Hal O'Brien

Earlier in the year we went and purchased a basic Roku box to watch streaming titles from Netflix on our TV. For the longest time, there were only three services available to use the box: Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand (pay per view), and MLB.com (US baseball games, on subscription).

This month, though, Roku rolled out an upgrade, introducing their Channel Store. It doesn't include Hulu (alas), but some of the things included are quite nifty indeed.

For example, one can now display Flickr photos. Putting them up on the TV, rather than on a computer monitor, makes an interesting experience. It reminds me a lot of how the Redmond library had a big HDTV screen (back when such things were rare) showing GalleryPlayer, a service that licensed images of paintings from museums (and has since gone under, it appears).

Pandora's music streaming is available, which nicely supplants our old music-via-cable that we lost after cancelling Comcast.

Most interesting, in some ways, is Mediafly, an aggregator service. It brings together podcasts and video feeds. Again, old hat for computers, especially those designed as Media Centers, but for plain-old-TVs a bit of a revelation. There was the Monocle piece I pointed to recently; Keith Olbermann's Countdown is available; lots of NPR/APM/PRI stuff; foreign radio podcasts from NRK (Norwegian radio) and SR Sverige (Swedish radio); and, not least, TED.

I just ran my first TED talk as a test, and it was great. It was the talk by Marc Pachter on interviewing people for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. A fine example of wonderfully humane, empathetic work. (And note, autopope, not a video or presentation software package to be seen -- not unlike Isabel Allende's talk, if it comes to that).

Most especially if you're a Netflix subscriber, and you don't want to be bothered with the hassle of roll-your-own media center software, the Roku box can be recommended more than ever. If you do like opening up the hood and doing your own custom rig (I'm looking at you, daveon), you're not alone -- the most frequently emailed piece on the New York Times' site just now is "Cable Freedom Is a Click Away", a how-to for just such a project.

From the ever-amazing TED site: "Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen."

Rosling is able to illustrate brilliantly the amazing progress that Asia in particular has made since, say, 1960. He has a cute Swedish accent, to boot.

Stats wonks take note: www.gapminder.org provides just about all the tools he uses. I'm going to be chewing on this off and on for a while, I think.

Which of course only means I agree with him, but hey.

I was browsing the TED site (as you do), and ran across this cogent, mordantly funny presentation about military power by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Funniest laugh out line so far (I haven't even finished watching the clip, and want to pass the guy along): "Every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this 'imminent threat' thing. We haven't faced an 'imminent threat' since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962."

Turns out he has a blog, which a quick scan shows is a) only slightly jargon heavy, and b) reasonably solid.