New Toy: A Wireless Digital Music System

I've said before in a previous post that my ideal "toys" work really well at solving real problems. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of companies don't get this concept, and those that do want to charge a premium price.

So here's my problem statement: I have a pile of music. I want to listen to any of it, anywhere in my house. And I want to listen to internet radio too. I want to be able to put on some generic soothing background music while I putter around the house doing chores, or while I have company over for a party. (C'mon, humour me.)

To that end, I bought the D-Link NAS, and I've been ripping my music collection from CDs to MP3s to store on the 1-terabyte network drive. So that puts all my music on the network, available from anywhere in the house (within wireless range). That's half the problem solved. Now, how will I play that music?

Options I've considered (or am currently using):

1. Play it off my computer (iTunes). The cheapest option, but not the most convenient: I don't want to have to lug my computer around.

2. Keep the music on an iPod. I'm sure it will be a shock and a surprise to everyone I know, but: I just don't get iPods. They're just not for me. Sure, I own one. But I don't use it. I can't even find mine right now. In the car, I'd rather have something simpler so I don't have to mess around with cables and docks and chargers.

3. PlayStation 3. The PS3 can play music and movies off the NAS. Mostly. Sort of. The interface is clunky and slow and needs the TV turned on to play music. Say what? This feels like a hacker's solution and I'm just not that impressed.

4. Wifi Internet Radio. I had one for a while. It works. The question is, if I want to listen to this stuff in different places, do I buy more of these units?

So this led me down the road toward...

5. Wireless music streamers. Expensive, but could this be the solution? What I liked about this concept is that it's not just a standalone device, it's a system -- a whole household of units that inter-operate, even synchronize themselves to play the same music at the same time, all over the house.

Perfect!

If all this sounds like an attempt to justify to myself another expensive gadget purchase... well, it is.

Mob Mentality

It's 6:20am on Saturday morning, and my alarm begins to blare obnoxiously. It blasts a monotone, beep-beep-BEEP-BEEP, getting louder and louder until finally I am awake enough to realize that I have a decision to make.

I could turn the alarm off, close my eyes, and go back to sleep. There's enough time for three more hours without feeling like I've wasted any part of the day.

Or, I could get up, get dressed, and drive into Westboro so I can have breakfast at 7:00am with other members of the Saturday Morning Caching Club, which we colloquially refer to as the "geomob". Then, after breakfast, participate in finding the geocaches listed on this morning's agenda.

On this particular morning, I hear the drip-drip-drip of fresh rainfall splashing onto my roof and deck. And the morning's agenda, emailed to our mailing list the day before, is a run through the suburbs of Gatineau looking for a series of tiny matchstick containers tied to spruce trees. Too small to actually trade any items - just a log scroll to sign. And you have to bring your own pen. Did I mention it was raining?

And yet, somehow, by 7:00am, I find myself walking through the doors of "Moe's" Newport Restaurant, home of the Elvis Sighting Society.

Sometimes I ask myself just what the allure of all this is. Today, it's not going to be about the "thrill of the hunt" or "taking you to cool and unknown places". Some days it is. Trips to Gatineau Park are usually worth the torture of getting up early -- the reward is an invigorating hike through beautiful scenery. Other days we do go places I wouldn't venture to by myself. Previous geomob outings have taken me as far away as Rochester, NY and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. I've explored abandoned underground subway tunnels, cached through 50km of trails by bike (in one day!) and spent mornings picking up garbage along the shoulders of the expressway while 18-wheelers roar by.

One common geocaching creed is, "It's not about the numbers". That's either a lie or hopeful self-deception. No, we don't always compare ourselves to each other. We all go at our own pace. But we do all go. I've had a busy summer, and haven't had very many chances to turn on the GPS. Meanwhile, friends are discovering caches I haven't seen yet (wasn't that one a neat hide, isn't this a clever camouflage). I do feel like I want to "catch up". If anything, today is about the numbers. A dozen easy park-and-grabs will bring me that much closer to my next "milestone". I don't watch the Ottawa leaderboard, but this will bump me up a notch.

