I’ve been meaning to regain control of my email for quite awhile, but for some reason I had just never gotten around it until a few weeks ago. For years, I’ve had at least a half dozen primary email accounts that I need to check daily. I didn’t do any sorting — everything just came into each account’s inbox and stayed there forever. Clearly, this is not ideal.

The problem

You can imagine what that looks like when you’re trying to find something — an endless list of messages with no organization at all. I would most often use my mail client’s search function to find something, but that wasn’t always reliable and tended to result in a lot of hits I didn’t want. I often found myself sitting down to complete a project and wanting a series of emails that were spread over the past few weeks with various questions, concerns, and feedback from the client/stakeholder for that project. Finding those messages in an unclassified inbox was a nightmare. In addition, if I had near-term action-required emails (bring something to work from home tomorrow, pay a bill within the next couple days, or anything that required a response), they would get lost in the noise of less important emails. If I didn’t (or for some reason couldn’t) act on those emails right when I read them, I was at risk of forgetting about them.

The solution

The core of a solution was some kind of sorting methodology, clearly. But what to do? I needed something flexible, powerful, and mostly automatic — because if I have to manually sort a hundred emails every day, it will never happen. Most importantly: the Inbox is a sacred place. The only time a message should be in the Inbox is if it is unread or if it requires me to take further action.

Put it all in one place
The first thing I decided was that I wanted all my email going to one place so I could more easily parse it — I forwarded it all to my main GMail account, and configured that account to be able to send mail as those other accounts, so I can still send out messages under my various addresses from one place. I also moved from a desktop mail client — Apple Mail — and decided to work solely out of the GMail web interface, because of the way GMail’s labels and archiving work (not to mention that Mail and most other desktop clients I’ve used start falling on their face when you get tens of thousands of messages in them).

Filter it out
Next, I setup a whole bunch of filters — automated rules within GMail that perform various actions based on criteria you specify. They’re very powerful — I have various rules applying labels (GMail’s version of folders) to emails depending on such conditions as who they’re from, what keywords are in the subject or body, which of my various accounts the messages was originally sent to, or any combination thereof. I spent quite awhile setting up my filters and occasionally still add to them, but for the most part I’m happy with my filter setup.

Archive it
However, having all my mail in one place and applying those great labels still doesn’t solve one big problem — all my messages are still just listed in my GMail inbox. Important messages, despite being labeled, are still going to be surrounded by tons of noise. This does not jive with the Sacred Inbox directive.

One huge feature that most GMail users overlook is the “Archive” command. When you archive a message, it no longer appears in your Inbox — it’s still accessible via “All mail” or by viewing any label with which that message is tagged (or just by searching), it simply doesn’t show up in the Inbox anymore.

So what I’ve started doing is archiving messages when I’m done with them — anything that doesn’t require a response or to which I have already responded gets archived. When reading a message from the Inbox, the Archive button is right up there next to the “Back to Inbox” link…and it also takes you back to your inbox after it archives the email. So it takes no additional clicks, no additional work. I read the email, I respond if necessary, and if I’m done with it, I hit Archive and go to the next message.

I’ve also worked the archive command into some of my filters for emails I don’t need to see immediately. For example, notifications from Twitter get tagged “Notifications” and archived automatically. I like to peruse these emails a couple times a week to see who started following me on Twitter, but I don’t need them cluttering up my Inbox.

Results and observations

I’ve been operating this way (sort of my own version of Inbox Zero) for a few weeks now, and the difference has been amazing. I feel less overwhelmed by my email, it’s easier to find relevant messages when I sit down to accomplish a task, and I don’t forget to take action on messages that require it.

I was hesitant at first about switching from a desktop app to a web interface, but since GMail does a good job with keyboard shortcuts it makes the experience quite a bit more palatable. I also use Fluid to setup a dedicated GMail “application” on my Mac which always runs in its own window, separate from my regular web browser, and has a few niceties like an unread count on the dock icon and additional keyboard shortcuts.

If your inbox is an unorganized disaster and it stresses you out sometimes, consider some of these methods to reach Inbox Zero. It’s made all the difference for me.

About six months ago I laid out my opinions on home-based backup solutions. As my some commenters quickly pointed out, you’re not really backed up until your data resides in more than one place, geographically speaking. That is to say: using scheduled nightly backups to an external hard drive or something like Time Machine is great, but if your house burns down, so does your data.

