As we here at Doombot have long celebrated Day of the Tesla, we thought you, the readers, might enjoy partaking in some of the more time-honored festivities of this highest of holidays. As always, we perform the ceremony of failing to electrocute an elephant with alternating current (we use symbolic plush toy elephants, of course—this is no diabolical, hedonistic Edisonstravaganza), followed by the traditional viewing of Tesla biopic The Prestige.

Finally, the evening is concluded with a live reading of our award-winning* children’s book, Tesla and His Pigeon: A Children’s Story of Love and Loss in the Electric Age, based on Tesla’s relationship with his favorite creature.

Afterwords, the kids are sent to bed with the reminder that the spirit of Tesla won’t appear to deposit Serbian dinars bearing his likeness unless they are fast asleep.

If this is your first time celebrating Day of the Tesla, you might also wish to partake of these classic episodes of our podcast adventures, The Scrimshaw Meme and TMYK, in which we pay homage to Tesla through the deepest respect of humor.

Finally, the most devoted of Tesla followers undertake—at least once in their lifetime—a trip to the laboratory of the man himself, Wardenclyffe Tower, where the prescient inventor intended to pioneer the field of wireless communication, were he not dastardly foiled by the dark lord Edison.

And so we wish you a happy Day of the Tesla, and to you and your kin, we say: may the eternal peace ray shine down upon you.

* Tesla and His Pigeon was the recipient of the 2006 award for Most Promising New Children’s Book Involving a Historical Inventor of Serbian Descent, by the National Association of Serbian Inventors Whose Initials are “N. T.”. It was also on the short-list for the Newberry Award in the same year, though it was narrowly beat out by Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow ↩

If you’ve been using one of the fine folk using our Xbox Live Widget, you may have noticed that it’s lately been suffering from a mild case of not-working.

Turns out we had a slight bug in the works that caused the widget not to be able to get your friends’ statuses, and resulted in a totally blank widget. Fortunately, it wasn’t too difficult to iron out once we knew what was causing it. Thanks to our hard-working volunteer widgeteer Andrew (seriously, folks, give him a hand).

And so we present to you our newly updated widget (v0.81 if you’re keeping track at home), now with 100% more workingness. You can download it here; I’ll also note that it’s been updated on that original download page.

I’m thinking we might need to get an actual download page for this at some point, huh?

Boy eats cats daily
[URL redacted]

(I just don’t know…does eating cats give you cancer? Cure your cancer? Who clicks on a link about eating cats? Don’t they know Steve Jobs is a pescetarian? What does this have to do with the iPhone? Anything?)

There’s kind of a cruel bent to this auction. I mean, selling of C-3PO’s feet? And what about Geordi’s visor; how’s the poor guy going to see? Why don’t you auction off Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair while you’re at it?

Oh man, it’s an embarrassment of riches, though: I mean, The Rocketeer’s helmet? Kirk’s phaser? A Tusken Raider costume from…Attack of the Clones? Ew. Lame.

Unfortunately, I suspect I’ll be missing the event, as I’ll be busy helping some jackass unload his moving van. But if anybody is looking for something to commemorate a certain blog’s upcoming fifth anniversary (hiatuses not included), well, I’m just sayin’.

Researchers at Cornell University—my alma mater, no less!—have apparently managed to pair superconductors with magnets in order to make hovering vehicles theoretically possible. Of course, science is not without its catches: in order for this to work, the temperature needs to be under -300°F. If you’re wondering, the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was apparently -129°F, so seriously, people: it’s time we start doing something about this global warming shit. If we keep going the way we are now, we’ll never have hover vehicles. Then what will you tell your children? “Sorry Bobby, but because I couldn’t go without driving my Hummer to the corner store, you can’t have a hoverboard for Christmas. Because they don’t exist.” I hope you enjoy having your children grow up hating you with every fiber of their being.

Anyway, if I can earmark my donation for hoverboard research, I might actually consider giving money to my college for once. Let’s see: I’ve got about two dollars in change in my pocket…and some lint. I expect return on my investment. You’ve got seven years.

