Oliver Siodmak's Rants & Raves

I still have fond memories of decorating a Christmas tree as WPIX TV played “Yule Log”.  Watching the White House fireplace beautifully burning on TV while listening to holiday music made our small NYC apartment feel like a wonderful home out in the country.  When I learned of iYule.tv  produced by Cali Lewis (GeekBriefTV), Geoff Smith, Paul Colligan and Neal Campbell in the NYTimes today I was eager to give it a try.

The team provides a 30 minute video comes complete with snaps and crackles of a real fireplace in multiple file formats for $5 each (both with and without a musical soundtrack).  You can also download all formats for $10.  The file sizes include support for the iPod Nano, iPod Classic, AppleTV and PCs & Macs.  The quality is great and the soundtrack is remenisant of the interlude music often played during Peanuts animated movies. Very soothing.

If you have been dreaming of cosying up in front of a warm fireplace but don’t have access to one, this is the next best thing.

Edwin Tofslie has created a very simple image that visually illustrates the evolution of Apple’s products from the Apple I to the newly announced iPhone.  Viewing all the images I find myself saying, “I owned that, used that, owned that … “.

You can check out the image at Tolfslie.com

From time to time I find myself utilizing YouTube.com’s services but I have never found myself scanning its pages for user submitted gems. That may change now that Apple has upgraded AppleTV with a YouTube browse feature. The software upgrade took about 10 minutes and after a short reboot I was able to scan hundreds of videos that have been converted into Apple’s H.264 format.

What was really cool was the ability to log into my personal YouTube account from AppleTV and view all the videos I have previously marked as favorites.