My current surround sound setup will go in the basement with the [...]]]> I am really excited about some sound gear I have ordered. Allow me to take you on a tour. As valuable background information: I will be moving in a few weeks and will have some rooms that I don’t have speakers for.

My current surround sound setup will go in the basement with the TV. That leaves me without anything reasonable for the main floor. So I’ve come up with the following little arrangement.

Harman/Kardon 3490 stereo receiver in the living room. This receiver will power the living room and dining room. I expect the primary inputs to be auxilary and the an optical connection from an Apple Airport Express.

The living room will feature JBL L830 speakers. The pair of speakers will be accompanied by an Infinity PS212 subwoofer.

In the dining room I plan to mount a pair of JBL LS326W in-wall speakers. This took a while to come to. I decided to go with in-wall speakers that will mount low on the wall, for a nice background music setup. Final placement hasn’t been decided, but I am hopeful that I can come up with a setup whereby the number of guide holes I would have to punch in the basement ceiling are minimal.

For outside I have a pair of Infinity Outrigger speakers. I am not sure I will install these, but it’s a solid maybe. The back yard is not such that it facilitates loud gatherings so it may be a bit overkill in this initial setup.

And finally, for the garage, a pair of Infinity P152 speakers. Originally these speakers were selected for my living room, but at the 11th hour I decided to go with the aforementioned JBL speakers. The P152s are tried and true, and will most certainly be welcome in any room.

At the end of the day I’m really excited about the possibilities that these purchases offer. Placing them and installing them will be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to hear them.

We all have mobile phones, and almost all of them these days have data service. A lot of us [...]]]> If you are reading this on the Internet then you must know what the iPad is. Sure, there’s lots that could be written on that topic but really I’d like to write about mobile data.

We all have mobile phones, and almost all of them these days have data service. A lot of us have laptops, but if we want to get our laptops online most of us will hunt for a WiFi access point or maybe tether using our mobile phone. A small number of people might have a data card for our laptop to give us always-on real-time access (AORTA) to the Internet from our laptops. But for a lot of people, the iPad might be the first “second” mobile data device they have.

The idea of people subscribing to data plans across multiple devices must have network access providers drooling. As we approach a 100% subscriber base on cellular networks the providers have to look at new ways to boost revenue. Selling multiple plans to single people is a no-brainer for them, but it hits consumers right in the wallet.

Until now the people who are paying for multiple data plans are the ones who have to. It is the people who need data access at all times for work; no network means lost productivity, which is expensive. But as additional devices come online that will use cellular network data, more-and-more people are going to want to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of their devices.

If it would end at the iPad we wouldn’t have to think about it, but it doesn’t. There’s laptops, as I mentioned, but that’s nothing new. These devices just scratch the surface.

Take cars for example. You can absolutely buy cars that can connect to the Internet today. And while most of these cars are expensive today, the technology will only become more affordable. As it becomes more affordable, it becomes more accessible. In fewer years than you have fingers almost any car you buy will have Internet connectivity.

How about digital cameras? With 3G and 4G cellular data connections it is now very practical to have your digital camera upload photos you take to flikr, as you take them. Or an HD video to YouTube. Remember a few years ago when blogs were all the rage? Now it’s twitter, because it’s quicker and easier. But if we can just automatically upload photos we won’t even need to tweet our latest thoughts.

As tablets, cars, iPods, digital cameras, and other devices become more connectable we will find that the pay-per-device subscription model simply isn’t sustainable. And while the cellular companies are likely drooling at the idea of scraping another $350 a year from every iPad 3G owner, I believe that a truly progressive company will find a better way. Almost every provider in the US has a “completely unlimited” phone and data plan today, recognizing that people will pay for all-in solution. But the next market leader will be the company that understands and encourages the push for more connectivity in our mobile devices.

There are challenges with this. If I paid for “personally connectivity”, where all of my devices can be connected for one rate, what will stop me saying all of the iPads that my friends own are mine? We might have to sacrifice some of our “unlimited” comfort for this model to work. But with more consumers being aware of the value of a byte, and the majority of Internet providers putting some kind of limits on data transfers, I don’t see why a payment for a certain amount of bandwidth couldn’t be applied across a finite number of devices.

The first wireless network company to offer 50 Gb of data, shared across up to 5 devices, for $50 a month will do well in future-proofing their business.

I had the misfortune of having to do this yesterday. Windows Media Player has this smart functionality built in that will allow you to update metadata, including cover [...]]]> Have you ever added cover art to a song using Windows Media Player? How about multiple files at the same time? Give it a try.

I had the misfortune of having to do this yesterday. Windows Media Player has this smart functionality built in that will allow you to update metadata, including cover art, from the Internet. This requires sending data over the Internet to Microsoft, which I had disabled in my privacy settings. Even after temporarily enabling it I couldn’t use the feature because access was blocked via the proxy/firewall.