For a while now, I have been using Bloglines to manage my RSS feeds. I’ve been using it because I potentially check up on my feeds from any of three computers—my laptop, my home desktop, and my office computer—and I want to make sure everything stays easily synchronized. It’s kind of a pain sometimes, though, so I’ve been thinking about switching.

I currently subscribe to 45 feeds, maybe a dozen or so of which I try to keep up with daily. This means that the other ones either update infrequently or pile up with old updates, which Bloglines caps at 200 unread items. Anything that gets posted after that I have to hunt down manually. If I go away for a few days and don’t have time to check feeds, sites like Kotaku quickly spiral out of control. Worse yet, marking posts that I want to save for later either involves checking them to “keep as unread” in Bloglines (which builds up and makes that feed load much more slowly in the future), or simply opening links to tabs in my browser and trying to get to them quickly (but those tend to build up too, eventually crashing my browser).

Well, NetNewsWire is finally free, and I hear it’s got a syncing service through News Gator so I could actually use it to keep track of my feeds from multiple computers. Swell, I figured. It was awhile before I felt like I had enough free time to sit down and migrate all my feeds from Bloglines, as I suspected it wouldn’t just be the five-minute export/import affair that each application claims. Unfortunately, I was correct.

Apparently you can’t just import your exported feeds list directly into NetNewsWire and expect any of them to work at all. You need to import this list into Newsgator Online, which is basically a Bloglines-style interface that takes longer to load and respond to clicking. Once you’ve done that, you need to go back into NNW and manually reorganize all of your feeds back into the folders they were once in, as the import recognizes you had folders, but apparently not which feeds were in which folders. Once you are done with all that, it is time to start dealing with duplicate feeds.

I found that every time I tried to run the program, it produced duplicates of certain feeds. Unscubscribing from either one unexpectedly removed both from my list of feeds, so I’m currently missing some feeds. (I’ll have to check Bloglines to remind me what they were.) I figured this must be a common problem someone else had fixed, so I googled around and found that people are complaining about it as of this week.

The kicker for me, from one person in that thread: “I’m fortunate to have a .Mac account…for folks without it, I hope NewsGator fixes this problem.” And I always gave Dan a hard time for paying for Apple-branded hosting like a sucker. (Hah.) I suppose I get the satisfaction of being right from when I assured him that this wasn’t going to be a ten-minute setup like he promised, but that victory is a little too bittersweet to actually be any consolation.

Unlike music and movie piracy, television piracy didn’t really start to become popular until the advent of BitTorrent. While TV shows are usually shorter than movies and thus have smaller file sizes, they more than make up for that smaller size with increased frequency. Distributing a movie is difficult enough, but if you’re trying to keep up with a weekly show, there’s a heck of a lot more data to be transferred on a repeated basis. BitTorrent made that much easier, due to a couple of factors: 1) The de-centralized nature of the file-swapping technology shares the burden by making every downloader a server as well, which leads to 2) the somewhat counterintuitive proposition that the more people who download a show, the faster everybody downloads it.

I’ve often wondered if some metric could not be divined from the relative speeds of downloading. Some shows seem to transfer very quickly, while others simply crawl. This is due in part to differences like file size—for example, downloading an entire season usually takes longer than downloading a single episode—the overriding mechanic at work here is popularity. Again, in optimal conditions, the more people downloading a file, the more servers, and the faster it goes. And if popularity is the deciding factor, it would seem logical (if simplistic) to conclude that the shows that download the fastest are the most popular.

Television ratings are an imperfect science—if they can even be called a science. Even today, Nielsen relies heavily on written diaries kept by their selected “families,” tracking their television watching habits (they do have an electronic device called a “Set Meter” as well, and have been slowly adapting to other forms of technology—while the company moved to start including digital video recorders, such as TiVo, in ratings, it did not do so until 2005).