For the past several months I’ve been getting better acquainted with online (off-site) backup services, as I’ve prepared to reorganize how we store all our data at home. I looked at popular file syncing services like Windows Live Mesh and Dropbox, but those are limited in space (only a few GB) and not really intended for backup. I realized I needed something huge, because I have at least 50GB of must not lose files and something like a terabyte of really would prefer not to lose files. Here’s what our home setup looks like now:

• 1 TB primary everyday work drive (in my main machine…in this case, a 24″ iMac); stores all important documents, photos, etc
• 160GB mobile drive (in a MacBook Pro); contains about 80GB of critical work files which I do not trust our own IT department to properly back up
• 80GB drive in wife’s MacBook, which contains documents and photos important to her
• 1.5 TB D-Link NAS (two 750GB drives) storing non-critical archived media like TV shows, movies, software

So I at least would like to backup the drive in my iMac, the drive in my MacBook Pro, and the drive in my wife’s MacBook, which total around 300GB between them of used space. I’ve already got a 500GB external USB drive for nightly backups of the iMac’s critical files via Time Machine, OS X’s file preservation backup system, and I plan on using SuperDuper to periodically make smart backups of the MacBook and MacBook Pro onto the iMac. But what about getting all that data off-site? Enter the cadre of relatively recent and cheap backup services: Mozy, BackBlaze, Carbonite, and a few others all cost about $5 a month and all offer unlimited — or nearly unlimited — storage space.

I’ve decided on BackBlaze, and while this won’t be a full review because I’m not done backing everything up yet (that review will come later), I can tell you why I chose them. First and foremost, they have a great looking control panel for both Windows and Mac that gets you started really quick — it makes a couple assumptions about what you don’t want to back up, like system files that can just be reinstalled, and the rest is good to go. Despite this rapid setup, the control panel offers plenty of information and options for power users to tweak to their satisfaction. They also, like some of the other companies I looked at, offer a great service where you can (for a fee, of course) have your data overnighted to you on DVDs or a hard drive, in case things go boom and you don’t have time to redownload it all from the BackBlaze servers.

Ah yes, time…when backing up over 300GB via the Internet, it’s clearly going to take a long time. Fortunately, just the initial backup is so lengthy — after that, updates are incremental and (supposedly) nearly instantaneous. Based on my research, that was one big advantage of BackBlaze over a number of the other options — while most of the competitors will upload your changed files on a certain schedule, BackBlaze will do it in the background more or less as it detects changes happening. I’m still doing my initial backup, which will take an extremely long time, so we’ll see if that fact holds true during normal use.

What about security? Hopefully, most of you got some sort of nervous tick at the thought of transmitting so much of your data out into the “cloud”. Fear not…every one of the backup services I researched uses pretty high-strength encryption to encode your files on your computer before they’re ever sent out, and the data connection to the server itself is also encrypted. So you have encrypted files traveling via an encrypted server connection. BackBlaze has a blog post with the nitty-gritty details, but suffice to say the schemes they’re using are good enough for the government and good enough for me.

For years I’ve just been backing up my stuff to whatever extra drives I’ve had laying around at home — if I was doing it at all. I’m being proactive and have chosen to do two layers of backups — one local and one off-site — but I think at the very least everyone should consider trying out one of these online backup services. For only $5 a month (and most of them let you try the first month for free), how can you go wrong? Remember this maxim: your data doesn’t exist until it exists in at least two places.

Full review of BackBlaze to come.

Yesterday, Google unveiled a new service called (simply) Sync that updates your contacts and calendars between your wireless phone and the Google servers instantly and over the air. And guess what: it works! Guess what else: it’s free!

That’s more than can be said for Apple’s $99 per year MobileMe service. I tried MobileMe for three months, and it just never worked. I don’t care about the 10GB of web space (have my own servers, or something like DropBox), I don’t care about the email account (uh, GMail), and I don’t care about the fancy photo galleries (I’ve got Flickr and my own gallery). The biggest thing I need is my contacts and calendar data everywhere, on every computer I use, and on my iPhone. MobileMe failed spectacularly in that respect — syncs were inconsistent, would sometimes replicate data, and just could never be depended upon to replicate data reliably from one device to another.

