One thing I did not anticipate was that people would have a desire to listen to audio podcasts on the Roku box. Once again, I was wrong. Almost as soon as I announced my project to the community, I had several requests that I support audio content. So, last night, I sat down to figure out a way to bundle audio support into my channel template.

The big question was how exactly was the best way to approach the task. One option is entirely separate channels for audio shows, but that does not do a good job of handling cases where a given publisher has both audio and video podcasts. So the better approach is to have one channel that can play either type of feed.

But what about feeds that include both audio and video content? Real Time with Bill Maher is a good example. The show publishes a single podcast feed and that feed has both audio and video in it. Whatever solution I came up with would have to handle that situation.

So the real solution is to make a choice at the most granular level. The higher level logic and navigation of the channel remains the same. We don't distinguish between audio and video until the last possible moment. The moment when the user chooses an individual episode from within a given feed. At that point, based on the type of content contained in that episode, we decide whether to use a video player or an audio player. That way shows like Bill Maher don't have to appear as two separate shows (one video and one audio), which makes navigation a lot easier.

I'll be deploying the first of these new hybrid channels this evening for those of you with Roku boxes who are interested.

Remember when Roku released the official SDK for the box and I fiddled with it for a weekend? I made a couple channels for my own personal use, but never anything intended for mass consumption.

Well, that all changed recently. The box has been able to do podcasts for a while now via the MediaFly channel and I just figured that was enough to keep most people happy. Apparently I was wrong. I had expressed my disappointments with MediaFly a while back, but I thought those disappointments were unique to me being a technophile and a control freak who is overly demanding. Wrong again. I had a conversation with a handful of other Roku users and several of them expressed similar frustrations with the MediaFly model.

That conversation got the gears in my head spinning and before long I had set out to build my own mechanism for delivering podcast content to the Roku box with the goal of addressing some of the MediaFly issues while delivering a product that was more centered around the user community.

My inspiration was Calibre's recipe community. When a user finds a new syndicated website whose content they would like delivered to their eReader, all they have to do is ask and usually within hours, the community has delivered a Calibre recipe that solves the problem.

Here are some of the issues with other products and how I'm trying to address them:

Clutter
A lot of people seem to find podcasting clients hard to navigate. One channel for all your podcasts just doesn't work for a lot of people. They prefer one channel per publisher. A channel for NBC, a channel for PBS, HBO, etc. That makes sense when you think about it because it makes the box feel more like a traditional television. Building an entire channel for each publisher whose content we want on the box means we need code base that requires minimal modification when building a new channel. This actually turns out to be fairly simple to accomplish. The box is designed to deliver internet content. That means we can also easily have the metadata for that content live in the could. As a result, I have a codebase that can be adapted for a new channel by modifying only 3 lines of code. And only one of those lines is actually code. The other two are constants in a manifest file. The most time consuming part of generating a new channel is the artwork. The logos that are displayed on the box's home screen. At present, a new channel can be deployed in less than an hour.

Timeliness
MediaFly podcasts are often out of date. MediaFly polls each podcast in their system at some interval. As a result, quite a bit of time can pass from when a publisher updates their podcast and when the new content appears on MediaFly. My solution is to completely do away with the concept of polling for content and keeping my own cache of it like they do. I rely directly on the publisher's data. When one of my channels populates itself, the episodic metadata is coming directly from the publisher's feed. That means new content becomes available the instant a publisher puts it out there. Of course that means that if said publisher has server problems or starts handing out corrupted data, the associated channel will be hosed until they fix things, but that's a rare occurrence and I think it will be a worthwhile trade off.

Simplicity
Finding, managing, and navigating a library of podcasts is just plain overwhelming to a lot of people. They aren't quite sure what podcasting is and they don't really care. They just want content to appear on their box. We can solve that by taking the procurement and management away from the user and putting them in the could. For each channel I publish with this infrastructure, I hunt down the podcasts that make up the channel and I take care of managing those podcasts on the server side. The user just knows they're installing the MSNBC channel. They don't know, nor do they care to know that under the hood they are subscribing to individual podcasts published by MSNBC. They just care that they can watch the most recent episode of Meet the Press on the box anytime they want.

It's a work in progress, but that's what makes it fun. And the community seems to be pretty excited about the idea. Those of you with Roku boxes who want to play with these channels, just surf on over to the project page.

Last year, Arizona enacted tax credits for manufacturers of green energy production equipment in an effort to attract business to the state. And it worked, the Chinese company SunTech set up shop in Arizona and a number of large scale solar projects are on the drawing board. The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) also set a requirement that utilities in Arizona produce 15% of their power from renewable sources by 2025. That number should be much higher, but it's better than nothing. Arizona also has a "distributed energy standard" which basically says that 30% of that renewable power must come from rooftop solar.

