The secret sauce of Social Media

I recently read the inaugural blog of a good friend, Marco Cuttin. He makes a very nice walk on memory lane going through all the communications systems and how they evolved.

However, while Marco shows the similarity and how they evolved, fails to point out the one thing that makes Social Networks, Social Networks.

The one thing that is different is that the connections ARE PERSISTENT. What I mean with this, is that once you have connected with someone, and exchanged information, the network remembers that path and it can be traveled again by others. It is like a telephone system that grows branches according to your calls. This concept is also very well illustrated by a speech by Sebastian Seung on TED, "I am my connectome".

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.

It is not broken, it is a feature...

If you are in the tech industry, you have probably heard this one, usually said as a joke.

If I have to explain any further, this refers to when the developer or Marketing finds an unexpected bug or defect and -BAM- (please draw starburst around it...) turns it into a new feature.

What is interesting is that the opposite is also true. New features that are misinterpreted can often be taken as a defect. I am an example of this with my newly-found learning curve on touchscreen phones, while I am still trying to make use of that muscle memory, now with almost no other tactile feedback besides haptics.

This also happens at any level of human life. One example is the controversial ADHD. Most people that I have known with this syndrome tend to be extremely creative and intelligent. So maybe it IS a feature!

I am trying to convince my wife on some of my "features"....

You are like Einstein

Yep. Much like Albert Einstein. Not because you can come up with the Special Relativity theory and also play the violin, but because your ideas come in the oddest moments.

Einstein once said: "Why do I have my best ideas in the shower?"

This is true for most of us and it is ironic that most of the time your best ideas come to you in waves and in places where it is so hard to document them.

I am currently inmersed reading "The Artist's Way", which is what you can consider a "classic", written in by . The concepts exposed there are not easily proven, but they are still very valid. One of the key concepts, at the core of the author's thesis, is that repetitive tasks "feed" the creative mind and we can then tap it. This is the author's explanation on why these ideas come to us in places that we are sometimes even embarrassed to confess.

This is the reason why Evernote is probably my all-time favorite app on my phone and the new version on Android is capable of doing off-line creation and editing.

Now we just have to make it work under the shower.

What's its name? Facemail?

It was in the news, but honestly, nobody is paying a lot of attention.

Facebook has announced that this Monday, they will make available their email services. At the time of this writing, it is not clear what enhancements are they incorporating into their Inbox feature, other than a dedicated email address.

I have been watching social media for a while (click here to see my 2008 rant) and I never saw Facebook as an email killer, but more like an Outlook killer. Think about it, What does Outlook do for you in a typical office environment? Integrates your contacts, communications, and takes care of your appointments and resource booking. There is not a lot that Facebook is missing out of these.

There are four things that I would point out with Facebook's announcement:

1.- Facebook does stand a chance. Email is becoming more and more just a transport layer and a notification mechanism. If I look at how my two daughters use their online resources, it is easy to come to this conclusion. They do have email addresses, to be able to "communicate with the dead", but they rarely check them. They communicate through Facebook and SMS, and email's function is reduced to make the vibrating device go off on their smartphones. If the notification piece is solved, Why send an email? You already have that message in FB's Inbox. It seems that something in these lines is coming with the announced Office Online integration.

2.- We need more. Some said this will be a GMail killer. Well, not until we get the gazillion storage capacity, the external email address, the capacity to SEND emails to people that are not on Facebook, Offline and mobile client access, resource management, iCal and VCard translation, multiple addresses to be able to manage your online personas, distribution lists, better threaded conversations, and -Oh Yeah!- better search. This is without even factoring in Google Buzz (or Wave?), which is a truly revolutionary way of communicating.

3.- What about voice? Nobody cares anymore? I do. Google has a nice foothold here, both with the Android operating system running on phones, Google Voice, and Google Talk's capacity to do VoIP. And it is not just a telephone, it looks more like your personal switchboard and unified communications platform. Facebook has a shy attempt at something like this with their partnership with Vonage, but again, no way to call anybody outside of Facebook, and what is even worse, no way to call anybody ON Facebook that does not have the Vonage app on their mobile.