Google Sync works on the iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, S60, and a handful of other devices. It utilizes the broadly adapted Microsoft Exchange wireless sync protocols (thank you, Microsoft) and is relatively easy to setup (Google has basic instructions for all devices). And after more than 24 hours on my iPhone, I’m quite happy with it.

I did have to go through an additional step to tell Google I have multiple calendars I want to sync (otherwise it defaults to just your primary one), but it works fine — even for my account, which is not regular GMail but Google Apps for Your Domain. Now, for example, my wife can add an event to her calendar and I’ll see it instantly on my iPhone, no matter where I am, without having to plug into a computer.

OK, so your mobile device syncs up to the Google “cloud,” but what about keeping all your desktop apps up to date? If you’re on a Mac, you can also now sync iCal with Google Calendar (real two-way sync, not just the one-way subscription that’s been around forever), and Leopard’s Address Book has built-in syncing with your Google account too. That last one isn’t working perfectly for me on one my machines, but it works well enough most of the time.

I remember when the iPhone first came out and Apple made a big deal out of their collaboration with Google. At the time, I made a pie-in-the-sky wish that Google would somehow make wireless syncing work for calendars and contacts, but never really believed it would happen because of Apple’s MobileMe service. However, since Apple included Exchange capability in the iPhone for corporate users, that opened up the door for Google (and others) to use their own tools that piggyback on that protocol. One more nail in MobileMe’s coffin.

Plex, the fantastic media center software I’ve written about before, added some icing on the cake recently: out-of-the-box support for Logitech Harmony universal remotes.

Logitech Harmony remotes are great because Logitech maintains a massive database of all the codes for pretty much every consumer electronics device ever made (the Harmony 550 was my pick for the best gadget gift under $100). You (usually) don’t have to sit there “training” the Harmony with your original remotes — you just hook it up to your computer, type in the model numbers of your TV, receiver, game console, etc, and you’re off. It vastly improves (and simplifies) control of your home entertainment center.

However, while Logitech did have remote codes for the Mac Mini (which is what I’m using to run Plex), the six buttons of the Apple remote aren’t enough to control a full-featured software suite like Plex. So I wound up buying a piece of software called Remote Buddy that interprets signals from remote controls and turns them into keystrokes. Basically, I spent 2 hours having my Harmony learn IR codes from 7 “virtual” Apple remotes (7 distinct sets of 6 IR codes) to give me 42 effective buttons, but then I had to create keystrokes for each of those 42 IR codes in Remote Buddy so that the proper commands would be sent to Plex (as keystrokes). It was extremely tedious, and I wound up having to do most of it over again because one of the learned IR commands was corrupted (resulting in double-presses).

Not happy with this solution either, a few users over on the Plex forums got together and decided to do something about it. An special IR profile could be added easily enough to the Plex code by the developers, but the catch was that Logitech would have to create a Plex “device” in their massive database. When I found that out, I pretty much lost all hope because while I love Logitech’s hardware, they’re a big company and I didn’t really expect them to pay attention to a little open-source project run by some home entertainment geeks.

Fortunately, I was wrong. Within a few weeks, Logitech was working with the Plex team to establish an expanded set of IR codes that a Mac could receive and that Plex would specifically listen for. Right around Christmas, the Plex device was added to the Logitech Harmony database. As soon as we got back from visiting our relatives, I eagerly updated Plex on the Mini, plugged in the Harmony to my laptop and fired up the Harmony control software. I found and added the Plex device, flashed the remote, and within minutes I was successfully controlling Plex just like any other device in the Logitech database.

Plex treats the Harmony remote as just another type of input device, so you can customize the key mappings using an XML file just like you can with the keyboard. I tweaked a few of the buttons to my liking, which only took a couple more minutes. All told, I had everything configured exactly the way I wanted in less than 10 minutes — compared to almost 2 hours I had to spend before learning IR codes and configuring Remote Buddy.

With the addition of Plex to Logitech’s device database, Plex now integrates as nicely into your media center as any other device. In my follow-up after my first couple months with the software, the one big drawback I mentioned was the struggle to find a good way to control it. That concern has been solidly dealt with. Considering how much we use this to watch archived video, I want to give a big thank you to the Plex enthusiasts who initiated this crusade, and the folks at Logitech who cared enough to listen to the little guy. From the comments on the Plex forums, it looks like they’re going to sell a lot more remotes because of it!

This is Part 1 of a three-part series, Navigating the Financiapocoalypse. It’s intended as a get-started guide for people just starting down the path of actively managing their money.

