue, the machine is pretty damn good. Even better if you take into account the SSD and that most data that used to sit in USB2 drives is now in an external SATA drive.  Do I need the streaming at all? The way I work I need a constant source of background noise. Music doesn't work because it is predictable, which makes it distracting. What really works for me is things like daytime court shows, trash talk shows, or movies. I have a dual monitor setup (company pa...

Yes, it misses the mark, but it is still going to make Apple boatloads of cash, and this is without even trying hard at it. I currently own two of the first generation AppleTVs, and both have been sitting idle for months. Why? We kept losing the remotes, that's $29 each and Apple did not allow an easy way to program any remote to use the AppleTV until we were fedup about it. Aaccording to my other blog, we had the two AppleTVs since February 2008, and the "new" feature to program remotes did not arrive until the 2.3 upgrade in October 2008. We probably bought four of those remotes in that period of time. Re-coding content sucks. Even with a hardware encoder dongle, which only worked in the Mac, it still meant that using the AppleTV involved a time tax for the conversion. The "hacks" available to add functionality to the AppleTV were not very consistent, so I always ended up resetting them to the official firmware. This is not Apple's fault, and sure as h...