4.- We still need more. There has been some comparisons with GMail's priority Inbox -which I think is the best thing after email search-. Facebook has insight into what is important for you, and what is not. So -in theory- they may be able to classify email according to this. The question here is, Can they do it better? Right now, honestly, they are not there yet. Facebook filters out stuff that I am interested in and stuff that is new to me and I would have never given a chance other way.

And let's face it, we do have "circles of friends", we have the "A" list, the "B" list, the acquaintances; people from work, and family. On top of this, our interests change. When I am looking to move to another city, or just go there for a short trip, I focus on friends that live there. If I am having parenting issues, I turn to friends that have same age kids as mine. These are all things that are not necessarily reflected in my status updates. Facebook makes it -in the best case- laborious to track these changes.

One thing is true. They got us to write about them, not on email but on a blog, and announce it on Facebook.

The inverted business model

How many times have you checked out that latest piece of equipment at the store, just to go back home and research for the best price online and buy it?

It happens all the time, specially with high ticket items and stuff that you have to try on (shoes, clothes, etc.). The physical part of testing the unit and trying it on works better in a brick-and-mortar setting. At the same time, the we is made for price comparison. This is usually the biggest challenge for the online retailers. There is almost no difference between one and the other if they use the same software platforms and the same logistics solutions. So the only factor available to differentiate is price.

So is the Brick-and-Mortar and the neighborhood store extinct? Not really, and just the other day I had an epiphany. I had reversed the model myself. I have been contemplating to purchase a certain book that I have researched online. I even had the book in my Amazon wishlist. But I just happened to be in Milwaukee, and passing in front of Downtown Books. And I couldn't resist to go in.

I found it! Used and inexpensive. I bought it immediately out of impulse!

So what's next? MP3 sharing club at a local joint?

It happens to be that the dust hasn't yet settled under the Internet sun.

A reflection on product innovation or how to buy a present for your significant other

When it comes to product development, innovation is a lot like planning a gift for your significant other.

You can always go on the safe side and conduct your "market survey" and start your quest for the perfect gift, responding to every single desire of your other half.

Yes, you will end up with a gift that is very much appreciated and that will fill a void long open. You -yes, YOU- will be in the ranks of the "reliable provider".

On the other hand, you can go the other way, the risky way. You can observe your partner for months, maybe for years, and try to translate into a model HOW do they think and feel. Once you are confident enough that you have a fairly good idea, then -and just then- set out to look for the perfect gift, without even asking a single question.

The difference here is that you will not only fulfill a desire, but you will surprise. And if you are successful, you will be LOVED. You will touch that fiber that will make her (or him) resonate.

In product development, something similar happens. Those companies that surprise us with a design that we never even thought about, earn our love, and we become advocates for them. There are many examples of this. The iPod wheel, the Segway (for the few that can afford one), the Dyson hand dryer, etc.

I am not suggesting that you blindly develop your products, after all, you need a market for them, and this means that they have to be priced correctly and that they address a real need so that there is a desire to purchase them from you. In contrast, in the gift metaphor there is no price involved from the receiving end.

What I am saying is that you cannot base your design ONLY on market research coming from surveys and direct questions.

Now, surprise me.

The Cartel of Doral

Here is my friend Artie. He's on fire, ready to take on corporate America. The reason? His TiVo is down. No digital channels, apparently he needs a card or something to make it work. Which is kinda weird as we can now receive a good number of digital channels over the air.

We heard stories like this before, the public services company that has horrendous customer service and after voicing "Scotty, Shields On!" protects itself behind the "voicejail".

We all like competition, but public services is a tricky one. There is infrastructure to lay down, and nobody is willing to do the investment if they don't have guaranteed returns. This is why government issues "rights of way" and gives the cable company an area to develop. A Cartel, a monopoly of a function in a given geographical area.

The problem with this is what we all know, and this is how the telecommunications industry used to be, until the Telecommunications Act of the eighties (oh, the eighties!), separated the ownership of the copper from the service. Oddly enough this is a case where free competition is spurred as a product of more regulation!