Before you can do any saving, you need to get your spending under control. As I said in my intro to this series, however, this isn’t going to be a guide on how to be a total cheapskate. I’m not going to be the one advocating use of a coffee shop for Internet access and the sports bar to watch TV, or putting on six sweatshirts so you don’t have to turn the heat above 50. But there’s plenty of smart decisions you can make to reduce expenses while still maintaining a lifestyle you enjoy.

My thoughts on budgets

Lots of financial types insist that you have to have a strict budget. Maybe this is starting off on the wrong foot in a lecture about controlling spending, but I have a confession to make: I don’t keep a budget. (I have a guideline that I call a “reverse budget,” but we’ll talk about that in part 2). I do keep rough numbers in my head, but I’m not going to agonize over every dollar — it’s too time-consuming and too much micromanaging. I know what our typical monthly expenses are, and I try to keep them low. Beyond that, my energy is better spent on doing more active things to control our money. Besides, many of the people I’ve met who do dollar-by-dollar budgets are usually so obsessed with recording that last receipt in Quicken that they forget to enjoy life.

Controlling your “right now” money

So I don’t consider planning every monthly expense to be very important. The important part is making the best decision at the time you have to actually spend that money (or in the case of recurring monthly bills, at the time you sign up for the service), and while I’m not a proponent of cheaping out on everything, you need to be conscious of the fact that a few bucks here and there can really add up. Making your own coffee instead of going to Starbucks can mean $50 or $60 a month — that’s a cell phone bill. Bringing lunch instead of buying 4 days a week can save you over $120 a month. How many times do you think you’re really going to watch that movie? Rent it instead of buy it. Everyone’s heard stuff like this of course, but once you get used to asking yourself the questions, “Do I really need this right now? What is it worth to me?”, you’ll find that sometimes the answer contradicts your first impulse.

This sounds like simple common sense, but there was a time when I wasn’t so great at asking myself those questions — and many people are affected by the same “must have” impulses fueled by our consumer-centric society. That’s what got so many people deep into credit card debt — buying things they didn’t really need because they were told that just “wanting” it was enough justification.

Another way to save money on bigger purchases is to avoid those store-offered warranties. People who try to actually use those rarely have a story with a happy ending — and if you use your major credit card (paying it off immediately, of course) you often will get a double warranty anyway, provided courtesy of MasterCard or Visa. I didn’t follow my own advice on this just one time, and sure enough the store (Best Buy, in this case) tried to cheat me when I needed their warranty service.

Monthly bills

Cutting back on recurring monthly expenses can be more difficult, but it is possible. With the advent of so many online video sites (like Hulu.com for NBC and FOX shows; all major networks have something up now), many popular TV shows are available for free — completely legal, ad-supported shows. This has allowed some people I know to ditch cable TV or at least downgrade to a lesser package, freeing up $40 to $80 a month. Many have already given up their landlines in favor of cell phones, and energy-saving tricks like bumping the heat down a few degrees at night (when you’re under the blankets) and when you head out the door can really add up too.

One big one I think a lot of people need to look at is their text messaging portion of their cell phone bills — the rates are extreme (if you multiply the bytes and dollars out, AT&T charges $1,310 per MB! For comparison, most MP3s are 3 to 4MB and viewing just a couple web pages can easily cause you to pass 1 MB) and you might ask yourself if you could just send an email instead. Email is essentially free, while SMS is priced in the stratosphere — the U.S. Senate has even opened an investigation into the wireless companies for the exorbitant SMS pricing. I personally get by just fine on the lowest SMS plan — 200 a month. I use email for most communications.

Take a week (or two) and examine closely how much you use the cable TV, cell phone minutes, text messages, and anything else that you may be overpaying for. Watch out for package “deals” from communication companies — yeah, you can get cable TV, Internet, and phone for $99/mo, but do you really need the phone? They’re not always the best deal for your needs. Also don’t be afraid to ask your service providers for discounts. Some will offer a significant percentage off if you prepay for a year; some have specials that are advertised to new customers, but might be willing to give to an existing customer if all you do is ask nicely.

Finally, look at your bills. I’m admittedly bad about this, and I know some of you are too. I didn’t look closely at my cable bill for many months, and when I did I realized they were erroneously charging me for the CableCARD in my TiVo. A couple phone calls later and I was credited for 10 months worth of incorrect billing. Always check the small print and individual charges — big companies tend to make mistakes in their favor.