I clicked all around with multiple files selected and couldn’t get anywhere that looked like I could update cover art. I looked at file properties. I finally had to resort to searching the Internet for details on how to accomplish this. Even then the first results were to use the automatic update feature mentioned above.

I read that you have to right click on a single file, go to the Advanced Tag Editor, select the Images tab, browse to a file, and select the image type from a drop down list. This must be repeated for every file. And to be honest, It didn’t reliably save the images for me: I was pressing Apply before OK and then re-checking the file just to make sure the image was saved in it. I would guess I had a < 50% success rate.

Have you ever done the same in iTunes? You drag an image to the Cover Art area for a selected/playing file. Multiple files? Select them and select Get Info from the File or context menu; drag an image to the metadata info window and click OK. Pretty darn simple. And iTunes has the “auto get album artwork” feature as well, to get the artwork from the iTunes Store.

I think I’m done. Thanks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about backups lately. I have regular backups, but not of all of my data. What’s worse is that the data that isn’t regularly backed up is the data that would be the most difficult to replace.

Currently my only personal computer is my [...]]]> Prepare for a little bit of geek-talk.

I’ve been thinking a lot about backups lately. I have regular backups, but not of all of my data. What’s worse is that the data that isn’t regularly backed up is the data that would be the most difficult to replace.

Currently my only personal computer is my little white MacBook. My little white MacBook has a little 80 Gb hard disk in it–plenty for OS X and applications, not very much for data. As a consequence of this I bought a Western Digital My Book external drive to store my data.

My current external drive is a 500 Gb firewire drive, and it still has a little over 100 Gb of free space. I use Time Machine with this drive, which consumes 100-150 Gb of the space. Time Machine backs up the OS, my applications, some documents, and general day-to-day stuff. The external drive is also the primary (and only) source for my iPhoto and iTunes libraries. Because these data stores exist only on the external drive there is no backup of this. Furthermore, all other data that is only stored on this drive is not backed up; the majority of the remaining data is non-original and could be regenerated.

So I’ve been trying to think of a way to have a backup. My mind went to a mirrored RAID of two drives, preferably done in hardware, that would support a firewire connection for Time Machine. This is relatively costly, however. I thought about doing this myself with daisy-chained firewire drives, but this would end up being difficult to maintain.

I think I have decided to buy another external drive of 1 Tb in size that will be used for Time Machine backups only. I would have both my laptop hard drive and my current external hard drive backup with Time Machine to the new external hard drive. I would exclude the current external drive’s Time Machine backup folder so that I could retain the Time Machine data that I have, without making an additional copy of it. (No need to start backing up a backup.)

I think this will resolve my concerns for backing up my larger data stores (iPhoto library in particular). Any comments on what you do, or how this could be done better?

Some of my eldest readers might remember a time when I was using bBlog to publish my web log, using the default theme. Eventually I found a theme very similar to the theme I use today, only with [...]]]> “I feel like I look ten years younger.” It’s not me saying this–it’s my web log.

Some of my eldest readers might remember a time when I was using bBlog to publish my web log, using the default theme. Eventually I found a theme very similar to the theme I use today, only with a red colouring instead of blue and a photo of a Bic pen rather than the Pilot ExecuGel. This theme was a WordPress theme, so I grabbed a WordPress compatible theme for bBlog and started using it.

A couple of years ago I made the move from bBlog to WordPress 2 and brought along my WordPress 1 theme. The theme felt right at home, but was still working with a sort of “compatibility” layer as WP2 added new theme features that my theme wasn’t using. This wasn’t really a problem because I could continue on with no loss of functionality.

But my theme was getting a little long in the tooth. A couple of people complained about the long list of archive links. Link ordering was out of my control. Searching sucked. Comments couldn’t be nested. And the list goes on to include various other minor annoyances.

Tonight I made the jump to a WP2 theme that is “highly configurable”. From what I can tell it simply means that they give you a bunch of text boxes in which you can edit CSS, and for this they add many kilobytes of your page size. None-the-less I spent the time to transition from the old to the new theme. A couple of you even noticed that I took the site down for a short period during the transition.

Enough with the history lesson; here’s what’s changed:

• domain navigation links moved from the sidebar to the top;
• front page is three columns, now showing recent comments and recent popular posts;
• tags;
• easier access to posts and comments RSS feeds;
• local search replaces Google search;
• no more AdWords;
• link ordering changed;
• archives are available in a drop-down list; and,
• minor changes to design and per-post page layout

The downside of this: the new theme is slow. Combine that with a really slow (read: cheap) web host and the blog effectively becomes really slow. Whether or not this is noticeable I don’t know. To combat this I have installed a caching mechanism, which should help if a few of you happen to visit at once. But please let me know if there are any side effects.

Update: Left sidebar: gone.