Netflix surveys users on XBox360 usage.  This raises speculation of a Netflix/Microsoft partnership.  I like it!

Here’s a link to the article.

Another musician I love embraces technology.  Peter Gabriel will be supporting the US launch of “The Filter”, a service that makes content recommendations based upon a user’s digital library content.  What’s most interesting about this is that this service is not limiting itself to music recommendations.  Rather it will recommend music, video, and books.  It sounds neat.  I wonder, though, will it be possible to use The Filter anonymously?  As in my identity is my existing digital library and that’s all that is known about me.  I suppose I will just have to try it out. 

Peter Gabriel to launch music-discovery service in U.S. April 9

Islands restaurants, known for its kitschy “Hawaii” decor, great burgers and fries, and surfing and extreme sports videos has gone high-definition.  The flat panel plasma TVs (from Panasonic) definitely created an updated feel in the restaurant without much effort.  Also, those great surfing and extreme sports videos became even more specular in widescreen high-definition.  Kudos to Islands.

This got me thinking about whether only this Islands (in Mira Mesa — a neighborhood in San Diego) did this, or whether some deal was struck with the whole chain.  If a deal was struck, who did it?  Panasonic, the content provider (Just Push Play), or some other distributor?  I, also, wonder whether the content is digitally distributed or whether they still rely on a DVD player.  Either way thinking about the whole solution, here’s what I see:

• Viewers — the television
• Distribution — digitally over broadband to an in store storage device so content can be rotated often
• Storage Devices
• Content
• Sales of adjacent products like videos, music, and an in-home version of the channel via the Internet

Oh how wonderful!  I like it!

I finally finished migrating all of my data off of my Western Digital World Book Drive to my HP Home Server.  In the process of doing so, I ran out of space on the home server.  I blew away some anime series that I knew I would not watch to make everything happy again.  After that, I decided to see whether I could add the 1TB World Book to my home server.  I was very worried that it wouldn’t work because to run in on the computer it was currently connected, it required a huge software package, and even then, it didn’t always work.  In the back of my mind, I was grinding away on ideas for a proper sacrifice to make this work.

I tried the most obvious thing first.  That is opening the home server control panel and then connecting the drive into one of the many USB ports on the back of the home server.  I did this and within a minute, the drive was visible but not active in the storage tab.  I clicked on the drive and selected to add it to my server.  The control panel asked if I wanted to format the drive.  I clicked “yes” and away the server and the drive cranked.  Within 5-mins, the activity was done and the server alerted me that the drive had been added and that I now have a whopping 1.82TB of storage.  Yippee!  And so painless!

I plan next to move our laser printer to the home server, so I now have no reason to keep my poor little laptop on 24/7.  I still have not enabled any of the sharing functionality, yet.

I updated Azureus at home to the Vuze interface a couple of weeks ago.  Vuze is a open source platform for the sharing of high definition video content (and more).  The interface is very slick looking with buttons for the various channels and thumbnails of the videos available.  Here’s a picture of the Vuze interface on the Azureus website.  The actually program UI looks very similar.

A new download window is also presented.  It is extremely simplified compared to the previous versions of Azureus.  While “pretty”, I find this view to be useless, so I still use the “advanced” interface to manage my downloads.  BTW:  There is now the ability to download series to specific folders via the RSS feed filter tab.  Yippee!

To be honest, I haven’t fully explored the Vuze yet because there was no programming available that I wanted offered through any of the channels.  Today I see there is some worthy content, so I will take a look and write more on this.  In the mean time, here’s a link to Vuze so you can play with it yourself.