Simplify your stuff

Taking stock of what you own and eliminating “stuff” can help too. I embarked on a cleaning mission for my office closet a few months ago — the closet that contains the myriad of computer parts, gadgets, and other electronics I’ve accumulated over the years with the thought “Oh, I bet I could use that one day!” I sold a few of the things that were really worth something, gave some of it away, and trashed the rest. Not only did I clear some storage space, but I made a little money and — more importantly — it made me re-examine a few of my spending habits. A few weeks later when I ran across a similar little gadget to one I had given away, I thought to myself, “The last time I bought something like that, it wound up in the closet after just a few months. Maybe it’s not worth it.” Clearing out the cruft will enhance your mental spending discipline and reduce clutter (I hate clutter!).

It’s all in your head

What all this boils down to is using your head and training yourself. You have to be willing to stop and ask yourself questions before buying something, and you have to be willing to spend just a little time with your monthly bills to make sure everything’s correct and you’re getting the best deal possible. It’s hard to put an exact number on it, but since I started asking myself those questions and spending that time I’d say we’ve saved on average $250 a month or so. It might take a little sticky note in your wallet over the credit card (“Should I really buy this?”), or a conversation with your spouse for any non-essential item over a certain dollar amount, or (in extreme cases) freezing the credit card in a glass of water so you have to wait for it to thaw — and therefore, give yourself time to think between the impulse and the act of buying — but get yourself trained to ask that question.

But why cut spending? Up next, a very important and neglected subject: aggressive saving.

The long-awaited (for Xbox fans, anyway) system overhaul for the Xbox 360, known as the New Xbox Experience, was rolled out this morning. The NXE is a completely new interface for the 360, and along with the eye candy brings some cool new features to Microsoft’s venerable gaming platform. More significant than the changes themselves, I think, is the fact that such a complete system upgrade is possible — it’s almost like getting a new system without paying a dime or lifting a finger. No one has ever done such a complete revamp of a large installed base of “set top boxes”, which are generally considered static devices once they roll off the factory.

Let’s take a look at the major improvements in the NXE.

Interface

I’ve always felt that the previous Xbox 360 “blade” interface, while visually interesting in certain respects, lacked quite a bit in the user interface department. It was kind of clunky feeling, and there were times I wasn’t sure what I could click on (or how to get the cursor there) and what I couldn’t. So the first and most obvious improvement in the NXE is the look and feel. It’s slicker, more open feeling, and more modern, bringing it in line with the PS3 interface. It also seems a bit snappier when transitioning from screen to screen — although some interface niggles remain. For example, it takes way too many clicks to delete a game (and I download a lot of trial games, so I am frequently deleting things). However, on the whole it is a very welcome improvement, and makes navigating the dashboard a much more pleasant experience.

Avatars

The other biggest visual change in the NXE is the introduction of Xbox Avatars, which resemble the Nintendo Miis. Rather than a boring, static gamer icon (of which there was an extremely limited selection), you now can customize a virtual person to your liking with a vast array of chins, eyes, body shapes, hair styles, clothing, glasses, makeup, earrings, and more. A snapshot of your avatar can then be your gamer icon. I thought avatars would be a stupid gimmick, but they’re actually kind of fun. More significant is the utilization of the avatars in the NXE interface to form gamer parties.

Party system

The party system abstracts the group gaming management away from the games themselves. In the old system if you and some friends were all playing Halo, for example, and then wanted to play Gears of War, you’d have to all find each other again in Gears — maybe send out invitations and all that. But with the NXE’s party system, you group up once in the dashboard area and then the party leader can take everyone around to different games. If some members of the party want to play different games, though, they can still all chat through their headsets, even though they’re not in the same game.

Netflix

At long last, you can tie your Xbox 360 to your Netflix account and watch streaming movies (in HD, no less!) at no additional charge (provided you have the Xbox Live Gold membership and a Netflix membership). I watched part of The Sum of All Fears while writing this, and the quality is pretty good. I’m on a 10MB cable connection (it will adjust automatically for the highest video quality you can handle), and it’s definitely at least standard DVD quality. I’m disappointed that there’s only stereo sound (no 5.1), and you can spot some compression artifacts in certain scenes if you look really hard, but for us the experience should suffice for all but the most intense action movies.

