Boxee Box Review

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I’m sure by now many people know that I was one of the ones who pre-ordered the Boxee Box. I had been waiting for this box to be released since I saw the reviews from CES. I’ve been using the Boxee software intermittently since the alpha days. To me, this box was the best you could get for the price. Short of building a custom HTPC, I still don’t think you could do much better.

Stumblability

Something that surprised me when I first started using the box was something that I’m calling stumblability — the ability to sumble upon new content that you haven’t experienced before (ie channel surfing on broadcast cable). There are quite a few videos and shows ready for you when you first turn it on being pulled from online sources. I think aggregators like this and services like Hulu or Netflix allow for just as much sumblability as we currently have with broadcast media. Maybe even more. Right now there is a large selection of shows and movies to pick from without loading any of your own content on it, but at some point in the future you will literally be able to start any show or movie at any time. I think your chances of starting a show you might not have watched otherwise are just as high on a device like this. The only thing that might change is that there’s a chance you won’t start watching something that you have absolutely no interest in watching. I don’t think I’d ever watch a show like that for any period of time anyway, so I think this is a benefit of this new direction that I think media consumption is taking.
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Poor Post Purge

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In the rash-executive-decisions department, I’ve decided to backup everything before Christmas July 2008 and move it to joshbetz.net. There’s some really bad stuff from the early days in there. Pretty much all of it to be honest. I’ve always kind of resented those years on the blog, but have alway felt guilty about completely deleting them — until now. I think this is actually somewhat of a happy medium though. They don’t have to annoy me on this site, but they’re still on the internet somewhere.

New Theme — JB Minimal

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I started working on a new theme a couple weeks months ago. At this point, it’s pretty much finished so I’ll go through it a bit.

In terms of general changes, this design features HTML5, much more CSS3, and far less images in the layout structure. It’s probably not as easy on the eyes in non-modern browsers, but it’s not like there’s a ton of styling going on anyway. I’ve stayed mostly with black and white which transfers easily across any browser you could think of. I haven’t done any extensive testing across browsers, but I rarely do for personal themes. I know — it’s a bad habit to get into, but this site is so always evolving and I would be in a constant holding pattern if I decided to do extensive testing before pushing it live.

Home

The home page still has the same stuff going on as it did in the last revision, but this time it’s much more linear and not quite as many photos. The main page title is just text — there’s no CSS images going on here. I’ve tried to lighten the load on images that are loaded into the page. You’ll probably notice the little Typekit bug in the corner of the page. They’re generously supplying some of the non-standard fonts for the page.

I’ve added a few new feeds to the social section and also removed some background images from there. The fading at the end of each line is now done via a white shadow on the date. I’ve removed the “joshbetz:” and also added some links with regular expressions. You’ll also see that I’ve brought back the feature that displays only the time if you’re looking at something that happened in the past 24 hours and the date otherwise.

The photos are still coming from flickr and being generated by (a very old) FancyFlickr. The photos in the Photos section are bigger with less of them. I really need to get out and shoot though or people will start to think those are static. The random photo that I had wanted forever has also remained.

On the sidebar I’ve added a small photo and a short biography which links to the newly re-crafted About page.

Everything Else

You’ll also notice that the big “Josh Betz” title doesn’t appear unless you’re on the homepage. This is another feature that I think is very important. Not quite as much here as on other sites, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time now and decided to add it. While there’s no title on the page, there has to be a way to know where you are and how to navigate around the site if you need to, so I’ve decided to go with a fixed “title” bar with some basic menu options to get back home and to some of the other pages on the site. I really like how it fades out when you scroll away from the top too.

Look around. What’s your favorite part? What do you hate?

Old Themes

Some people have asked for my old themes in the past and I’d love to be able to just zip them up and put up links, but they’re so personalized that it will take some work to generalize them at least to scrub my name off before they’re ready for the real world. It’s one of my goals to have this done for a few of them at least by Christmas. Maybe.

Not that I’ve been involved in a ton of logo design, but it seems like the best ones are always fairly simple. Think about it, if you’re a designer you probably find yourself looking at artwork and putting it together in your head as I often do — but you rarely see a super complex looking logo and think to yourself, “amazing”. The amazing ones are almost always amazingly simple. One way to help with this — and simplify everything — is to work in two colors, probably black and white.

Maybe some people are thinking you can’t do much with black and white, but I’m going to tell you the opposite. Designing in black and white gives you so many more options. First of all, you’re ensuring a maximum of two colors in the logo which is what most companies will be looking for anyway. Those colors don’t always have to be black and white though. Giving a client a black and white logo is as good as giving them a logo with two arbitrary colors that don’t even exist because when they go to print their t-shirts, or business cards, or put together their website they can get it printed in any color they want. But many people already knew all that.

The reason I like designing in black and white is that you have so much freedom with color choice afterwards when you’re actually putting the t-shirt design together or the website. This logo for nfocus creations is one that I did for a local photography studio. And then I decided to colorize it. There’s so much you can do without going over the top.

Colorized version of the nFocus Logo

Josh 2.0

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I’m a sophomore at UW – Madison. I’ll be applying to the Wisconsin School of Business at the end of the semester and looking into what it takes to major in Computer Science in the mean time. If I get into the Business school, I’ll probably double major in CS and Information Systems. Otherwise, it’ll just be Computer Science for now.

I’m a freelance web designer/developer that hasn’t had a ton of work recently. I’m not particularly upset about that right now, as school is starting and I’m getting back into the student life — class, homework, sleep (working web stuffs into the mix in as we get these first weeks rolling). I’ve done a few things that I’m pretty proud of, but my best work always seems to be the personal stuff — when it really means something to me. I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot lately; trying to use that as a way to make everything I do better, but I’ll talk about that another time.

I’ve finally started JoshBetz.TV as a podcast, which only means it’s listed in iTunes. Right now it’s a sad excuse for a podcast and shouldn’t really be called a website at all, but I’ve got some stuff in the works. The only live video is the one about setting up a LAMP server.

Looking Forward

I’ve got some goals for the next year.

  • Establish a real podcast with joshbetz.tv
  • Establish a base of clients to work with
  • Take more photos
  • Better Flickr integration on here
  • Grow this list