Apple TV - issues with the real experience

I have been an owner of the Apple TV when it was a 1.0 twinkle in Steve's eye - and I enjoyed it although it was over-priced and under capacity. But, with 2.0 (Take 2 - sweet!) I was really excited.

Being one her Majesty's subjects based in the UK (not, as they quaintly say in some UK territories, 'residing at her Majesty's pleasure' i.e. in prison) I could not get onto the US iTunes store for movie rentals.

Until I discovered the neat workaround of buying US denominated gift vouchers ($200 available for immediate redemption at internet sites) which will allow anyone, anywhere to create a US iTunes account and get watching.

All so very groovy. EXCEPT...

Problem 1) my hitherto heroically excellent ISP in the UK, Zen Internet, starts coughing blood when my monthly downloads reach 20GB (back when I started with them there wasn't a limit, of course) and so my few episodes of Mad Men & Damages soon busted my limits. The last thing I expected to be a problem was this paltry download limit - and I'm not even using the pernicious, sneaky and downright underhand SLA's of the budget, mass-market ISP's like Sky, BT or Orange.

So - problem 1 in brief is that ordinary, high quality broadband packages from award winning UK ISP's are not ready for legal on-demand download TV services.

Problem 2) stemming fairly heavily from the above - I upgrade my broadband package to a pro (semi-business) offering from Zen in order to boost my download limit to 50Gb per month and find that I still can't get through a whole Live Fast Die Hard in HD as the download stalls out at 59% - even though I am still fully online now and able to write this post my Apple TV has been given an early bath for reasons I cannot fathom. Have Zen's servers shut that stream down? Is the Apple TV on the fritz? What has happened?

All I know is that I work in this world - I sell these products - an ordinary user would be very disappointed.

Apple TV 2.0 in the UK - our deliverer has been taken out at the last fence. "The quarterback is toast".

I.E. it's over

Interesting take on why Microsoft has u-turned on its IE8 standards compatibility - and I so hope it's true so banking websites, cinema booking sites and even pizza delivery companies start coding things that work rather than things that don't work just to fit in with Redmond's way of doing things.

Can anyone tell me how a company like Viatel gets to charge £270 per month ex VAT for 2MB SDSL with 10:1 contention?

Is that really the going rate?

Lock you mac screen with ease by keeping Keychain.app (from the Applications>Utilities folder) in the menubar (under Keychain>Preferences>General). Then click on the little padlock icon and voila!

Simple yet effective

Google blog widget - excellent little device! Probably very late in the game on this but there we are.

One less good thing is that I changed my Google account the other day and I can find no way of making the Blog (or Analytics) accounts change with it. Any hints?

Apple Computer Inc - using my house as a promotional tool without permission!

I was in the Apple Store in Regent's Street and was getting my first hands-on time with the MacBook Air and I was wowed by the size (really very small), the weight (super slim) and the overall quality - and I thought I'd try out the funky gestures in iPhoto. So I open it up and obviously it comes pre-loaded with some Events for people to browse through and amongst them is Tropical Beach House - and, this is where it gets a little odd, about 8 of these glossy, people-having-fun-and-larking-around marketing type shots (you know the sort of things that make up the images in the iLife templates) were taken at a rental villa that I own in the Caribbean. The place is completely uncredited but here are a group of young people sipping beer by the pool, snapping the sunset from the dock, laughing on the terrace etc etc!

You can see the whole lot of shots, and the shots I took of the same images on iPhoto on machines throughout the Apple Store (2 MacBook Airs, 1 Black MacBook, 1 Mac Pro) here:

Apple Store shots of Gun Point, Tortola

And the main website here for comparison purposes: Gun Point

The house looks great which I am thrilled about (as it would in Apple ad-world) but surely this is tantamount to marketing, and shouldn't Apple maybe have contacted me to say that it was using them? The guests did come and pay normal rates for the week but there was no suggestion that they were anything other than holidaying types.

What do you guys think?

Mis-adventure?

I had one of those moments when I take a leap into the unknown when buying software and I [knowingly] plink down my credit card details without having really done my research. But usually $15 shareware mistakes don't break the bank. But what I actually bought was Apple's supposedly pro-photography app Aperture.

I am something of a Mac fan-boy but mainly because they make great products. But can someone please tell me why Aperture is wowing anyone? For filing purposes it seems to be little more than iView Media Pro (although now that has been bought by M$haft so it's not much of an option). But it has some decent photo-tweaking tools but then it's a little like getting 55% of the way into a job and then realising that actually you are going to have to change your whole methodology and start with new tools. Which would be fine if there was a clear distinction where the alternative tool also required the use of a specialist filing app before hand... but it doesn't. It's called Lightroom and then Photoshop.

I realise this is hardly a well thought-out, insightful rant (see Daring Fireball for those) but it remains that I am v frustrated with Apple and hoping for a lot from the soon-to-be-announced update.

(Oh, and I spent a weekend creating an in-depth photo album in Aperture and something happened and I lost the lot - not, happily, before I ordered it online but shortly afterwards. And then the results were poor, saturation-light, dull images on poor quality paper. The "special-sauce" that Apple puts into Albums made with iPhoto obviously helps but I felt a bit let down.)