One big wrinkle in the Xbox/Netflix streaming system is that Sony, in typical petulant Sony fashion, has blocked the streaming of all Columbia Pictures (owned by Sony) movies to the Xbox 360. All those movies can still be viewed on your computer or any other Netflix streaming device, just not the 360. Once again, Sony…great work.

Installing games to the hard drive

With the NXE, you can now install games to the Xbox’s hard drive. Sadly, you still have to insert the disk to play — in order to prevent piracy — but in many cases load times will be reduced. However, I’m more annoyed by having to swap discs than I am by a few seconds of load time. I wish there was a way for them to take care of that — maybe ask for the disk once every two weeks? Or once every 10 plays? Or randomly?

Conclusion

The NXE is definitely an exciting update for Xbox users, and it’s very cool that Microsoft can practically give you a new console with just a software update. Microsoft popularized the concept of a dashboard for gaming consoles, and is now blazing a new path with this mid-life overhaul. TiVo looks like it may do something similar sometime next year with a total replacement of its operating system. Hopefully this trend of major product improvements via software updates continues to expand through the consumer electronics industry. It’s nothing but good news for the consumer.

• Joystiq: NXE overview, feature tour videos

Plex - Band of Brothers episode list

A couple months ago I wrote my initial impressions of Plex, a Mac-centric fork of the venerable XBMC software that was originally written for hacked 1st-generation Xboxes. In early September I bought a Mac Mini to run Plex, and have been using it exclusively as my living-room media streamer since then. The original post got a number of comments, and I’ve received a lot of emails as well so I wanted to follow up now that I’m more familiar with the software.

My original endorsement of Plex stands: it’s a beautiful piece of software, and is being actively developed so improvements are constantly forthcoming. It has taken our interaction with the terabytes of video I keep on hand to a whole new level. It’s so slick and easy to use, as a matter of fact, that sometimes I’ll pick something to watch through Plex even though I have the DVD right there on the shelf next to the TV. I hate physical media, I find it to be a nuisance, and Plex delivers a much richer way of experiencing your video library.

Video library

Speaking of your video library, that is one thing about this software that requires at least some maintenance on your part: as you add new videos to the folders you’ve assigned Plex to watch, you need to make sure the filenames follow one of the half-dozen or so naming conventions that Plex can recognize. This is what allows it to go out and download all the art, synopses, episode names, and other metadata that make the library experience so great.

Performance

Running on a current-generation Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz with 1.5GB of RAM, Plex is super responsive. It can play high-quality 720p .mkv files with nary a stutter or skip (I don’t have a 1080p TV, but users on the Plex forums report no problems with that either). One of the reasons I switched to the Mini from a hacked Apple TV is that the ATV just didn’t seem to have the horsepower to both pull high bitrate files over my home network and play them at the same time — it would start locking up and jumping around. Really, for up to 720p I know that any Intel-based Mac Mini will work fine, even the Core Solo.

Remote control

This was my only significant headache about the whole Plex experience, although most of it was not really the fault of Plex. Out of the box, yes, Plex works with the Apple remote — although with only 6 buttons, that’s pretty limiting. Plus, I love my Logitech Harmony to death and won’t ever allow a second remote to invade my single-remote nirvana. So what are the options?

Update: Since I wrote this, Plex has integrated Harmony support directly into the software, so remote setup is now practically effortless. See my newer post.

Beyond the basic Apple remote, there’s two additional control schemes that Plex supports: multi-button sequences, in which it will recognize subsequent rapid button presses from the Apple remote in order to execute a larger command set, and of course keyboard control. The free way to use your Harmony to near full effect with Plex is to follow the guide in their Wiki to configure your Harmony to send out these rapid button sequences. It does work, but is not without serious drawbacks. For one thing, the sequences simply take awhile. Yeah, there’s only a few hundred milliseconds between each command, but when most of the video operations consist of three virtual button presses, it does get annoying after awhile to press “Pause”….and then wait a couple beats until the video actually pauses. Also, it introduces a lot of margin for error. Often, one of the commands from the sequence will simply be missed, either because of an obstruction or just for no apparent reason at all, and Plex will recognize two button presses instead of three — which will execute a completely different function and will have you wanting to throw your remote across the room in no time. This is no way to relax and enjoy a movie. It also fails the “wife test” — my wife couldn’t reliably operate Plex in my absence and would just give up.