The question here is: Has cable the same ranks as Telecom as far as a strategic public service now that a lot of people run their Internets and phones through them?

iAccept

I am amazed at how many things can Apple get us to accept as normal, and -sometimes- even as better.

First, it was the brilliant move from Apple's side to force every customer to attach an unlimited data plan to the iPhone. This single clause in the contract had more influence on user experience than any of the technical aspects of the iPhone, so this one was -as bold as it was- an unusual one. But we accepted it.

This was accompanied by its huge size. Yes, the screen is great, and it is more or less thin, but let's be honest, it is almost the size of my 1999 Palm Pilot. Granted, it had a little apple on the back. Accepted.

Then the dubious reception and voice quality (at least on the first versions). There they went, the happy iPhone users predicating that it was just "a minor nuisance" on a super-innovative phone.

The last one, -and one that we live with every day- the on-screen keyboard.

I swear. The one app that iPhones should come with, and that no user should be able to uninstall, is a spell checker. Spelling errors and typos must have gone through the roof since the adoption of this device. Oddly enough, I just read that iPhones have surpassed Blackberries in the domestic market. This means that the trusted little keyboard that so many users swore by, has been traded for the unreliable, jittery touchscreen.

So we not only accept this, we embrace it.

I am wondering if the Apple effect could be translated to other concepts and make us accept those things that are "the right thing to do" even if they mean increased costs or moving away from our comfort zone. How about an iBus that would make us take public transport instead of our own car? or An iBulb that will finally convince us that turning off the light bulb when we have left the room IS a good idea? iMortgage, a product that gets banks to assume their share of the Real Estate bust? Anybody iBurger, made of organic stuff that costs $20?

For now, let me try to convince my teenage daughter that an Oldsmobile is a great car. I hope this little Apple sticker works...

The "unconvergence" age

Everything is cyclic. In business and technology we see it all the time. We push, push, push and there is a point where the market stops us as saying "that's just way too much".

The convergent device has been great. Being able to integrate phone with PDA and then being able to GPS locate and email almost everything on the device is just fantastic.

However, I find myself more and more in a situation where I would rather prefer a second device, an example is when I am driving following a map and suddenly somebody calls.

The question here is how do we approach this? I can think of three basic solutions:

1.- Better and smarter peripherals. If the audio interface and a second display on goggles could be an option, maybe -and just maybe- we won't need a second device.

2.- The dedicated device collection. We tried this, and while we somewhat like it, it is not the Holy Grail. Carrying a collection of dedicated devices is not a good answer.

3.- The second, multipurpose, connected device. One is not enough? Try two! Not a brilliant idea but if we can limit the number of devices that we carry to two, and both can do everything we can dream of, we also get redundancy. To some extent this is happening with the arrival of the iPad. In fact many appleheads just think in "number of Apples I own". Good for Jobs, that is Steve Jobs.

4.- The interactive environment. Let's expand on concept 1. Turn your car into a peripheral. When you sit in your car, your device works like a security token and information is shared. Suddenly you have access to the map on your personal device and display it on the dashboard, or your phone can use the car stereo, and the car marks your calendar for the oil change. To some extent we are there. Now expand that thought to Home and the big screen TV, or the office's keyboard, mouse and monitor and desk phone.

Whichever way we go, the key here is to establish the real, secure Personal Area Network. Is Bluetooth ready for this?

Bump is Magic

If something is true about my Myers-Briggs profile (ENTJ if you ask...) is that I get easily fascinated and entertained by ideas and concepts. This is one of those cases.

For those of you who don't know, "Bump" is an app that runs both on iPhone and Android and allows you to share your contact info by "bumping" your phones against each other.

By an elaborate and innovative flow of information the user is fooled into believing that the act of touching the two phones is doing the trick, while the devices in fact don't have anything that allows for this!

What is really happening is that the devices connect to a central server, notifying that they want to exchange a set of data, and when the accelerometer detects that the phone is "bumped", the server tries to match the GPS coordinates with another phone being bumped at the very same precise moment. Clever huh?

It is like a coordinate-authenticated PAN (Personal Area Network).

The part that I really get hung up on is that this is like faking a punch and having the other being put out by lightning!