But do ratings even work? They’re used by networks to set advertising rates: if you can guarantee X number of watchers for a certain program, then you can tell your advertisers what kind of exposure they’ll be getting for their spots, and thus how much those spots are worth. DVRs and other methods of time- and place-shifting complicate that, but those factors have not yet been rolled into the networks’ rates to advertisers. As technology progresses and more and more people are watching online by streaming from networks’ websites, downloading from iTunes, or, yes, pirating via BitTorrent or other methods, then ratings—as a measurement of what people are really watching—get even fuzzier.

We’ve all of us—some more than others—seen a favorite shows get axed by a network due to low ratings (which is pretty much the only metric used to decide if a show lives or dies—nobody’s going to cancel a highly-rated show with poor reviews from critics, though the situation happens all too often—just ask Tim Minear). TV is a business, so it’s not a surprise particularly: if people aren’t watching a show, then advertisers aren’t getting what they’ve paid for. NBC recently had to refund money to advertisers for missing their target ratings—that’s pretty rare and it’s a situation that NBC wants to avoid at all costs, as much because of its image as its pocketbook.

However, if the ratings system is, as I’ve suggested above, flawed, then how do we know that people aren’t watching? What if they’re streaming shows online (for which, we’ll remind you, writers barely get paid), or downloading them—either legally or illegally? Admittedly, streams usually have their own advertising baked-in and downloads—both legal and illegal—don’t really matter to advertisers, because there aren’t any ads for viewers to watch. But, for one thing, revenue is still made from legal downloads and streams and it seems that should be figured into whether a show continues to be produced or not; for another, there are plenty of people who don’t stream or download every episode; they might watch it when it airs one week, then catch up on the website if they miss an episode. And while illegal downloads may not directly contribute to a show’s bottom line, it’s hard to argue that they aren’t in some way reflective of whether a show is being watched or not. A recent essay suggests that networks are actually considering Bit Torrent statistics as a metric of a show’s popularity; it also suggests networks are now starting to leak pilots to Bit Torrent before the shows air, in the hopes of building hype. Obviously, doing so can build a show’s reputation by word of mouth, even going so far as to widen exposure for shows that may have been otherwise constrained—they give the example of Weeds, which has become extremely popular despite the fact that Showtime, as a premium network, has a smaller audience than broadcast networks.

This is where the Long Tail comes in. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, here’s Wikipedia concise definition: “Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard-to-find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes.” Or, as Lincoln might have put it, you can make as much money—if not more—by selling to some of the people all of the time as you can by selling all of the people some of the time. This is pretty much the polar opposite of the way network television works; for them, if you can’t capture a majority of the market, you’ve already lost. It’s always perplexed me that networks continue to deliberately schedule shows against programs with similar demographics, as though network television were some sort of zero-sum game. Once upon a time, it was, but VCRs, DVRs, and now streams and downloads have provided an end-run around this proposition for years: now you can defy the laws of time and space and watch two shows that air at the same time by watching one—or both—at a time of your own choosing.

But the ratings aren’t treated that way. The networks are still stuck in that mentality where winning means your opponent has to lose—they’re operating under the holy rubric of the primetime slate, thinking three-dimensionally in a world that’s now four-dimensional. As a result, even if a show has a particularly rabid following—take Joss Whedon’s Firefly as an example—and especially if that following is technologically savvy, potentially watching the show in ways that aren’t tracked by ratings, then the networks might make a decision on the life of the show based on flawed or incomplete information. In rare cases, fans have been able to mobilize and show their support for a cancelled program—I’m thinking particularly of the campaign earlier this year to save CBS’s Jericho—but for every example where that tactic succeeds, there are at least three or four examples of equally-deserving shows where it fails (Veronica Mars, or Journeyman).

The television model is predicated on an increasingly inaccurate and unstable system; the fact that we’re currently in a lengthy transition period only compounds the problem. As of yet, not enough people are watching shows via streams and downloads, and millions still tune in the old-fashioned way every week to watch “Dancing with the Stars.” There’s a surfeit of ways to consume television content right now, and yet the tracking—in an industry that still depends on such data to make its decisions—is far from comprehensive. There are many who loudly and vocally decry such tracking because they consider it a violation of privacy—me, I want the networks to track me so that they stop canceling my shows.

