Spring Cleaning

It’s been a while since last posting, so there’s two quick updates I wanted to let everyone know about.

Regarding the Yahoo! Pipes issue, user finwright on the discussion boards reminds us about a trick to get your enclosures back: use FeedBurner’s free feature to turn plain RSS feeds into podcasting-ready ones. I can verify that this works — now all of my various playlist feeds from Blip.tv, Network2.tv and Revver.com have been merged into a single feed, and subsequently a single entry in Front Row.

And about this Apple TV… I love that it is creating this buzz in the industry, but I’m still eager to see how this plays out in Mac OS X Leopard. In my idealized world, Apple would be planning on not only bringing the front-end experience of Apple TV to the Front Row application (which is known to become a platform for all Macs and not just a pre-installed app for only the newest machines) but also tuning the Mac mini product into a desktop Mac that, with a few tweaks, can become a home media server/center that can drive your HDTV if you want. Think of it as selling the iPod nano to people who just need a little music (Apple TV) and the iPod 80GB to the people who realize they want or need much, much more (Mini media center). In any case, if you’ve got one of these babies, the always forward-thinking Rocketboom has been releasing their content in 720p high-def for a while now and you might as well subscribe to that feed instead of the lower-rez one you’ll find in the iTunes Podcast Directory.