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The retro-ignorant

We had more technology evolution in the last century than in all of human history before that. Those that are near their 40s today are witneses of the proverbial shift, not as experienced by our generation but more by observing that of our parents and our children.

My father in law was a very intelligent and agile man, who travelled half of the world routinely. He was both exposed to the advances of the Old World, as well as the enormous cultural differences present in South America. He was also a fan of shooting home movies on "Super-8" as many in his generation.

In the 80s, when the then new generation of Camcorders was out he decided to buy one. My wife and her siblings would make fun of him as he kept adjusting the camcorder's position -now plugged into the TV- to "project" the image to the screen. Obviously, he was having a hard time assimilating the new technology and opted on relying on his past experience.

Another example was my own father, having worked as a mainframe programmer for almost 25 years, had a hard time digesting the relative "ease of use" of Windows 95.

This used to be the norm, older people would "get stuck" on the older technology and younger, smarter generations would take their place and would master BOTH the newer technology and the old one. In this same year, anybody my age would be equally proficient handling the camcorder/VCR/TV or the Super 8 projector.

What is interesting today, is that technology is evolving at such a pace that learning the newer technologies does not allow for any room to understand the old ones, and this comes to equally embarassing ignorance. Retro Ignorance. Just a few examples: A 15 year old (unless is a DJ) would not know how to play a Vinyl or a Cassette tape, the fact that you cannot skip immediately to another song would puzzle them. I have seen them trying multi-touch gestures on non-touch screens. They don't understand how a car works, connect to the Internet through a modem, operate a typewriter, drive a stick-shift, the list keeps going on and on.

"Three factor" authentication

It is truly amazing how human nature prevails. As much as we try to change, rule and regulate human behavior, there are examples in every field.

It is a known fact that when tax rates increase about a certain threshold, revenues begin to drop as evasion becomes more common place. The fiercest regimes are usually the ones that fall quicker.

But this blog is not supposed to be about sociology or politics, but about technology and management and in reality the issue that prompts me to write this time is the obsession of some IT Security departments to implement every single possible "best practice" as security measures. Two-factor authentication is one and the most common version is the security token, so this guarantees the unbreakable duet: something you know (the password) and something you have in your possession (the token). So when you put these together you have successfully authenticated yourself. This is not a new concept and it has been used ancestrally, just remember the stories that verse about tattoos or moles, passwords and objects that would identify a king, a priest, or a knight.

Changing passwords and setting up rules to construct valid and secure passwords is also a good idea, the problem arises when these rules restrict dramatically the number of words the user can choose and effectively remember. When combined with a stringent requirement for changing them too frequently together with a strict no re-use policy, these policies can be counter productive as they make it almost impossible for the user to commit multiple and random letter/number combinations to memory.

I see this trend quite often, where most users have to identify themselves with a "THREE-FACTOR" authenticate method: The Token, the Password and the piece of paper where they wrote down the password and how to login.

The $1,000 FreeVo

I get a lot of grief from my friends about this one. Unlike most of the people, I have a Mythbuntu box at home instead of a much less expensive DVR solution and what I struggle to explain is that this project started out as a different set of requirements. I wanted to have (purchase or build) a system that would have the following:

- Allow for 100's of GB of storage to be able to back-up all my photographic work and all the laptops at home (5 total!).
- Have a Linux O/S in order to be able to test some software solutions that would not run on any of the 5 Windows laptops.
- Full fledged development Web-Server with the LAMP stack installed, to be able to test sites on a local server.
- Central storage for all my music files.
- A networked, always-on system, accessible at any moment, from any place in the house.
- Being always-on, I wanted a SILENT, low-power consumption box, instead of a noisy, of-the-shelf server (I had a Cobalt before and it was like a hair dryer on all the time).

Then I figured:
- If this systems is going to be always on, and have all my music files on it, I want it to be hooked up to my Stereo.
- Now that it is hooked up to my stereo, Wouldn't it be nice to have my big-screen TV as its monitor?
- And, now that it is hooked up to my TV and Stereo, wouldn't it be nice to watch movies on it? Or even record TV shows?