Ultimately, for me, it's about the people. I walk into Moe's and the waitress brings out my coffee without even asking. She addresses me by name and asks if I'll have my usual ("Kiss Me Quick" -- the yogurt and fruit platter). Anyone is welcome at breakfast, so there's often someone new to meet, and there's a core group of people who I've come to expect to regularly be there. We share stories, trade hints, make jokes. There's usually a crack about my unkempt hair. We finish eating, get into cars, and venture off.

By noon, I am soaking wet from the rain, but I hardly notice. I have 15 more cache finds to log when I get home, but I haven't been keeping count. What I am thinking, as we part ways and I drive off, is that I really should get to bed earlier on Friday nights.

I've missed this.

New Toy: Hip Street FM Transmitter With MP3 Playback

Despite my reputation among my friends as being a bit of a gadget freak, it is actually quite rare for me to find something that I am truly impressed with. Here's something that I actually really like.

I found this at Staples, but it is also for sale at Wal-Mart. I paid $30 (on sale) for mine. It is simple: it's an FM transmitter powered by the car, and you can hook up any audio source (such as from an iPod) or play music off a USB storage device or SD card. But most importantly: it works.

I think all good inventions should solve a real problem -- too many gadgets out there contrive to sell you on some "need" that you really didn't have before. This one is simple: I want to play my music in my car. Over the past few years I've played with, and dismissed, several different FM transmitters designed for the iPod. The Griffin iTrip didn't allow the iPod to be charged while it was playing. The Griffin RoadTrip solved that problem, but it stuck out awkwardly in my car. The iTrip Auto was a mess of cables. And this Digipower unit from Canadian Tire worked, but only for a short while before it died, and it was limited in the frequencies you could select. All of those solutions had issues with low volume, interference from other radio stations, and the general awkwardness of having to turn things on and off whenever I wanted to listen to music. Not to mention, every time I got out of the car, I had to hide the iPod to avoid theft.

The Hip Street model solves all of those problems by doing away with the iPod altogether. Instead, I can copy music onto SD memory cards and keep the whole thing permanently plugged into my car. It starts playing music when the car is turned on, and stops when it is turned off. It's as simple as that. There's no worry about my iPod being stolen or running out of battery. I like this! There are playback controls on-board, as well as a hokey little remote (like I'm going to use that while I'm driving?)

The FM transmitter sounds great, too. Volume is decent, there's no obvious hissing or distortion, and it's even strong enough to hold its own against real FM radio stations. The only issue I've found is that the SD card slot is not SDHC-compatible, so it's limited to 2 GB cards (4 GB if you really look). But hey, that's still tons, and they're so cheap that I could keep a few cards in my car with different genres of music. No apparent limitation on the size of USB media it accepts. Oh, and the unit does keep track of what song it was playing when you last shut off the power, but when it resumes, it restarts the song.

Strangely, this product doesn't even show up on the Hip Street Online website, and I've only found one other review on the web. Too bad, because this is a keeper!

I think they're solving the wrong problem

As a veteran camp leader, I've learned to watch out for certain things, particularly when working with younger age groups. One unfortunate characteristic of campers younger than about 12, particularly boys, is that they still haven't fully learned proper personal hygiene. For instance, you need to pay attention to the clothing that the kids wear each day. If you start to see the same shirt being worn for two, three days in a row, alarm bells start to go off. This counts for double if you see the same pair of shorts: same shirt, same shorts, probably means... same underwear.

I had to deal with one such kid in my woodworking activity a few weeks ago. After about the third day I noticed he was always showing up in the same red shirt, red shorts, and green striped socks. When I asked him about this, I got this answer: "Yeah, I was planning to wear the same thing for the whole week, but the other people in my cabin are starting to complain..."

I sent him back up to his cabin to change immediately.

But not to worry, science has the answer: Japanese astronauts are hard at work testing underwear that can be worn for weeks at a time.

I can't wait for these to become available in our tuck shop.