Despite all those noble efforts, the Arizona Legislature has decided to try their hardest to muck things up. House Bill 2701 would do away with the 30% distributed energy standard. And, what's more disturbing is that the bill would redefine renewable energy to include nuclear and hydro-electric power. On its face, that doesn't sound so bad, even to me. Nuclear power is an issue on which I diverge from the liberal line. I am absolutely in favor of this country bringing new pebble bed reactors online. However, Arizona is simply not the place for it. A state so awash in sunshine should be concentrating on solar generation as a market it could easily dominate in coming decades. What's more, Arizona already has a nuclear generating station. In fact, we have the largest nuclear generating station in the country. I've toured the facility and I'm glad it's there. Nuclear is by no means perfect, but it produces absolutely no greenhouse gasses and over the years, it has killed a lot fewer people than has coal based power generation.

So why is HB-2701 so horrible? For starters, the bill would assert that "the Legislature has exclusive authority to determine RE policy for the state", essentially bypassing the ACC, which is the body traditionally empowered to regulate utilities. But it gets worse, remember that goal set by the ACC that Arizona produce 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2025? Well, almost 30% of the energy produced by Arizona's largest utility comes from that nuclear plant we just finished talking about. That means that if HB-2701 becomes law, that utility would already be in compliance with the 2025 renewable energy goal. Furthermore, as I said, Arizona is the sunniest state in the country! The state should be doing everything we can to encourage development of solar power projects here. Arizona has been one of the states hardest hit by the Great Recession and this bill could cost the state thousands of potential jobs. Arizona should be doing everything it can to bring jobs to the state. Especially green jobs that put people to work while positioning the state at the cutting edge of the new green economy.

HB-2701 will discourage job growth and discourage solar production. It's bad for the economy, bad for the planet, and bad for working Arizonans.

Sources: greenchipstocks.com, onearth.org, Phoenix Business Journal

First a little back story. My condo community is in fairly close proximity to a large university. As a result, a large number of the units in our community are rentals. Personally, I enjoy the dynamic. There are always fresh new faces around the neighborhood and my experience is that college kids tend to be more friendly and outgoing than the average condo owner. Even so, the high rental rate in the community apparently causes our governing board some problems. As a result, the board recently tried to force all condo owners who rent their units to attach a rider to their lease agreements essentially giving the board the ability to evict renters for any violation of law whatsoever. The rider specifically calls out drug use as one such offense, but by no means limits its reach to drug related infractions. To be clear, the board wouldn't actually be evicting renters, but with this rider in place, they would be be able to bring unreasonable amounts of pressure to bear on owners to evict their renters. Thankfully the board has been unable to get their proposal enacted, yet.

Now the funny part. I was sitting on my patio with Kindle and a cup of coffee. Not far away, one of our board members was having a conversation with a teenage boy who lives in the neighborhood. The board member was lamenting her inability to get decent turnout for some community activity she was coordinating. When the young man said something apologetic to her, she said to the young man "you're good folks".

Why is that funny? Well it's not. It's not humorous funny so much as it's pathetic funny. It's an almost painful demonstration of how out of touch and deluded this particular board member is. The young man whom the board member was conversing with has a couple of underage siblings and they all live with their single mother in a rented unit in the community. That unit is the source of almost weekly shouting matches. More than once in the time I have lived in the community, the various children have been kicked out for days at a time, forced to seek refuge with the families of their school friends. Random people are constantly coming and going from the unit occupied by this group. Often these visitors show complete and total disrespect for our community by parking in reserved parking spaces and littering up our neighborhood with soda cans and fast food wrappers and who knows what else. And to top it all off, the unit occupied by these people perpetually smells of marijuana. That means that if the board's proposed lease rider were to be put in place, these "good folks" would be out on their collective asses pretty quickly.

Remember, we live in a college community and it is not uncommon for the entire neighborhood to be shrouded in the aroma of pot on a Friday night. Generally, I choose to find it charming. The college kids are being college kids. They aren't hurting anyone and they don't deserve to have an over reaching condo board interfering with the contract they entered into with the owner of the condo they live in. Even so, these relatively innocent college kids are the people the board has chosen to target with its dictatorial overreaching rather then the truly bad people who live among us. I would much rather live next to a bunch of college aged pot heads than a single mother who is more weed procurement officer than parent.

The board would do well to take a step back and reevaluate who it chooses to label as being bad members of our community.