So this is how I bumped into Mythbuntu. My decision of using a Linux O/S was pretty much a done-deal. This was a promise of having a full-fledged LAMP server with all the multi-media functionality I also wanted.

Hardware Spec:
- The application is not very CPU-demanding, so almost anything would do. I used a Motherboard and CPU I had around. A core-solo @ 2.66 MHz with 1 Gig of RAM and integrated Audio and VGA video.
- One 160 Gb PATA HDD that I had around for the system disk.
- Two 500 Gb SATA HDDs I purchased new for a RAID-1 array
- A Hauppauge PVR-150. I chose this one when I started this project BEFORE the digital TV transition. It comes with an MPEG dedicated compression chip, so this way the CPU would not be tied up doing this during recording. It also comes with a Phillips-MCE-Compatible remote and receiver. I will probably add a 1600 digital card soon, to be able to record off-the-air, straight digital signal.
- An Adesso 3000UB wireless USB keyboard. I wanted this to be able to browse the web, and use the actual Linux server without being tethered to the box. This model, despite some bad reviews, has withstood my abusive use pattern. It has a built-in trackball and a scroll wheel, so you can drive it kinda like a game console.
- A pair of Ethernet over powerline adaptors. I wanted to have this unit by my entertainment center (where there is no CAT-5 wiring), but still have decent connectivity, so I chose this over wireless.
- ANTEC box. I selected this one as I needed minimum wife friction. This box goes in the living room and the aluminum finish of this box is very discreet and looks like a Tuner. The box also has dual fans that can be throttled. I set them to the minimum speed and there is NO audible noise at all. The box has enough space for 3 HDDs and a DVD unit. This is a must if you are building a server. On the front of the box there is a VFD display. I had issues with this as the chipset has a IR receiver that is not functional but the O/S detects it in some cases. Because of this I disabled it by unplugging the USB interface that powers it.


Setting up the system:
When you install a UBUNTU system, things are just much more easier if you have everything in the box before you fire up the O/S. The plug-and-play functionality works well at initial install as long as your stuff is quite standard. Once the operating system is installed, dropping in an additional piece of HW can be more challenging (as it proved to be on my initial attempts).

1.- Under this configuration I would set everything in the box, except for the RAID-1 drives, then verify that it powers on without major errors.

2.- Download the Mythbuntu ISO. Mythbuntu is distribution that is a blend of Ubuntu and MythTV and comes with all the funky drivers, like the MCE Remote and the PVR150. I recommend you use a version based on one of the Server releases (8.04 was the latest LTS version at the time of this writing). Ubuntu has frequent updates for the desktop environment, but some of these updates can break your setup.

3.- Burn the ISO. You can use any software burner. In case you need one, CDBurnerXP is a good free alternative.

4.- Pop the CD in the optical drive of the newly built system. Follow the menues for installing UBUNTU on the system HDD and when prompted, select "Advanced Install". Here, add the VNC and MythTV services. On screen 12/15, enable the remote selecting "Windows Media Center (New)".

5.- Once UBUNTU has finished installing and rebooted, Launch the MythTV Setup. In my case I had to select General: US-Cable, Capture Cards: MPEG-2, setup the Database as "mythconverge" (is the default), and selected "Schedules Direct" (This is a Non-For-Profit Scheduling service that costs ~$20/year.) as my Video Sources. On "System Roles" select (add) "Ubuntu Desktop" so that all the stuff that comes with Ubuntu, such as Open Office, etc. gets installed.

6.- If you want to use Pandora on your box, you will have to install Flash. There is no Pandora applet for Mythbuntu at this moment. The Web browser on Mythbuntu is a Konqueror port. So you have to install Flash on the Konqueror browser. To do this, go to the menu (by pressing Ctrl-Esc) and select System>Add/Remove. Look for Konqueror. You might have to enable all software sources to do this. After you have installed Konqueror, open Firefox and close it. Now run Konqueror and install Flash (by navigating to Adobe's site).