I don’t know if the television industry could operate under a Long Tail model, but as consumer attention becomes more and more splintered and fragmented it seems to me that they might, as that model suggests, be able to profit more from appealing to smaller groups than by trying to get as big a chunk of viewership as possible. What is clear to me, especially given the current situation with the writers who clearly do realize the impact that technology is having, is that the networks need to adapt or die a long, slow, painful death.

In the course of my job, lots of people email me with questions about their Macs, Mac software, and—more recently—their iPhones. As someone who writes publicly about these topics, I’m expected to be conversant with many of their intricate details, and in most cases I am.

But what I’m not is a personal tech support guru. I try to help out people who email me, because, well, I spent years working in tech support and I like to do what I can to make sure people have a good experience using technology. As someone with specialized knowledge, I feel an…perhaps obligation is too strong a word, maybe call it an inclination to help out those who don’t possess that knowledge, just as people with more money often feel an inclination to help out those who are less fortunate. Again, to be clear, it’s not my job, and I don’t respond to every email, but I try to when I can.

Most of the time the people I deal with are polite and appreciative that someone has even responded to their emails. I don’t want to get into a position of saying “Hey, you should be glad you even got an email back,” but let’s face it: a lot of people whose positions are similar to mine don’t have the time or interest to respond to queries that will take hours away from their actual paying work. But the rule of thumb seems like it should be this: when you ask a favor from someone, you should be civil and gracious for any time they take to help you out. That goes for dealing with people in pretty much any walk of life, in my opinion.

My latest email help request started innocuously enough. It wasn’t sent to the catch-all for the iPhone blog, or through Macworld’s contact form, but directly to my work address:

hi, i put a video on youtube.com and it worked fine. I listed it as global event as the key word search and then I tried to view it on the iphone. i couldn’t find it in the listing. Do you know why this is? Matt [Just as a note, I've changed the man's name.]

A valid question, but not one I was prepared to spend a lot of time on: the fact is that YouTube is a closed system and I don’t know the intricate details of how it works. But I’ve uploaded a video or two to the site and a quick check shows that at least one of them shows up on my iPhone when I search for it. Going on the basis of that, and my general knowledge on the topic, I jotted back a quick reply:

Hi Matt, My first question would be how long between uploading and trying to find it on the iPhone? YouTube videos need to be specially encoded in a format for the iPhone, and I don’t know if YouTube does this when the video is uploaded or later on. My suggestion would be to wait and try again later. Hope it works out. Cheers, Dan

Admittedly, not the most in-depth reply I could have offered, but I did invite further information from Matt to see if we could try to approach this in a logical fashion.

Twenty minutes later, I got a response. I quote the entirety of the reply below:

this was a lame response. Do some digging. jeez.

I won’t say that my jaw dropped, but I did find myself a little surprised and put off; enough so that I twittered about it. My friend Glenn offered this advice “I usually reply to those, ‘Once civility is abandoned, so is discourse. No further replies will be read.’” I wanted to reply with something witty and biting, but well, I had actual work to do, so I opted not to write back at all, figuring that would be the end of it.

Oh, would that it was. The next day, I get another email from the guy.

what did you find out? matt

Er, well, I found out that you’re a jackass, but that’s about it. At this point I was reduced to exclaiming somewhat unsatisfying mid-20th century expressions like “The nerve!” and “What gall!” Glenn’s suggested reply to this development: “Alternate response: “No soy tu mono.” (I am not your monkey.)” Tempting, but I again chose to ignore the email. Don’t feed the trolls, as they say.

