Wish list for next Christmas

It's never too early to think ahead.

One of the new purchases I would like to add to our entertainment center is a media server. Ideally, this media server would be able to work for audio and video. However, if we are to talk about audio only, the Sonos Digital Music System is pretty close to the ideal system.

• All music can be centrally stored
• Music can be streamed to any part of the house, independently (different streams to different areas of the house) or in sync (same stream to different parts of the house).
• Nice remote for controlling the music

At the moment, with all our music centrally stored, we can use Windows Media Player (or any other software) to access it. We have a computer hooked up to our entertainment system in the family room, but to listen to our music repository in the bedroom, we would have to carry a computer in there. Not quite convenient. This is where a system like Sonos would be handy. Of course there are other systems as well, but Sonos provides the best integrated system (with the ability to play the same stream in different rooms, having a simple interface, and so on).

A similar system for movies and other video we have would be ideal. Since many of our shows are still on ReplayTV units, then a central video repository for all recorded shows would be difficult. We have almost 2 TB capacity on our ReplayTV units and one PC with over 1 TB capacity.

The plans for this coming year's computer purchase is an ultra-small IBM, I mean Lenovo, desktop. This will replace the computer in the media room, and the one in the media room will become my work computer. This way, I can fit the small PC on the shelf along with the other AV equipment instead of on the floor. In addition, with the one I'll use as my work computer, I can easily swap hard drives, so I can boot up with a Linux computer and whatever.

The second purchase is the X41 tablet PC. I would prefer the tablet PC to be less than 3 pounds, but at 3.5 pounds and the fact it is a "convertible" with keyboard included and that there have been some very positive reviews about how it feels to "write" on the surface, I think this is a good choice. However, including the x4 base, it would be over $1800 (over $1500 for the computer alone). However, in Japan, even for IBM employees, it is over 22,000 yen (over $2000) just for the computer alone. Ideally, I would want to get one for Kyoko, too, although she'll say she doesn't need a new computer. What does need have to do with buying anything?

One obvious use of the tablet is to place on the kitchen counter and stream video to it, such as TV video. Another use of the tablet is to allow it to be easily carried to another room for playing music from the music repository. Hey, if I can do that, then why not just use bluetooth speakers to play music in the bedroom and not carry the tablet PC around? There have to be bluetooth speakers somewhere, right?

For the desktop, I noticed IBM, I mean Lenovo, was offering free CRT monitor or $99 for flat-panel monitor. However, since we don't really need a new monitor (especially not CRT), I thought I would wait to see what the next offer was... The monitor offer expired on December 27... And so far, no new offer! Sigh!

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Regarding other items, one interesting item I saw which hasn't even been advertised much anywhere is an hard drive enclosure for an external drive which also has video playback capabilities and a remote control from ByteCC. What this means is that you can hook up this enclosure to your TV and play videos from the external hard drive. This would be ideal for business trips, especially to Vienna where most of the channels are in German, so I can watch movies and other shows I record. I already do this, but this means I have to watch the shows on my ThinkPad. I would need to check though that the TVs allow external input. There are some limitations with this enclosure though. The big limitation is that it supports only FAT32 and not NTFS format. FAT32 has a limit of 4GB file sizes. Some golf recordings could be over 4GB. To be ideal, the remote should come with 30-second skip feature to help skip through commercials. Anyway, with these limitations, I'll stick with my ThinkPad, but it is an interesting concept.

Making a million on the Internet? No problem...

I guess this shows there are endless possibilities on the Internet to make money. Or at least 1000x1000 ways.

From Reuters:
Link to referred home page: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com

Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea
Dec 29, 1:05 PM (ET)

A view of Alex Tew's page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com. Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small... Full Imag

By Peter Graff
LONDON (Reuters) - If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he would pay for university.

The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.

He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release.

That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites.

So far they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.

"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew told Reuters from his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini."

The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits for a fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising.

Meanwhile Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at university, where he is studying business.

"It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing the site," he said.

But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an original way to make money online.

"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief."

Give me my MP3 player (part 1)

For Christmas, I gave Kyoko an MP3 player... After careful consideration, I got her the MPIO FL350. It has 1GB memory and weighs about 1 oz. Yes, that's right, one ounce. For Kyoko, weight would be a consideration, especially if she wants to use it while exercising, and this one, she hardly feels she's wearing it. I thought they looked pretty stylish too.

I also gave consideration to their FG200 which is approximately the same size and has about a 1" LCD and can play videos. I ended up opting for FL350 because of the choice in colors. It seems that MPIO is having some supply problems, though, as I have not seen the FG200 with 1GB available on their website for a long time.

Anyway, back to the FL350, not only can it play mp3 files (as well as wma), it has an FM tuner, voice recorder, and I believe line-in recorder as well.

Kyoko has been very happy with it... and when she's happy, I'm happy!

My trouble with phones, part 2

Anyway. since we went to Skype, I thought it would be better to get a wireless headset instead of talking directly into the computer. Using computer speakers and mic anyway could result in an echo (although not the cause of the echo per my previous post), so anyway, a headset is a reasonable accessory to the computer and a wireless headset would be the best.

After researching bluetooth headsets, I decided on the Sony Ericsson Akono HBH-300. I thought the other ones looked way too geeky. I thought this one with a clean line was the best looking.

