Double Parity

One of the most useful features on a Tivo is the 30 seconds “commercial skip” button. When I had a Tivo, this feature had to be unlocked on the remote by a sequence of button presses. On Windows Media Center, this functionality is available without any shenanigans, but it only works for recorded shows. So if you’re watching a DVD with poorly placed chapter markers, you’re forced to rely on the extremely temperamental fast forward and rewind controls to scan through video segments.

Last night, just through random chance, I discovered that the channel up and channel down buttons perform the 30 second skip and it’s 8 second replay counterpart in Windows 7. Very pleasantly surprised, I dug a little deeper and found that Microsoft even added some customization options (Settings -> DVD -> Remote Control Options).

You can now customize the Skip, Replay, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons of your remote! Skipping forward and backward with DVDs is not quite as snappy as with recorded TV, but it’s still great for skipping title sequences and replaying that last little bit of audio you couldn’t quite hear.

I’m really digging Windows 7. It seems to have a much leaner resource footprint than Vista and performance, particularly network performance, seems much improved. That said, there are still some issues.

For me, one of the issues is that with Windows 7, my PC won’t stay asleep. It will go into power saving mode and then promptly wake up again. Tweaking various settings in the Power Options control panel had no effect. After some hunting, however, I was able to get to the root of the problem. What I needed to do was to adjust the power management settings for my network adapter. Once I did that, sleep mode worked as expected.

First, to figure out which device was waking the PC from sleep mode, I opened a command prompt and ran “powercfg -lastwake”. The output indicated that my network adapter was the cause.

Next, I opened the Device Manager control panel, right-clicked on my network adapter, and clicked on Properties. This opened my adapter properties. I selected the Power Management tab and got the following window:

Because I do want to be able to wake up my PC via the network, I checked the box to “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”. This means that the PC will still respond to Wake-On-Lan packets, but other network traffic should be ignored.

And voilà, my PC now stays asleep! One thing I’m not sure of is whether the PC will stay awake during really long downloads. This generally isn’t an issue for me, but it may turn into one.

Apple quietly updated its Apple TV software to version 2.3 a couple days ago. The release notes are spare, but the Third-party Remote Controls feature did catch my eye. Programming universal remotes is a universally bad experience, but with Apple TV 2.3, Apple has turned convention on its head. Instead of trying to program new codes into a remote control, Apple’s answer is to program new codes into the Apple TV. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it makes programming remotes worlds simpler.

The new Learn Remote option can be found in Settings >> General >> Remotes.

Once you start the learning process, the Apple TV presents you with a page showing the six buttons found in the miniature Apple Remote in a single row.

Learning an infrared code from a non-Apple remote is super simple. Just press and hold the button on the remote. The progress bar on the screen will quickly fill up and once it’s done, you get a brief confirmation message and the Apple TV automatically progresses to the next button.

After these six buttons are done, you are presented with an option to set up “Playback Buttons.”

There are a total of nine playback buttons. Play, pause, and stop seem out of place since they overlap with some of the buttons from the basic setup. However, I was happy to see that fast forward and next chapter could be mapped to different buttons. To activate fast forward with the Apple Remote, I had to hold down the next chapter button. But held buttons weren’t always reliably detected by the Apple TV. Often, the device would skip to the next chapter rather than fast forward. This becomes tiresome very quickly. Separating these controls makes fast forward much more reliable.

I was also happy to note that I could assign dedicated buttons to Skip Back and Skip Forward. With an Apple Remote, I had to pause the video first, then hit fast-forward or rewind to skip around, and then hit play to resume playback.

Unfortunately, skipping still only occurs in 10-second increments, both forwards and backwards. I much prefer the Tivo and Windows Media Center increments of 30-seconds forward and 5-seconds back.

Also, Apple TV 2.3 kills XBMC and Boxee. As of this writing, there’s no fix or easy workaround, but something may be coming soon.

All that aside, I find the Learning Remote interface in Apple TV 2.3 to be excellent. And it’s just a wish, but hopefully it will make its way into OS X. My mind runs wild with the possibilities…

Apple TV, 160GB Hard Drive (Amazon)

Yesterday morning, I launched Time Machine to undo some changes I had just made to a file. But when I tried to jump back an hour, I noticed that all backups since Nov. 10 were missing. That was pretty strange since I had seen the Time Machine icon spinning in my menu bar at regular intervals all throughout the week.

