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I got Netflix a while ago. I knew at the time that the content for their Canadian offering was lacking, especially as compared to their American selection. Nevertheless, the subscription cost was reasonable enough to warrant keeping the service. Last week, I registered with a service that lets me get content available to US residents. It was a change for the amazing, one that I should have done long before.

Netflix provides its subscribers with different content based on where it thinks they’re surfing from. If it thinks you’re browsing from the States, it will provide you with their American selection. If it thinks you’re in Canada, the Canadian content will appear.

How it knows where you are is by way of your computer’s Internet or IP address. It uses a geolocation service to tie that address a physical location. It’s imperfect, because these addresses aren’t structured according to physical location, but according to the topology of how computers are interconnected. To show you just how different the two are, here’s what a map of the Internet:

Anyways, this means that if your traffic to Netflix appears to be coming from a different IP address, say one that’s in the United-States, then Netflix will think you’re American. There’s a few ways to change where you appear to be coming from.

One is to use a VPN, whereby all of Internet traffic gets routed through computers located somewhere else – in this case, the United-States. Netflix would see that traffic as originating from an American IP, unaware of the Canadian source. An account with a VPN provider would cost about $10 a month.

Another approach is to change the DNS servers to those of a special service provider. Think of DNS servers as a phone book for the Internet. It translates domain names like “netflix.com” (phone book analogy: people’s names) to IP addresses like “255.255.255.255” where the content is actually found (phone book analogy: phone numbers). So just as mucking around with the phone numbers in a phone book could have someone who intended to call one person call another, DNS servers can likewise misdirect a computer.

This service uses this ability to trick a computer into talking to the wrong servers when it wants to reach Netflix. The servers it gets pointed to are owned by the service provider and based in the US. They act as relays, passing the traffic over to Netflix on behalf of the computer. Netflix meanwhile only sees these proxies with American IP addresses, and so feeds content intended for US residents. This approach has much lighter bandwidth requirements than a VPN provider, and likewise costs less at $5/month. This is what I went for.

The difference between American and Canadian Netflix content is staggering. Below is an image of the latest additions to Netflix. What’s in black is content only available to Americans. The little that’s left isn’t very impressive.

I had a hard time recommending Netflix outright before. Now I’d say yes, it’s absolutely worth it if you don’t have cable, but only if you’re able to get the American selection.

I’m happy to announce that Diets Suck is now available in the iTunes store. Still waiting to hear back from Barnes & Noble to see if they’ll accept it for their own eBook outlet.

Update: The book is now on Barnes & Noble as well!

I’m a pretty big fan of GNOME 3, the latest iteration of the popular desktop environment. The designers at GNOME anticipated that users would interact with their computers through touch, not just the mice and keyboards of today. Their attempts to satisfy both means of interaction led to a kind of hybrid interface design that isn’t too unlike what Microsoft unveiled with Windows 8.

This makes GNOME3 suitable as a desktop environment for a tablet computer as much as a laptop. This is great from a user’s perspective, where a consistent experience was threatened by the diversity of the hardware coming into the market.

As great as I find GNOME3, however, there are aspects that are wanting. The most notable of these is the application menu, which copies what’s found in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Basically, it’s a screen with all the icons presented to you in one shot.

This clutter makes it difficult to spot what you’re looking for. The example above, from my computer, shows a menu with 54 icons displayed at once. Many users will have to essentially scan every one of these, a relatively lengthy exercise, to find the icon for the application they want. This isn’t much better than the old joke about the cluttered Windows desktop.

I think we can do better. Here is some concept art I devised for an alternate main application menu.

Instead of displaying all the icons at once, the user would be presented with a selection of the most frequently called applications and the most recently used. Users usually make use of a small pool of applications, much smaller than the totality of all the programs on their system, so this would cut down instances of pixel hunting.

The “Featured” application at the top would randomly select one installed application and pull its description. More experienced users could substitute this for a “recent documents” bin, but novices might appreciate the insight.

I think the design of full-screen application menus should take a page from the likes of the Ubuntu Software Center, whose designers have found ways to balance quality with quantity. It’s certainly a step up from the visual diarrhea of the current approach.