Full HD triggers massive upgrades

So, you have bought a new Full HD TV, Congratulations! So did I, a 40" Sony KDL-40E4000.

Now, isn't it great to download HD content and stream it through wlan to your media center, like PS3?

No, it isn't if your other equipment sucks.

You'll need:

• a modern 2008-level multi-core machine, preferably a new 64bit system with at least 8 gigs of RAM and plenty of disk space
  
• 802.11n wlan with some QoS implementation to prioritize your HD video streams. 802.11g with about 15mbps max is not good enough for HD if you have other traffic in your wlan.
  
• A gigabit network connection to your media center is always good, too
• And if you intend to download HD content, 10mbps internet connection is a minimum
• ...and you should have a HDMI output in your PC to connect the TV directly, without a media center

Besides money, you'll have to invest some time to learn about uPnP AV and the basics of MPEG-4 and different container formats, at least in order to learn their compatibility with your media center.

All this because of the new TV. Otherwise, no big hurry to upgrade the home desktop/server with all the hassle involved.

-mika-

P.S. For a PS3 uPnP server I recommend the PS3 Media Server. It crashes now and then but it's still better than Windows Media Player 11 or Tversity.

A review of RescueTime: Part 1. Why time tracking?

Just about a year ago I stumbled upon RescueTime, a time tracking tool for individuals and teams. This is the first part of a two-part review I intend to write on the individual version of the application. I will also discuss the topics of economics of human time and collecting time data to a real-time data warehouse.

This part of the review will focus on economics of time tracking. Tracking life events divides people and even the most accounting-oriented persons have mixed feelings about tracking their time. Knowing your time, expenses, calories etc is both potentially insightful and yet utterly disturbing. Most of us can probably remember periods of our lives when we had to count money more carefully, and the idea of going back to penny-pinching days is indeed disturbing. Likewise, tracking time can be seen as petty waste of time. Something that busy people do only to get money from. So why bother for nothing?

There are a few reasons that make time tracking sensible.

First, time is always a scarce resource. There is a fundamental difference between counting cents and counting seconds: money has no hard upper limit for an individual, but life definitely has. It follows, that if you compare the utility of an extra unit of free time versus an extra unit of money, the marginal utility of money tends to decrease more than the marginal utility of time. There are two factors that amplify this:

• employment increases money and decreases unallocated time
  
• getting older decreases one's available time by definition, but it also increases one's wealth from two sources: inheritance from the deceased and interest payments from accrued wealth.

These facts can be summarized as follows:

The more money you have the less wealthy you are in time, relatively.

Second reason to track your time is that you can actually waste time voluntarily. There are places in society that restrict individual's use of time. Like the army for example. I've been in the draft army and I know that tracking every minute of time does not make any sense there. You are stuck in the woods and that's about it. You are not wasting time because you don't have any choice. Wasting time is a concept that presumes individual liberty.

Third, you have to have plans. Without plans there is no difference between time well spent and waisted. Everyone has plans but there are huge differences in commitment. Time tracking is a clear statement that one is committed to his/her plans. At least in the most measurable level.

So far, I have tried to describe an image of the people who should be interested in time tracking. They are relatively well-off, determined people who have long-term plans. Now that is a good clientele. These people are perhaps busy with their current commitments and distractions surrounding them, but they do want to make progress. Time tracking tool has to offer them something they couldn't do themselves, a value proposition. Doing tracking yourself generally means doing tracking with Microsoft Excel, the world's tool of choice for semistructured data management. So any new tool has to beat Excel, but that is only a start.

So what is RescueTime good for?

Even if time tracking creates value, it may not create net value. The costs of tracking might be too high. The first and foremost cost in time tracking is the input time cost. This is where RescueTime has made a big effort. They have really focused on keeping the input costs low. It is not even possible to input timesheets manually to RescueTime, at least not from the UI. This prevents certain scenarios like project billing but I think that the decision is right. First, you have to get reliable, objective data on your time use and only then you can make judgements on more subjective items like projects. After all, project billing is not about counting time, it is all about putting a price to a work agreement.

In part 2, I'll discuss more about RescueTime, its data collector, reporting UI, and the whole data-warehouse centric application model in general. This will rely heavily on my current academic focus, the trickle-loaded real-time data warehouse. Stay tuned!

-mika-

Addicted to a website? A simple method to get rid of the bad habit

Like it or not, consumer websites are designed to be distractive or even addictive, regardless of the genre. You can get addicted to social media, news sites, financial information, tech sites, blogs, porn videos, image boards, whatever. And just like in substance abuse, it is possible to get rid of the harmful consequences of addiction by abstinence. But abstinence also takes away any good consequences of the addictive substance, so it is a trade-off.

This is simple behavioural economics. There is no reason why anyone of us couldn't find a suitable way to manage one's behavior. I suggest a two-step iterative method presented below. But I also want to point out that testing and comparing the statistical effectiveness of these kinds of self-help methods is completely another matter. Resolving that would take a serious study.

The 2 steps are:

1. Measure you computer use

The rational thing to do when you realize having a bad habit is to measure its effect. RescueTime is a great tool for this, it gives you good reports on how much time you spend on your computer(s). It reports every site you visit + every application you use. You should use it for at least a couple of weeks to gather enough data.

2. Ban the harmful sites

Once you have found that a site or a group of sites is harmful, the next thing to do is to make it hard to access them. There are multiple tools for this, but the simplest one is to route the domain to localhost. This means editing your hosts file. 

You can find the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc for Windows and in /etc/hosts for OS X and Linux. It is named hosts without an extension.

Open the hosts file in a text editor (you will need administrator priviledges) and add one line for each domain in your blacklist, like:

127.0.0.1 finance.google.com

127.0.0.1 icanhascheezburger.com

Now, every access to these domains by any application will be routed to your local machine and you won't get to the site. Nice. If you really need to access any of the banned sites, just comment out the that line with a #. Frankly, I can't figure out an easier way to blacklist sites, but there is a whole industry to make this process easier or user-specific. The user-specific thing is usually called "parental control".

(3. Adjust and iterate)

After taking these steps, measure your internet usage again for a few weeks. There might be bad substitutes that have taken the place of the banned domains. You might consider banning them too. Sometimes it is best to take domains out of the blacklist. After iterating for a while you should have found a balance. 

This kind of self-denial is somewhat humiliating. But I think it is a rational way to deal with internet distractions. If you spend much of your life online, adjusting your "diet" can pay off well.

-mika-