After A Few Days With Amazon fireTV

Once the Amazon fireTV was turned on, and connected my Amazon account without any action on my part, I was excited to get right into it.The obvious difference between the fireTV and other streaming boxes is the fireTV is based on the Android operating system. The biggest difference with this box over others is the natural integration with Amazon Prime Instant Video. Just like the Kindle where books are the primary interface, Prime movies and TV shows are the primary interface, Netflix, Hulu and others are secondary apps.Finding...

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Why I'm Ditching Roku For Amazon Fire TV

I've been a Roku fan for a while, owning versions 1 through 3 and several variations. I don't have cable TV and use streaming almost exclusively, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu Pro are my main stays. But throw in Plex streaming from a local server and Roku struggles.The three things that sold me immediately on the Amazon FireTV (affiliate...

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Amazon Prices J.K. Rowling's New Book Sky High

Checked out J.K. Rowling's new book The Casual Vacancy on Amazon today. Just wanted to see what the reader ratings were, and what the price would be. And to my surprise, the Amazon Kindle version at the time of this writing was $17.99. What the? I guess you can no longer justify the cost of an e-reader as a way to buy cheaper books. Publishers have...

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New Amazon S3 Data Transfer Pricing

This is incredible. The price for transferring data into your S3 account is now FREE! Starting July 1, 2011. And now they have pricing for data storage in the Petabyte range. That just blows my mind.New inbound data transfer price for all regions (effective July 1, 2011)$0.000 - all data transfer inNew data transfer price for US-Standard, US-West and Europe regions (effective July 1, 2011)$0.000 - first 1 GB / month data transfer out$0.120 per GB - up to 10 TB / month data transfer out (10 TB total)$0.090 per GB -...

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5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

1. Sources: PopCap In Late Stage Acquisition Discussions With EA For $1 Billion+ PopCap Games is in late stage acquisition discussions for a sum of over $1 billion — we’ve now heard from two sources that the buyer is Electronic Arts.2. Google Invests $102 Million More Into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center According to an official company blog post today, Google is increasing its investment into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) by $102 million, bringing its total investment in the renewable energy facility to...

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Amazon CloudPlayer Fail On iOS

No luck using Amazons new web based CloudPlayer on iOS. Wants me to use Internet Explorer. Really? Did Microsoft pay for that?...

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First Use Of Amazon CloudFormation

Amazon recently release a new product called CloudFormation. It’s basically an automated build out of several Amazon AWS products, driven by a simple XML file. One of the templates offered out of the box is for a complete WordPress install. After following the wizard like instructions, I had a basic WordPress installation up and running in a matter...

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Cutting Out The Bloat Of Cable

I've been forced by circumstance to evaluate my usage of, and payment for, Cable/Satellite TV. What follows is an overview of my attempt to find free or low cost alternatives to the bloated cost of Cable/Satellite.The first thing I wanted to do was evaluate how much TV we actually watched. Most of our live viewing happened in the morning, catching up on local news. Almost everything else was watched from the DVR (digital video recorder). My biggest hurdle was finding a way to watch free local TV.Finding the local channels turned...

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Library Systems Need To Adopt The Netflix Model

Last week I read an article from a Twitter link (thanks Zach), about Libraries being a waste. I've been thinking about that statement for a few days now, and I must admit I agree. Most library systems are antiquated and cost more to run than they are worth. It's time for an overhaul.I've been a library user all my life. There are incredible resources...

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Amazon Adds Media Streaming, Spot Instances, and VPC Cloud Services

Amazon AWS just keeps getting better and better. Today the company announced three new services to it’s AWS product line. Amazon CloudFront Streaming This new services gives you a world class media server in the cloud. You can now stream media files, audio and video, from a server using Adobe Flash Media Server. As with all Amazon AWS services, this is a pay for what you use, no upfront costs to start and no minimums. CloudFront puts your files on the networks edge, delivering your content quicker, which is a great benefit...

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5 Step Web Hosting Disaster Recovery Plan

In light of a recent web hosting snafu at MediaTemple, I wanted to share 5 things you can do to recover from a web hosting disaster. Most of these require some time to set up and your vigilance. But if followed, you can rebound from a disaster in a short amount of time. 1. Create your disaster recovery plan. The easiest part of a disaster recovery plan is to actually have a plan.This plan should include: A list of the sites you maintain A list of user names and passwords for your sites The databases names, server...

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I Lived 080808

Yes, today is 08 08 08. The most significant thing happening today is the 2008 Summer Olympic Games (link is to English version), being held in Beijing, China. Without trying to make some political statement, I'm pretty surprised more athletes or countries didn't refuse to participate. Does that mean something?A neighbor is getting married today....

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