Looking into the Backups.backupdb folder on my Time Machine drive, I was surprised to see two folders. One was the name of my Mac (let’s call it “doubleparity”) and held all backups prior to Nov. 10. The other was named “doubleparity 254″ and contained all backups since Nov. 10. As you’ve probably guessed, the solution to restoring my missing backups was to merge these two folders. But whenever I tried to copy or move the contents of either folder, I got a “Operation not permitted” error.

After a bit of Googling, I discovered that I had to disable Access Control Lists. Here’s a list of all the steps taken to get things working properly again:

1. Disable Time Machine

2. Backup Time Machine volume.

   Admittedly it’s rather ironic to have to backup a backup, but it’s a precaution that should be taken to keep your data safe. My Mac backs up to a ZFS filesystem on a DIY OpenSolaris server so backing up simply consists of creating a filesystem snapshot – a single command in OpenSolaris. Without ZFS, this is a considerably more complicated task.

3. Open Terminal

4. Disable ACLs

   sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<Time Machine Backup>/ -d

5. Merge folder contents

   cd /Volumes/<Time Machine Backup>/Backups.backupdb/

   sudo mv doubleparity/* doubleparity\ 254/

   Here, I got an “Operation not permitted” error on the “Latest” symlink. I initially ignored it since I didn’t need the link anymore. However, I couldn’t delete the “doubleparity” folder since it wasn’t empty and all attempts to delete “Latest” gave me the same “Operation not permitted” error. I had to unmount the Time Machine volume and remount it. After that, I was able to delete the folder with no problems.

   sudo rm -rf doubleparity

   sudo mv doubleparity\ 254/ doubleparity

6. Re-enable ACLs

   sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<Time Machine Backup>/ -e

7. Re-enable Time Machine

As far as I can tell, my missing backups are available and Time Machine is working normally. I still don’t know why backups suddenly started going into a second folder. If anyone out there has had a similar experience or any ideas, drop a line in comments.

I don’t know where I first read about Buyology, but I was instantly intrigued by it’s premise of adding rigor to the rather fuzzy field of marketing via brain imaging and neuroscience. And for the first third of the book, I got what I was hoping for – a scientific look at the mental machinery of consumerism and its relationship with certain marketing techniques.

For example, why do we often feel happy after a purchase? Answer: Dopamine.

When we first decide to buy something, the brain cells that release dopamine secrete a burst of good feeling, and this dopamine rush fuels our instinct to keep shopping even when our rational minds tell us we’ve had enough.

Why do we want what other people have? Answer: Mirror Neurons.

In short, everything we observe (or read about) someone else doing, we do as well – in our minds…Thus mirror neurons not only help us imitate other people, they’re responsible for human empathy. They send signals to the limbic system, or emotional region, of our brains – the area that helps us tune in to one another’s feelings and responses – so we can experience what it’s like to walk…in another person’s shoes.

Does product placement work? Yes, when used appropriately.

And products that play an integral part in the narrative of a program…are not only more memorable, they even appear to have a double-barreled effect. In other words, they not only increase our memory of the product, but they actually weaken our ability to remember the other brands.

Does subliminal advertising work? Yes. At times even better than explicit advertising.

The reason is that since the subliminal images didn’t show any visible logos, the smokers weren’t consciously aware that they were viewing an advertising message, and as a result they let their guard down.

Does sex sell? Not really.

…the sexually suggestive material blinded them to all the other information in the ad – even the name of the product itself.

Lindstrom is an engaging storyteller and sucks you into his narrative. However, as I got further into the book, I noticed the perspective changing. Instead of keeping the focus on the results and implications of his imaging studies, the latter portions of the book were more a survey of current trends in advertising and a discussion future directions – Reality TV, user-generated content, Paris Hilton-esque human brands – content that often seemed unrelated to his neuromarketing study.

Lindstrom also devotes significant portions of latter chapters to neuromarketing advocacy. Ironically, a book meant to break down preconcieved notions of advertising ends up being becoming an ad itself. I suppose the author could only suppress the marketer inside him for so long.

Overall, though, I found Buyology to be an interesting and quick read. A good starting point to exploring neuromarketing.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Amazon)