Ricky Martin’s Blog

photo by rapidgamer03.
Well as I mentioned in my earlier post Boxee Beta and apple TV I have not had cable or Satellite service since moving back to Canada which will be almost a year now. The only stumbling block I have found as well as many others is when it comes to live sports there is a bit of snag depending on the sport you follow. how do I get around this for the world cup? Well there is a great article over at lifehacker that list where you can find all the streaming online for the world cup.

Well luckily CBC in Canada is streaming all the games live online, and the quality is great, the only issue I have is doesn’t quite work with my apple TV unfortunately. But as always there is a solution.

I use my Laptop which has an HDMI out port and I hook it up to my flat screen with an HDMI cable, and problem solved.

This solution works great, and I used the same setup during the Olympics which were broadcast by CTV in a similar fashion.

And if you have a problem with the sound of the vuvuzela’s you can follow this link to an engineer who created a filter for it, I have not had a chance to try it out.

Well as you may have read in my other post boxee-beta-and-the-apple-tv, I am an avid user of torrents and appleTV to watch them using Boxee. and recently I switched from Vuze to Utorrent as my bit torrent client as a result of the functionality enhancements. it is great given the fact that unlike many of the US ISP’s in Canada as is the same in most of Europe from my experience you are capped on bandwidth and if you go over your allotted amount you are charged. this is where I really like Utorrent in the fact you can schedule times to restrict for downloads as well as limit uploads and stop traffic altogether. There is even an option to track bandwidth and limit uTorrent if you exceed the threshold you configure.

All these great goodies that come with this simple to use tool. and now there is an article that shows that the download speed has been tested and is 16% faster overall than Vuze. you can read the post here at torrentfreak .

The Post gives the details about the study that was performed, and a link to the actual paper produced by the researchers.

you can download Utorrent from here.

and Vuze from here.

if you would like to compare for yourself.

Well I was an early adopter of the apple TV and tweaking it with Boxee. Now there is no official release of Boxee beta for the apple TV as of yet but some creative people out on the net have taken what is available and tweaked it to work with the apple TV.

I have to say I liked the alpha version but really love the interface of the beta version. I find it a lot more polished and user friendly. The UI really takes advantage of the resources available you get access to online content for TV shows if they are available or local content as well if you have it mapped out.

Now From the alpha to the Beta there was not an easy way to get it installed. For the initial install of Beta on the Apple TV you had to follow these instructions which involved using SSH to log into the apple TV and run several commands to install various components or with the script linked above managed to automate most of it. Which is how I got it working at first, but now the great people that work on the ATV patchstick and Launcher have managed to get it working from the launcher,  so if you have the Alpha installed on your apple TV you can upgrade the launcher and then you can update Boxee from the launcher as was done in the alpha versions.

Now this install method does not install some of the additional features such as flash or Firefox which run in the background and allow you to use some of the Apps that are designed for the Mac version that this is ported from.  you can get the additional instructions by clicking on the link if you use the Launcher method to upgrade to Beta on the apple TV.

OK, Listen up everybody, here is a link to the preview of Tim Ferriss new pilot show called trial by fire.

Personally I find it interesting and since I am a fan of his book the 4 hour work week, anyone else might find some interest just to see how this guy thinks. from a purely selfish reason would be nice to win the prize he is offering on his blog site, but on another note I find it a chance to learn how he approaches things and take away as much as possible from that I can use.

all the best to Tim, hope it works out for him, just adds to his fame….