However, with the headset people were also complaining that they could not hear me so well. So based on the following picture from the user's guide, I thought that meant that you could extend the boom mic. Doesn't that seem like a reasonable assumption to you?

Just as a warning, this is NOT what this diagram means. I am not sure what it seems but do not try to force extending the boom mic. So now my headset does not have such straight lines.

Sigh!

My trouble with phones, part 1

For some reaosn, at our house, the phone lines seem to be iffy. Of course, if we call a service person out to take a look but they cannot find a problem, then they'd say the problem is inside the house, so they would charge us for a service call and not have fixed anything.

So I need to have a quantifiable way of measuring the problem we are having with the phones.

Basically, the problem is that often on calls, I am told that they can hardly hear me. I've thought it could be our Siemens phone system, which may be contributing to the problem, but I've also been told that using a different phone. I have taken a phone outside to the junction box (whatever it is called) and I have seemed to have replicated the problem outside, too, which would indicate the problem is not from inside the house. However, I really need to have a quantifiable way of measuring the extent of the problem.

The problem is only outbound traffic, so I never have problems with hearing what other people are saying. The problem does not occur all the time. However, since I never hear my own voice on a call, I never know when there is the problem and how often it occurs. Whenever I call home, I never seem to have the problem hearing what Kyoko is saying.*

Anyway, since it is a problem for people not to hear me on calls, we did sign up for Lingo. However, there seemed to be extremely poor quality on calls to Japan, so we ended up dropping Lingo. My current alternate provider is Skype. Other people sometimes hear an echo with Skype. I've gone through the FAQs but there does not seem to be an easy answer with that either. Also, since I am not the one who hears the echo, I am not sure how often the problem is with the echo. I may have to try Vonage next...?

(* This has led me to wonder if the frequency of my voice is such that it is difficult to transmit over phone lines. There are insects which chirp at such a frequency that even though the human ears can hear the sound they make very clearly, someone on the other end of the phone would not hear them at all. Is the same true with my voice?)

100-disc CD player

Last year we were able to use my old Aiwa 100-CD player to play Christmas CDs, although it did need a little "encourage" at times. This year,it really does not want to work. From what I can tell, it is a mechanical failure, not an electronic failure. I can see what it wants to do, but for some reason, it is not able to do it. It can work with a little assistance, but it requires assistance now every time you want to play a CD, so it makes using it quite impractical.

However, playing one CD at a time is also impractical when you want it as background music. Therefore, I decided to create mp3 files from the CDs. This being the first time for me to do so, it's actually quite simple. The only drawback would be for the disk space, but considering we have over 1 TB available for recorded TV shows, we can spare a few gigs for music. Having all your music available on your computer then make it quite simple to play what you want, whenever you want, and never have to search for CDs.

So even if I were to get the 100-CD player working again, it seems that having everything on a computer is much more convenient. Oooops, I shouldn't mention that to anyone to whom I might try to sell the CD player.

I thought that I bought the player in the late 80's, which would make the player almost 20 years old. (OK, 16 years old if it were bought in 1989.) However, it turns out this one was manufactured in January 1995, so it is one month from 11 years. I never used it to its full capacity. However, that is not too surprising for me. It's quite a nice looking piece of equipment with flashing lights for the elevator moving to load and unload CDs. The flashing lights are the main reason I bought it. You can even hook up multiple players together to get 200+ CD capacity. In fact, I was extremely tempted to buy other units. Good thing I managed to be patient in this case. Also very surprising for me.

Anyway, I can't quite get myself to throw it away yet, knowing that it seems that it is some mechanical failure which is preventing it from working. I was able to get a type of workaround using double-sided tape, but it only helped partially. With everything else I need to be doing, I'll put this unit away in storage for when I might have some free time to look at it again.

PS. Uhhh, anyone interested in buying a "partially working" 100-disc CD player?

Backup of backup

The new external hard drive for Kyoko's use is making some not-so-interesting noises. Just in case of a hard drive failure, I'd better make sure that the data on the enclosure is backed up somewhere.

One use of the external hard drive is to backup data from her ThinkPad. Therefore, the original data is still there. (Also, the PC is the media room is also used as a backup for data.)

However, another use of the external hard drive is to archive shows she wants to save from ReplayTV. Therefore, one way to have a backup of the archive is to burn to DVD, but probably too much of a hassle, so I need to expand the data available on the Family Room PC archive to also copy her shows there. I have been wondering whether I would need a backup of the Family Room PC archive. Considering it is already over 1 TB, that would be quite some additional capacity to back that up. Therefore, at the moment, it seems impractical, although it is true that if I really, really, really want to save a show, I'd better save it in two places.

Yes, I believe in magic

I found someone created freeware called IVSMagic. IVS is the Internet sharing mechanism used by ReplayTV users to share shows (among other ReplayTV owners). Someone had already created freeware called DVArchive which allows your PC to look like a ReplayTV unit and allows you to easily download from your ReplayTV unit to your PC. But once downloaded onto your PC*, then you cannot use IVS to send the show to another ReplayTV owner. (By downloading, I do mean downloading and removing the original copy from your ReplayTV unit. Downloading to your PC is a way to free up space on your ReplayTV unit but still have a copy of the show available to view.)

IVSMagic allows you to send the show even though you have already downloaded it to your PC. Now I can send my mom "Teahouse of the August Moon" which is a very good movie starring Marlon Brando in post-war Okinawa.

Update:I did install IVSMagic and it is truly magical.