Over the past few days, we’ve been moving a portion of our subscriber base to have access to content servers that are more reliable. The process  hasn’t been glitch-free, but in general, a number of you should be experiencing better completion rates and higher transfer speeds. If you’ve experienced NEW problems with content linking (not with the app itself) make sure you contact our support group.

And if you noticed the 5 minute accidental restart of our servers last night around 1am EST, then apologies. If you didn’t, then don’t tell anyone.

We hear stories from many of our users on how they either watch Graboid on their PCs or their TVs. There have been some quite inventive solutions, and we’d like you to post for the benefit of others how you’ve done. Me, I started with a 20 foot VGA cable into the RGB input of my TV, although I acknowledge that some sort of a media center solution would be better. I hate getting up off the couch to connect the cables (because I’d trip over them if I left them connected).

After a while I realized my laptop screen was big enough that if I balanced it on the corner of the coffee table, I could watch it and it kind of looked like a TV. Since it’s a lot closer to me than the TV, it takes up nearly the same visual area of my eye (and I’ve got a 50″ TV). I know most of you will recognize that as a rationalization, but it gets me through the night. Now I just use the laptop. Plus it’s a nice portable TV to give kiddies so they stop annoying the adults trying to watch hockey on the real TV.

It is eventually our plan to package a simple software/hardware solution for Graboid, but that’s in the future. For now, let us know how you’re bridging the gap.

Graboid is popular. Perhaps a little too popular lately. We were taken by surprise with site traffic this weekend and as a result are experiencing intermittent server delays that can result in an XML Parser error when you are launching Graboid. This can usually be solved by immediately relaunching, or waiting a few minutes. Sorry for the issues, we’re working to resolve the problem. And thanks for using Graboid.

Browsing for a birthday gift for a friend who’s really into TV, I had a hard time finding something interesting. It would appear that, as with everything, there are a few good products, and a lot of real junk out there. I can’t tell you how hard it is to find a decent Jack Bauer bobblehead. Anyway, finally got it at the Fox TV store (duh).

What I REALLY want though is that cool phone Jack has. Danged if it doesn’t look just like my Treo 650 smartphone, but I sure as heck can’t watch live security camera footage, download gigabytes of building blueprints, or teleport myself to CTU headquarters.

Speaking of behaving like a child, I finally watched an episode of Kid Nation this evening. Hilarious. 10 year-olds behave just as immaturely as 30 year olds in a Survivor-esque landscape. If you’re a parent, watch it with your kids and tell them not to act like Michael (crybaby), and learn from Sophia – except for the pre-erotic-dancer act she does to earn enough money to buy a bicycle. I’m sure you can find it on one of those websites that lets you watch pretty much any TV show. Oh wait….

Anyway, if you have friends who are really into TV, buy them a bobblehead. Or a gift certificate for Graboid, once they’re available.

We’re sending out an email tomorrow inviting anyone who’s downloaded Graboid to join our Facebook group and invite their friends to join as well. We’re doing this as a public service because we know you’re looking for any excuse to log into your Facebook account, kill some time at work, and annoy your friends with pokes and invitations to join groups of questionable value/integrity/purpose.

Use this link to join the group. Invite your friends.

We can’t help but notice some fuss in the blogosphere about the tv-link.co.uk site being shut down, according to an article in the UK’s Guardian Newspaper. As usual with stories like this, it is difficult to separate fact from the PR spin put on the stories by the related copyright enforcement organization, whether it’s the RIAA in the US, or FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) in the UK. The story quotes only sources from FACT, not the police, which allows them to say whatever they want about the how and why of the shutdown of the website.

There is more to this story and it will come out over the next few weeks. Every time a website like tv-links disappears, the copyright organizations raise a victory flag, and then the site comes back in a few days, a victim of inadequate bandwidth, or in the case of Piratebay, a complete overstepping by legal authorities of due process.

In this case, the owner of tv-links might just as easily have been arrested for not paying his internet service bill, for all that can reliably be told from the story in the Guardian. It’s a good thing in any case that internetizens have lots of choices for how to get TV content.

We notice that Joost went from beta to live a few weeks ago. It’s a standard sort of site you’d expect from commercial interests – trading (our opinion only) sub-par content for advertising inserts. For those of you who are familiar with Joost, what do you think? Is it a viable alternative to cable TV? Their latest announcement was a deal with Major League Baseball to televise major games about 24 hours after their live airing. Can’t figure out why that’s interesting, but maybe we’re missing something. They do seem to be getting a lot of press. Not that we’re jealous or anything.

We receive constant requests for updates on updates to Graboid. When is the next version coming out? When will there be a version for Macs? How can I get action figures from my favourite shows?

We can’t say when we’ll have a Mac version, sorry. As we do say (often), we’re all Mac users at Graboid, and it kills us that Windows has so much market share that we have to focus on that application for now.

We’re working feverishly on the next version of Graboid. The reason there haven’t been any updates for a while is that the app is being re-developed with a new and improved architecture, that will let us make future changes more rapidly, including such things as versions for other operating systems. We’ll publish a release date for the new version once it is in the final stage of testing. It will release before the end of November, and perhaps much sooner.

Another bit of news – we’ll soon be linking to more content servers. This will not affect the broader selection of video content, but it will make that content more reliable, and will increase transmission speed for many of you with fast connections.

We realize that without dates attached, this news is a a bit less news-like. However, we thought you’d like to know that change is afoot. If you have requests for features you think would be nice, please post here. And don’t bother posting “make it work better”. We know that one.

We get a lot of requests from people as to how to get videos they download onto a DVD for easier viewing on their TVs. We have a special deal from Roxio for 10% off any of their various burning products on their site – use code SAVE10RX, it’s good until the end of the year.