This is ponderous man, really...ponderous.

Okay, this is the last post on this topic I swear, otherwise I really will turn into Engadget.

Engadget yesterday posted about some of the more ridiculous looking USB (for no good reason) powered devices out there. One of them I thought was somewhat useful, the small fan. I have a USB light right now that I find quite useful also. This all scares me, as the fact that these are USB-powered is still somewhat ridiculous.

Anyway, I saw the one that takes the cake today on a deal site. The USB Aquarium. Fake fish, powered by your USB port. Wow. All of this seems like something out of "The Incredibles" to me, "I'm still geeking out over it..."

There, I'm done. No more posts ever on silly USB devices.

"I was just layin' down some rhymes, with the G-folk, you know, kickin' it on the west siy-eede"

Today's adventure involves companies who just don't grasp customer service and/or selling to people. Why would you not try to help out customers? Why make it so hard for people to give you money? No idea.

We went to KFC for lunch, because that's what we do sometimes. This is an entire other story, but in the past we all got flack because we wanted to order the sandwiches that were on the menu. Then, KFC removed the sandwiches, only to replace them with a bunch of new, smaller sandwiches. Now, for me to get the same amount of food, they have to make 2 or 3 sandwiches. Brilliant.
Today's adventure though had to do with payment. KFC recently FINALLY joined the ranks of fast food restaurants allowing credit or debit (which is a fantastic advancement by the way.) However, KFC only supported debit cards, and they have some cheesy, I-just-signed-up-for-my-first-merchant-account machine sitting on the counter. However, Josh was going to use it today nonetheless. It turns out though, that this thing might as well be an ATM machine, they actually charge $0.99 per transaction to use the thing. Where else have you ever seen a restaurant charge to pay with plastic? Ridiculous. Especially when you consider the price of things on the menu. The new snacker sandwiches I was talking about are only $0.99 themselves. So, buy 3 of those, and your payment for the meal is suddenly 25% of the total cost. I refuse to pay ATM fees, they are evil, so I spotted him the cash instead. Lame.

Topic #2 - stupid phone co-op's with lame websites. My local phone co-op, who is great in many ways (great DSL, low-priced local phone service) began offering video via phone line as well. I was very interested in this, as I would be more than happy to drop the 800 lb. gorilla that is Mediacomm for my cable TV. However, they will not list a price for the service anywhere. They have a website that tells you they have 3 package levels. They send out fliers with the monthly bill stating the same thing. Nowhere do they tell you the price of the packages. Do you actually want people to buy this service? Tell us how much it freakin' costs. I don't want to have to call you and beg you to know how much it will be. Lame.

Last topic. When your company president is coming to town for his annual visit, don't piss off your customers because of it. I bet that's not in the company 'vision statement', and I bet the president doesn't list that in the achievements for the year. If somebody calls your store (which just might happen to be a furniture store) and wants to pick up their purchase (that you should have called them about in the first place), let them know at that time that you are not allowing any pickups while said president is there. Don't wait until they have already made plans to go to that side of town on that day to let them know. Lame pricks. You're lucky this chair is so comfortable or there would be very little slumber in my land.

Okay, Token, give me a sweet bass line.

If you think it's easy doin' one night stands, try playin' in a rock roll band...

Today's example of people who just don't get it. As is often the case, brought to you by the downward spiral that is Engadget.

The iTrip is a slick little accessory to allow your ipod to play music via FM modulation through your stereo. It is a sleek package that fits perfectly with the ipod.

Now, Engadget doesn't like that approach. Here is their choice quote:

For about the same price ($39.95) you could opt for a more generic DIY solution

Now, check out the picture on the site. Yeah, for the SAME price, I would rather get the multipurpose solution that is not a finished product whatsoever. I love raw circuit boards just hanging around the house.

<Shakes head in disgust./>

NPH wouldn't do that!

Okay,

A longer post is in the works, but this whore known as school will keep me occupied to late tonight to finish it.