The end, you think? Not by a longshot. A day later, I get another email:

Hey, I’m not asking just because of mild curiosity. I have several dozen retailers paying me in Oklahoma City to stream over youtube.com. I want to be the first person to hit all three networks when it launches in france. if it doesn’t work then I won’t waste my time. I need a good explanation so I can do business. Thanks for your time. Matt

The tone here is at least civil, but there’s a tone of entitlement here that I found distasteful: I’m in business and I need you to help me. That’s right, you’ve got “several dozen retailers” paying you and you’re trying to cadge free tech support from a writer, because you want to get the cheapest fix to your problem rather than, say, hiring someone whose job it is to figure these things out.

So I finally gave up and wrote back.

Matt, I’m sorry if my first reply was not helpful to you, but when you abandoned civility, I abandoned discourse. I recommend contacting YouTube if you’re having problems. Good luck to you. -Dan

Okay, I probably shouldn’t have even bothered because, as we all know, this just opens up the channel of communication again.

And so, here comes the missive, which, if you don’t mind, I’m going to break up and respond to piece by piece:

You told me in your e-mail that I should just wait for a while and see what happens.

No, in my email I asked you how long you waited between uploading the video and looking for it on the iPhone, a question that you never answered. It’s like going to the doctor complaining that you’ve got a stomachache. Then, when he asks you “How long have you been experiencing abdominal pain?” you reply “Didn’t you hear me? I’ve got a stomachache.”

Not one of my partners or investors thought that was a very thoughtful response. I’m having a meeting with Renee Edelman shortly and I don’t have an answer for her. I thought you would at least do some digging but I don’t know you or if you’re a lazy editor or your best guesses get the job done at Macworld. I’m sure you are busy but toughen up a little bit. I called a spade a spade and I am contacting you from a cornered position in this market, obviously. I ran this question by Amol Sharma at the Wall Street Journal and Iloop mobile’s VP of Business Development.

Then he goes on the entitlement power trip. “I’ve got investors and partners.” Who were not impressed with the free advice from a tech writer. And then name dropping: Renee Edelman (a big PR contact), a Wall Street Journal writer, and a media company VP. Gee, and none of them gave you answers either, so you came to me, huh? What a surprise.

I’m sorry if I don’t have civility, but I’m getting sick of people blowing off important things. Good luck to you Dan and thanks very much for trying to make your job all about pleasantries. I’ll let you know how things are going in the trenches where we just get things done and don’t worry about our emotions. It’s a pretty big deal to know why videos don’t show up on the iphone when they show up on the desktop.

That’s my favorite line in the entire exchange: “I’ll let you know how things are going in the trenches where we just get things done and don’t worry about our emotions.” That’s just brilliant: I think I may have a plaque made. Seriously, the trenches? You’re comparing your problems to World War I-era combat? I had no idea the world of streaming media was such a tough, barren place, where emotions can get you killed just as quickly as stepping on a mine. Truly, it’s a sad, lonely life out there on the Internets.

Your response was lame and now Macworld is irrelevant to me. I hope you continue to make friends with all of the business people you work with, but i don’t need friends I need answers.

Saying that you “don’t need friends, [you] need answers” is one of those great self-explanatory statements in the history of mankind. Now, you have neither friends nor answers: see how that worked out for you? Also, the threat that Macworld is now irrelevant to you would probably have been far more effective if you were a) a subscriber (which I highly doubt) or b) someone even as remotely important as you’re convinced you are.

Shame on you. matt

Shame on me? Shame on me? Shame on you for your sense of entitlement: “what I want is important, so your time and inclinations are trivial compared to mine. I expect you to do whatever I want you to, because I have investors and partners and several dozen retailers in Oklahoma City paying me.” Really, no offense, but going your haughty on Oklahoma City? This is a man who has never even been introduced to irony at a cocktail party.

The worst thing about this conversation, though, is that it makes me less willing to respond to emails in general. And there are plenty of perfectly reasonable, appreciative folks who I’m sure I could help with their problems. But if there’s a chance that I have to go through this sort of harangue even one time in five or ten, it’s a heck of a lot less attractive prospect. All it does is take time out of my day. Even worse than that is the fact that there were brief moments in there where I felt guilty that maybe I hadn’t done enough to solve this guy’s problem. That just makes me angry. And when I get angry, you get long vitriolic blog posts. So, there you go.