Without a doubt the most versatile — albeit inconvenient — way to control Plex is with they keyboard. Having so many keys at your disposal, you can execute any of the hundreds of functions with a single input. However, with no additional means of input, this also fails the “wife test,” because there’s no way in hell she’s going to memorize 20 or 30 different keys or keep a big wireless keyboard on her lap just to watch a TV show or movie. So…what if there were a way to send keystrokes to Plex with the Harmony?

Ah…but there is. It’s called Remote Buddy, it costs money, and it will take a good two hours for you to get oriented, program the Harmony, and configure it to your liking (a tutorial at FunWithComputers really helps — it’s for XBMC, but Plex is nearly the same thing), but once everything’s all properly glued together with Remote Buddy the whole experience finally comes together. Since I setup Remote Buddy, the Mac Mini with Plex passes the “wife test” with flying colors. It was a tedious process, but I’m very happy with the results. Remote Buddy is free to try for 30 days, so you’ve got plenty of time to figure out if you want to use it.

I hope that answers most people’s questions. If you’re wondering about anything else, just post a comment.

• Plex web site
• XBMC source project

During a London event pimping the upcoming military/monster/undead bloodbath game Gears of War 2, developer Rod Fergusson from Epic made a remark about the Xbox 360 having reached its graphical limit. Some thought he meant that nothing else could be done with the platform, but what he was really referring to (as clarified later by Epic colleague Cliff Bleszinski) was that developers had to find creative new ways of taking advantage of what the 360 provides, because they’re not going to get any more processing power or memory. Bleszinski cited the Super Nintendo’s life cycle, during which game graphics continually improved despite a series of apparent plateaus.

The point is that a fixed platform, like the Super Nintendo, Xbox 360, and every other console, forces developers to work within their hardware restrictions with no expectation of any flexibility or improvement. While this may be obvious, the contrast between development for game platforms and PCs makes for some interesting observations.

The comments by the Epic developers brought one issue to the forefront: that console developers are way, way more concerned about squeezing every last drop of performance out of their platforms than their PC counterparts. When writing software for a PC, developers know that by the time they release PCs will be even more powerful than what they’re developing on. Time spent optimizing will often get sacrificed on the altar of earlier release dates, because throughout the product’s life cycle PCs will continue to get faster and faster.

The Xbox 360 is 3 years old, and there are still new games coming out (like Gears of War 2, and Far Cry 2) that graphically put earlier titles to shame. It’s the same hardware; nothing has changed except that developers have gotten much better at taking advantage of what’s there. Compare that with a PC from three years ago; software doesn’t get better at running on that old computer, it just gets worse. Not just games, but even mundane stuff like Microsoft Word will get harder and harder to run on that machine as new versions are released. Obviously at some point the hardware has to advance to open up new opportunities for software developers, but the rapid pace of PC technology has, in my opinion, resulted in a vicious circle: out-of-control software bloat causes people to buy faster computers more often than they should have to, which in turn gives software more room to be sloppy. Right now my Mail app is taking 100MB of RAM. What is it doing with all that? Email is just text!

What would it be like if some sort of backward pressure existed in the desktop development industry like it does for console games? I’m not against faster hardware, so I’m not sure what could provide that pressure, but I sure think we could make much better use of our computers if the same devotion was made to efficiency there as it is for game consoles.

I have a lot of video media stored on my server (almost 2 terabytes), and I need a way to stream it to my television so we can watch the stuff from a couch instead of a desk chair. Years ago I started with a basic PC running Windows, then moved to a hacked original Xbox with Xbox Media Center, then to a hacked Apple TV. Today, I replaced my hacked Apple TV with a Mac Mini running the excellent Plex media center software.

Plex is a fork of the original XBMC software that I used way back with my original Xbox. It has been updated and beautified, and definitely sports one of the sexiest user interfaces you’ll ever see gracing your screen. One of its greatest strengths is gathering information about your videos. You point it to your media, and as long as the files are named in a sane way it will go out and fetch all the metadata from online movie and TV databases — it downloads the episode/movie names, descriptions, and even cover art. This makes for a fantastic experience as you’re browsing through your media. You can see in the image here an example of this as I look at the movie “300″.