Okay, lesson #1. Kids know some really cool things, and you just have to be crazy enough to try them. I consider myself quite crazy, as an Arby's sidewalk and many other landmarks could attest. Thus, I did not just ignore my kids as would be the general American consensus when we were eating at a local Eatery and Tavern the other day for lunch. My 4 year old boy told me he really liked mustard. We happened to be eating chips and salsa at the time. He then decided that mustard on chips would be good. Most people would have stopped it right there. Taking a cue from Big Daddy I did not. I said, sure and I'll try one as well. Guess what, it tasted pretty darn good to me. A new appetizer is born.

Lesson #2. Open source is good. Embrace open source. Yes, I knew and believed this already. I am not a zealot, I just see a lot of good things come from open source. My flavor of the day was a site I found Friday. Several in fact. The appropriate links are here and here. Firefox is the bomb, I can't surf the web without it anymore. My main site should make that abundantly clear. It also happens to be open source. This means anybody can take the source, compile it, change it, patch it, etc. Due to this, there happens to be many people that build custom builds with either features added or patched, or optimized for speed and to take advantage of certain processors. I happened to use one from moox.ws for quite some time, after somebody at work pointed it out to me. However, I wanted to upgrade to version 1.02, and moox didn't have it out yet. So, I started looking around. I found there were literally hundreds of sites like that, hence the two links at the top of the paragraph. I ended up settling on the stipe build, and have been quite happy with it. Very cool in my warped mind.

Play that funky music, white boy.

Pedro offers you his protection.

I visit deal sites online on a regular basis, watching for things that are cheap or free after rebate and such (more specifically I watch my RSS feed). Yesterday, one of my feeds pulled down 2 bizarre things in sequence that I felt necessary to showcase. Hopefully this won't turn me into Engadget, but I don't plan to start drooling over cell phones and endless stupid USB devices.

First, we have the USB Hub PowerBar. This seems in some ways like it would be really useful. In other ways, it looks and seems rather odd. It's currently free after rebate, so it might just be worth picking up.

Next, we have the fantastic Verbatim Digital Vinyl Spindle at Best Buy. This comes across as just plain lame to me. Oooh look, my shiny CD's look that smooth vinyl my grandpappy spun on the tables.


Now, I'm going to threadjack for a minute (I love that word -- wait, is it possible to threadjack yourself?). I have beef with some lazy engineers out there dealing with audio components for home and car. Why is it so damn hard to get a constant output level from a receiver with multiple input sources?

My biggest gripe with this is in the car. I have yet to have a radio, factory or not, where without changing the volume knob, I had a consistent output level while switching between CD and radio. That is pathetic. Okay, back in the old days when the volume knob was an actual potentiometer, I could see that. Now, the entire thing is software/hardware controlled though.
Given that both sources are completely controlled by the dash headunit, and that the volume can be adjusted on the fly, why on earth can't I get a consistent output level.
My current Pontiac Montana is the worst for this. The FM radio and CD output are not quite the same, the CD level is very "hot" in comparison. Flip over to XM satellite and it is MUCH worse. The volume needs to be turned up to about 3 times the level of FM or CD to be heard at a decent volume. Now, make the mistake of flipping over to CD from there, and your ears begin bleeding.

I have had similar issues at home as well. My DVD volume always has to be turned up substantially over the radio or CD on my receiver. I understand this is more difficult, as the source for everything except possibly tuner will be external to the receiver. However, I don't think it would take much in the way of software or a single DSP to handle this and adjust the output accordingly. Lazy.

All we hear is Radio Ga Ga...

Okay, I have an idea. It happens sometimes.

The Old
It concerns something that is a large part of my life, and quite a few
others as well, the radio. Radio has been around for a long time, but
it has advanced relatively little in that time in reality. It seems
for something as much a part of daily life, some more practical
changes would be made.

Let's recap a bit. First, there was AM. Very simple, long range, and
cheap. It also has an audio quality that lands it somewhere in one of
the levels of hell to listen to, especially in an cramped automobile
(Shannon tells me that watching PBS telethons are one of the other
levels of hell with which I agree completely).

Next comes FM, still fairly simple engineering principles at work,
much better sound quality with the tradeoff of reduced range.
However, we still have the problem of poor quality at long ranges or
with poor tuning. Also, because it is free airwaves floating in the
ether for anybody to grab, it is funded by bludgeoning the listeners
with commercials.

