Derek Bodner’s Blog

Originally posted at RealGM.com.

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I love bouncebacks. Can’t this be considered spam? I certainly didn’t solicit information about their services.

550 We would love to have gotten this email to …@… But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks.

God bless AOL. Never miss a chance to market their services.

I recently got a new TV, and finally entered the HD world.

Problem is, my trusty old series two TiVo can only do standard definition.

Comcast charges $10/month for an HD cable box, and only $5/month more for their HD DVR. So my options were to throw down $300+ to get an HD TiVo, and pay $13/month for TiVo service, or pay $5/month for Comcast’s Motorola DVR.

Because of the enormous difference in cost, I elected to go with Comcast’s offering, as it would actually save me $8/month, and have no upfront cost.

I’ve been using it for about a month now. While I appreciate the technological edge it has on my ancient TiVo (besides being able to record in HD, being dual tuner is nice), there are plenty of things I miss about my trusty TiVo.

I think the menu system (which has largely been borrowed by competing DVR manufacturers) on the TiVo is much more intuitively laid out and easier to use. I like that I can go online and schedule DVR recordings, and trust that the TiVo is going to sync up relatively quickly and get my recordings. I also like that I can install TiVo desktop and grab recordings off my DVR to store on my personal computer. To my knowledge, I haven’t found a way to do either either with the Motorola.

For the time being, I’m going to continue to primarily use the Motorola because of its capability of recording in HD and the fact that it’s dual tuner. That being said, I find the TiVo much easier and more intuitive to use, and find that I’m missing many options I had come to expect from the TiVo. From a usability standpoint, the two just don’t compare. Some day, I’d like to replace this DVR with a Dual Tuner HD TiVo.

The latest version of my Desktop Environment of choice, Xfce 4.6, was released. It certainly isn’t a huge revolution, much more of an evolution release. It’s not something that’s going to cause longtime KDE or gnome users to switch because of. But for longtime Xfce users, it’s a nice progression and improves upon stability considerably. The installer they have is fantastic (making it almost pointless to use your package manager), and the entire upgrade went without problems. Hats off to the Xfce team.

In a similar vein, I had to use Windows (Vista) today for the majority of the day because it’s the only thing I had on me. Windows has some catching up to do. I’m not talking about the whiz-bang factor. I think I’ve had compiz installed on my machines for all of about 10 minutes in total. I’m talking about usability.

Sure, Linux is still lacking in the unified “control panel” type configuration, although all of the major DE’s are making major steps in that regard. But on usability things, concepts like (and I’m going to use the Xfce names as that’s what I’m most familiar with) snap to border, focus stealing prevention, smart window placement, heck, even multiple workspaces. I get on a windows box and it just drives me nuts when I go to stick a window in the corner and I just ever-so-slightly miss, and part of the app is hidden offscreen until I notice. Or when I open up a new mail window in thunderbird in a dual monitor setup and, for some reason, it sticks the new mail window in the completely different monitor that I’m using. And don’t get me started on focus stealing. And why can’t I maximize a window horizontally with a keyboard command?

The more I’m away from Windows, the more convinced I become that Microsoft’s edge and “ease of use” comes more from its marketplace advantage than technical prowess.