Update 12-05-07: I actually did decide to test the issue at hand at one point, uploading a random movie file to YouTube. It does not, as Matt complained, show up immediately—this doesn’t surprise me. As I suggested in the initial email, YouTube does some processing behind the scenes, and the iPhone version uses a different codec: H.264 instead of the Flash movie you see on the website. But I forgot about the video, since the entire exchange sort of put me off investigating the problem.

To my surprise, I found another email from Matt in my inbox yesterday evening, the entirety of which was two words:

it worked.

I wasn’t really sure what worked, but on a hunch I looked up my test movie on my iPhone and, sure enough, there it was. So, as it turns out, my initial suggestion was completely utterly one-hundred percent correct.

Vindication is delicious.

Joost A program that streams shows with the approval of corporate overlords. Cory Doctorow hates it because it has DRM and people should be able to copy stuff, make new stuff with it, etc. It has 250+ channels. It’s ad-supported, and after you’re done watching a show on it, it will go on to another show in the same channel automatically.

PRO

• Access to bunch of shows you’ve heard of
• Episodes load very quickly

CON

• Forces a 10-second commercial into show where no commercial break was originally planned
• Viewing controls (like, how do I stop watching Robot Chicken and look at other shows) not exactly intuitive
• Pop-up ads in corner can be suppressed by a button (which seems intentionally designed as mystery-meat navigation), but pop-ups still sometimes show up anyway
• Occasionally freezes on slow connections, just like any other streaming
• You don’t get to keep shows on your hard drive, just stream them as desired

Miro An open-source program that lets you specify RSS feeds of uploaded TV shows (like from TVrss.net), downloads the shows automatically, and then lets you watch shows in the program and manages your shows in a format kind of like iTunes. There aren’t “channels” per se, but they use the term anyway to describe the thousands of RSS feeds you could choose from. Extended setup instructions here.

PRO

• Fairly intuitive interface for keeping track of shows
• Cuts a step or two out of how you might have been stealing shows before, which might make it easier for you to set up your parents if they get fed up with Comcast

CON

• Built-in torrent client is bizarrely slow
• Downloading shows by torrent can take a few hours, the better part of a day, or more (even with a good torrent client)
• Doesn’t really do anything you couldn’t do before if you were willing to follow an RSS feed yourself, click to download each episode as it comes up, and then watch it in VLC or Quicktime
• Very misleading use of the term “channel” confused me and everyone else I tried using this program with

Summary…

I generally approach watching TV in either of two ways: crashing in front of the thing and just pulling up something to view at a moment’s notice (e.g., when eating dinner alone), or tuning in regularly for the same shows (e.g., following Lost). Joost is probably better for the first, and Miro is probably better for the second.

The ads on Joost really irk me, and perhaps I’ll stop using it altogether when I run out of the bite-sized chunks of Robot Chicken I’ve been cycling through whenever I plop down with a sandwich. I suppose you could build up a backlog of shows with Miro for casual viewing like I’ve been doing, but that kind of forethought kind of defeats the purpose of casual viewing. Plus, while downloading a recently-posted show can be quick, downloading stuff that aired awhile ago can take days. Ultimately, however, until Miro works out its issues with its torrent downloading, it’s basically not worth using at all.

In the meantime, my preferred method of watching TV will remain through either (a) Netflix or (b) following RSS feeds from TVrss.net, downloading stuff with Transmission, converting it to MP4 with VisualHub, and then streaming to my television through my Xbox 360 with Connect360. It’s not as cheap as using Miro (as I actually paid for VisualHub and Connect360), but I’m not a big fan of watching TV on a computer monitor anyway.

Update: After using Joost some more, I’ve concluded that I probably won’t use it again. Once I ran out of Robot Chicken episodes, I got frustrated trying to use its interface and find anything else I really wanted to watch. Also, Miro just released its 1.0, and I was going off the public preview.