New Toy: D-Link DNS-323 Network Storage Device

OK, so as much as I appreciate how inexpensive it now is to purchase a 1 TB hard drive, it wasn't only for nostalgic value. My plan is to set up a single file storage area and start cleaning up all the files I've collected over the years. Most of them are digital photos and video. A huge portion of the files on my computers are camp-related: pictures, music, forms, and documents going all the way back to when I started volunteering in 1994.

My ideal scenario was this:

• Networked, so I can access files from any computer in the house
• Media streaming of all my music, videos and photos to my PS3, and devices I could potentially get in the future (like an Apple TV, internet radio, whole-house audio, etc.)
• Low power consumption, since by definition a device like this stays idle about 99% of the time
• Reliable, including ways to make backups of the data
  
• Accessible over the internet

Most of the criteria pointed to a standalone NAS device, but many of them are expensive, and at the time, people had all kinds of issues with PS3 compatibility. For a while I thought the answer was going to be to buy an old PC and run media software like TVersity. Then a few days ago I had another good look at the D-Link DNS-323. I had dismissed it last time I looked, but in the year since then, new firmware updates fixed a lot of the issues that were once show-stoppers. Now it should fill all my needs, and I got a good deal on one too (you know who you are -- thanks!)

A nice thing I discovered about the DNS-323 is that it is pretty much a tiny Linux PC, so it will be possible to install all kinds of tools onto it including media servers, web servers, and all sorts of other interesting hacks.

To help with power consumption and heat, the 1 TB hard drive I bought was a Western Digital Caviar "green" series, WD10EADS, which claims the lowest power consumption at only 2.8 watts. I might even buy a second one later, and set up the NAS in RAID 1 mode for even greater reliability.

Now to start copying all my files over!

I'll take a trillion, please...

I will never forget the day my dad brought home my first PC. It was an Intel 386, running at 25 MHz, and it had 4 megabytes of RAM and a 52 megabyte hard drive. Up until then I'd only had an Apple ][ clone to play with. The PC, that plain beige box running MS-DOS, was a thing of beauty. Going into eighth grade, it meant so much to me to finally have a real computer! (You need to understand that, in grade 7, I was writing up school assignments on a typewriter. Using WordPerfect was a HUGE step up.) And 52 megabytes of storage was a dream. Back then, files were simpler, smaller, and I could pretty much account for every single one of those 52 million bytes.

But it didn't take long for even 52 million bytes to start getting filled up, and two years later it was time to upgrade. I made a deal with a guy in my grade 10 Manufacturing Technology class (read: welding class). He was a sketchy character, and I never knew if we were friends or enemies -- but today we were doing business. He had a hard drive for sale. 80 megabytes. $80. "A dollar a meg -- that sounds fair, doesn't it?"

That was 15 years ago. Every few years, computer technology kept improving, everyone started amassing more and more files, and I kept buying bigger hard drives. It doesn't seem that long ago that I built a PC with video editing in mind, with a 10 GB main hard drive and 20 GB for data. The interesting thing is how the price points haven't changed much over the years, compared to the leaps and bounds in storage capacity. I paid about $100 for a 160 GB hard drive a couple of years ago. $100 bought me a 250 GB portable USB hard drive last year.

And $100 bought me a 1 terabyte hard drive yesterday. 1 terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. To put it another way, that's almost 20,000 times bigger than that 52 MB drive I owned in 1991. At the 1993 prices of "a dollar a meg", this much storage would have set me back one million dollars.

Conclusion: hard drive storage is 10,000 times cheaper today than it was 15 years ago. And still dropping!

OK, I admit that it's kind of geeky to be fascinated by that.

How long will this one last?

Jay has a blog!

Again.

I started with LiveJournal, then migrated to a WordPress setup on my own host. And now I'm here on Blogger.

I'm not convinced I'll be able to keep up a blog to the point of entertaining readers, but I've been encouraged to give it a try. I expect I'll share adventures from geocaching, stories and experiences from my volunteer involvement with summer camp, thoughts on technology, and life in general.

There, that sounds pretty exciting already.