This is where the medium pretty much stagnated from the early 1970's
until the very late 1990's. Then, spacemen intervened and hooked us
up with sounds from much higher above. Satellite radio appears from a
few companies, XM (intended to identify it as the successor to AM and
FM although it is not an acronym containing modulation) and Sirius. I
didn't think much of satellite radio until I actually purchased it
when we bought a new vehicle. It is fantastic. The music channels
are completely devoid of commercials, it is just non-stop music. I
have close to 100 channels that are all available in perfect, digital
quality no matter where I travel in the country (except going under
overpasses and behind buildings -- damn line of sight technology).
The one drawback noted by some is that since there aren't commercials
to fund operations, a monthly subscription fee is required. Well
worth it in my opinion though.

I'll throw a quick aside in here, HD radio should be mentioned as
well. A relatively new development, still not very widely adopted.
Really it is an incremental technology, rather than revolutionary. It
is in simple terms a means of embedding a digital signal on top of the
standard FM carrier. Since it is digital, as long as you can receive
the signal in a somewhat reasonable fashion, you will have perfect
quality. Some will also point out as a benefit that unlike satellite
radio which charges a fee, HD radio is once again a free technology.
My opinion is that it is just a way to listen to the same short
playlists and annoying commercials in a restricted area, just in
better quality. I'm not saying I'm not glad the technology was
introduced, I'm sure eventually it will completely replace standard
FM, I just don't see any revolutionary improvements.

The New
Okay, if you stayed awake through the history lesson, you are ready
for my idea. As I mentioned, I like my satellite radio. However, I
still find its selection limited sometimes. Also, although the
randomness of radio can be a good thing, sometimes I just want to
listen to a certain set of music. I could lug CD's with me, or hook
up an iPod or something through my radio to solve that.

Or....what if there was an online music service that partnered with
some media distributor (probably satellite) to deliver whatever songs
I wanted from their store at any time? The underlying cost structure
would likely involve a system such as that offered by Napster. The
user would pay a monthly fee, and have access to unlimited streamed
music. iTunes is rumored to have something similar in the works. In
many ways, this would then resemble the satellite radio that I like,
but with a more customizable solution. Heck, maybe we don't even need
the online store. The current satellite providers may have more than
enough music selection now, we just need more control over what is
sent.

This is where my idea falls flat for the time being. How do you
provide custom streams? There probably isn't enough bandwidth to send
down every song available, just in case somebody wants it, no matter
the compression used. Also, how do you setup the stream, does it have
to be programmed at home, or will there be terrestrial communication
that tells the satellite what to stream down? I don't have the
answers here, hopefully future technology will solve them.

Until that point, it would be cool to have a fast wireless connection
from the car to the house, dump my entire music library wirelessly
over to a huge storage device accessible from my radio, and then
provide my entire library as just one more channel for music.

I will end my rambling here. It didn't really end up where I wanted
it to go. Ideas always work must better in the morning before I wake
up enough to realize the technical limitations.

This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun (UB1)

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Good thing I never made any promises as to how often I would update.

My thoughts today turn to content hardware. I avoided saying media players, set-top box, etc. here on purpose. Those are the terms commonly used to describe the box I am envisioning, but they simply aren't adequate. Each describes only a small portion of what I believe this piece of hardware should be doing.

I was going to initially have this be an in-depth post on what I think the box should have, how it should be presented, etc. Instead, I think I'm going to approach it incrementally. A series of posts describing the various features, or products that implement portions of them. I'll include at the end of my wacky subject lines a UB (Ultimate Box) abbreviation on posts that apply to this topic. Eventually, I'll try to create a summary post that ties everything together.

Today I saw a new product that serves a fairly cool purpose. It is the PC-P3LWG/DVD from Buffalo Technology. This device is a progressive-scan DVD player with the following cool features:

• 802.11g wireless connection for streaming audio and video
• Support for a large variety of compression schemes (WMV, WMV HD, DivX, DivX HD, MP3, WMA, etc.)
• Automatic up-conversion on HD-capable sets. (720p and 1080i)
• USB port for connecting additional media locations (Flash drive, Hard drive, auxiliary DVD or CD, etc.)