7.- If you will be installing RAID devices, run in a console "sudo apt-get install mdam" and "sudo apt-get install raid". I followed the full How To published HERE.
- Partition your drives using fdisk. You can list your devices without risk using "sudo fdisk -l" If your first disk of the RAID array is your SECOND drive, you would use: "sudo fdisk /dev/sdb"
- Once you have created the raw partitions, these will be "ext3", the default Linux type, which is not available for RAID, so you will have to change their type to "Linux RAID Auto - fd" by using the "t" command in fdisk. Make sure you write your changes (command "w").
- Create the raid device using "sudo mknod /dev/md1 b 9 2"
- Create the RAID-1 array "sudo mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1"
- Verify that the array is created and synced: "sudo cat /proc/mdstat"
- Once it is synced, put a file system on the array: "sudo mke2fs -j /dev/md1
- Now mount the array on the /raid folder: "sudo mount /dev/md1 /raid
- Once everything is checked, create a line in /etc/fstab using: "sudo nano /etc/fstab"
- Add line "/dev/md1 /raid ext3 defaults 1 2" so that the array mounts with every boot.

8.- Once you have installed your RAID devices, now you can reconfigure your system to RIP your DVDs to the redundant array and also the music utility to save on this one. This way if your system drive fries, you will still have the files.

9.- Now you can configure other stuff like the MythWeather applet to display the maps and forecasts you want as well as the MythFlix applet to show your queues.

There is no easy way to configure your MythFlix queue now. You have to input some parameters into the MySQL database. To do this, it is best that you install PHPMYADMIN. You can find instructions on this HERE. Once you have this installed add the parameters following the instructions HERE.

10.- Create SAMBA accounts for everybody who needs to backup. This is something that I struggled with. In Linux, you need to have a local account and a Samba account in order to have a share. Download the SAMBA administrative application going to the system meny and selecting System>Add/Remove.

Other Add-ons:
1.- LAMP server:
One of the things that I wanted is to have a full LAMP stack to be able to run websites off this box for development purposes. One of the easiest how-tos is HERE.

2.- VMWare Server:
At this moment there was no other way to use NetFlix instant watch but on Windows machines. So I installed VMWare and XP on this box. I used the tutorial published HERE. I found out later that Sun's Virtual Box uses much less resources so I switched to that.


Issues:
On my way here I have found a number of good How-Tos.

1.- If you have problems with your IR Remote:
- Install LIRC on Hardy - Step by step diagnostics
- MCE on Hardy problems - an entry on the Ubuntu Forums, with many different issues

2.- If your PVR card is not recording:
- Hauppauge Wintv pvr 150 - A good case where many diagnostics procedures are described

3.- If you have Audio problems:
- Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide - Self explaining...

4.- Alright, you obsess about getting the VFD working:
- VFD on Antec fusion (look for the iMON section!)
- LCD Proc on MythTV.org
- HOW-TO Configure the VFD to work with MythTV on a Antec Fusion case - This even gets into using the Control Wheel on the box to drive the menues

Other improvements:
1.- RAID upgrade. I recently changed my 500 Gbs to 1.5 Tb drives. There is no way to "grow" a RAID array, so I had to create a new one and transfer the data using an external box.

2.- Backup system HDD. As you can imagine, after this server is up, it becomes critical to everything you do, backups, Websites, etc. So I decided to create a second drive that I could throw in, in case of a problem. I cloned my system HDD with G4L. The "receiving" drive was bigger, and G4L seemed to be confused by this, it was just taking to long to clone. By creating a partition on the second drive of exactly the same size as the source drive, the image was completed in 20 minutes. This larger drive now holds a partition exclusively for recordings, this way overrecording cannot ever cause problems with the O/S.

3.- Digital card. This is one that I want to do as I cannot get any content directly from the air right now.

4.- Version upgrade: Newer version now features MIRO and other plug-ins. I will try to figure out a safe way to perform this upgrade.


The $1,000 FreeVo, asides from humor, is an understatement as this is not a DVR. This is my home server with full LAMP capabilities, disk redundancy for backing-up my laptops and a central repository for my music files (several iTunes instances can sync onto these files through the network straight to an iPod, without taking up space on a laptop). On top of this, the box also acts like a DVR which justifies its place in the living-room. The fact that it is a regular computer, allows for running HULU and Pandora. Obviously, when you want to make a change, you usually have to open up that terminal window...