All in all, it’s fantastic using the Mini has a media center. I have full control over my huge media library using just my Logitech Harmony remote, but I can surf the web or do anything else I want with the computer just by pulling out the bluetooth keyboard and mouse from under the coffee table. Plex is a great piece of software already, and lots of improvements are planned. For digital media junkies, I think this is about as good as it gets right now.

Those who know me know I run a decently big file server at home. It’s an AMD system running Ubuntu Server with about 1.6 TB of hard drive space (that’s 1,600 GB). I store most of my stuff on that server — personal documents, client projects, web site development code, TV shows, movies, pictures, music, software backups, you name it. None of my Macs actually have any documents stored on them — it’s all on the server, which I depend on having access to wherever I go.

On the road, I typically would use the somewhat klutzy method of downloading files I need via FTP, working on them on my MacBook Pro, and then re-uploading them when I was done or when I got home again, to keep the server up to date (this excludes code, for which I use the Subversion version-tracking system). At home, I have until now used the Samba protocol (the file-sharing system native to Windows) to mount the shared directories and work on them directly over my gigabit network.

I recently had an epiphany about the way I was doing things. My Samba setup was a holdover from when I had all Windows boxes. I continued to use it when I moved to Macs because it pretty much works with everything — Linux, OS X, Windows. However, while compatible with many things, it excels at nothing. It is slow, it is limited to Windows filenaming conventions (UNIX/Linux is much more flexible about file names), it has an extremely limited permissions system, and it can’t really be used over the Internet — hence why I was using FTP while away from home to access my files, because using Samba through the Internet is about as fun as pulling your fingernails out with pliers. It’s just so slow, if you can get it to work at all.

Then I discovered AFP. Despite having had it operational for less than 24 hours, I think it’s safe to say that AFP has changed my life.

As I said, an epiphany: I suddenly realized I was using a Linux server, Mac OS X clients, and a file-sharing protocol that was native to neither of them. Hence, the slow performance. Of course, even on Windows (from whence Samba, in its modern form, hath sprung) most experienced networking engineers will tell you that file-sharing performance sucks. So I started to look at other options: NFS and AFP.

AFP (AppleTalk Filing Protocol) was introduced by Apple in the mid-1990s as a way for people to access shared files and printers over a local network or the Internet. I installed it (with SSL authentication) on my Ubuntu server using this guide and had everything up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Performance? Freaking awesome. I connected to my home server from work and was able to browse directories and open files incredibly quickly — and all using the native OS X Finder rather than a special program for FTP. The usage is no different from being plugged into my network at home, other than the speed of course, which while not as fast as being at home is still much faster than FTP or SSH over MacFUSE or something. I don’t have any benchmarks, but I’d compare it to using a USB pen drive. Keep in mind I’m accessing the server through 15Mb down/1.5Mb up cable Internet.

It also “just works” when it comes to permissions. With Samba, since it was born of Windows, and Windows doesn’t have a very robust (ok, pretty much nonexistent) file permissions system, there were all sorts of configuration settings you had to define to tell Samba which users could read/write which files. Also, those permission settings got applied to the whole mounted share…there was no way to fine-tune permissions within the share for specific users (as you can natively in Linux). Oh, and speaking of users, with Samba you had to specifically add Samba users on top of the Linux user accounts they already had on the server. It was a real pain. With AFP, after defining where my shares were (which was stupidly simple…two parameters per line: the folder path and the share name) I was able to connect to it with my regular account on that server, and the permissions on all the files were appropriately handled. No special user creation, no special settings. It was fantastically easy.

I’m not a network engineer, and I only took one network programming course in college, but it seems to me that AFP performs so well because:

• It was designed from the start to work over large network “distances” — i.e., complex networks like the Internet
• It integrates into TCP/IP at a low level, reducing overhead
• It integrates into the operating system at a low level — access to files over AFP is handled the same way as local files, without going through a lot of special protocol translations (Samba)

AFP will change the way I work when I’m away from home. If I’m in a location with a decent Internet connection, I can just work on most files directly on the server at home through AFP. Even if I have to copy files to the laptop, because they’re huge or because I might not have Internet where I’m going, it’s still much more convenient (and faster) than using FTP. I left Samba running on the server because I do occasionally need access to those shares with Windows, but that has no impact on AFP performance. If you have a file server and you’re using OS X client computers, I strongly recommend setting up AFP. It’s made things go a lot smoother for me when I’m away from home, and even the performance when I’m directly plugged into my network is noticeably improved.