The price is a bit steep right now at $300, but that isn't completely out of line. This box serves a wide range of purposes for me. It would allow the media to be stored off on a giant server and drive array somewhere else in the house, and not require running additional cabling to the DVD player. I can see where potentially with more online delivery of movies (and a blazing fast Internet pipe) that the compressed HD format files might be very nice.

From an immediate needs standpoint, I like the automatic up-conversion for playing on my HD set. The documentation doesn't mention it either, but this is available through either a DVI or HDMI (can't tell which) connector. It's also nice that this player has a multi-format drive. Many current players including mine only support DVD-Video and DVD-R. This drive support rewritables and +R varieties alike.

I really like the enormous support for compressed media formats as well. I was already impressed when I read the overview, but I was slightly miffed that it didn't support AAC, given my growing iTunes collection. Lo and behold, I read the full specs and find out it supports the following:

• dat, mpg, mpe, mpeg, m2v, m1v, vob, avi, asf, divx, xvid, rmp4, mp4, vro, m4v, m2p, hnl, wmv, wmv hd, divx hd
• mp3, mp2, ogg, wav, aac, wma, pls, m4a, ac3, mp1, mpa, asf, m3u
• jpg, gif, bmp, tif, png

Yeah, that's pretty much the kitchen sink. This thing will display pretty much any form of media that you've got. The glossy sheet also completely ignores the fact that this thing has an Ethernet jack as well. That way if you do have a network drop near your player, you can do your streaming over a nice, fat 100 MBs link.

Here's what I feel is missing from this specific piece of hardware. I won't go into the complete details of what it is lacking to be the Ultimate Box (UB) yet.

1. Why in the hell is the USB port only on the front? I can see using a hard drive far more often than I would use a flash drive, or pull from my camera. At the very least, throw a port on the back as well.
2. The wireless security is fairly primitive. The literature only claims support for WEP 128. I would like 802.1x at the very least, although by now I would expect WPA2 support.

Stay tuned for additional posts fleshing out more details on this Ultimate Box (UB).

Like James Brown I'm sayin' it loud, am I loud enough?

Okay, just a quick informative (maybe) post for fellow bloggers.

First, if you save a post of as a draft, make sure to change the date and time before posting it. Otherwise, it has a timestamp of when the draft was created, not when it was posted. Stupid.

Second, for those who have not found it yet (me until tonight, although I wasn't really looking), there is a spellcheck feature. Click the ABC with the checkmark on the edit bar in the compose window. I've heard other bloggers complain about no spellcheck, and I thought I would look. It was right there staring me in the face the whole time.

Word!

We've got a 288A in progress, send backup. (Sorry Ryan, yet another nonsense title)

First things first. I like making the titles to my post bits of pop culture trivia. They don't tell you anything about the post itself, but hopefully they're interesting. It won't change, so I guess it doesn't matter either way. Now, on to the content.

iTunes is a wonderful thing. I didn't really think this the first few times I used it. I downloaded it as soon as it was available for Windows, but I really didn't care for the user experience at first. I kept it installed simply as a frontend to the iTunes music store where I could purchase music. At the time, I was actually very much liking Windows Media Player. Version 9 was a very good player, and version 10 seemed very nice as well. I liked that it was built-in (No, bundling is not bad in all cases, more on this later...) and didn't require me to install anything extra, and also felt it did everything I needed a player to do.

Over time, I somehow started using iTunes more, and realized that I had stopped using Media Player altogether. I found that once I stopped trying to listen to music the way I thought that I should, and just let iTunes handle everything, everything just became much simpler. I was now able to simply enjoy my music, and found myself forgetting about the software entirely. That is the sign of well written software. I realized at that point too that Media Player was lacking a great deal, and no longer came anywhere near meeting my needs.

I like having all of my music available in the library at all times. Smart playlists make this experience even better, it's about time somebody created an interface like that. Mix and match as many rules as I see fit to tailor my music. Streamlined manipulation of ID3 data and album art. All of the features I had come to expect from a media player as well. It's all good.

I recently found a program called EvilLyrics that provided the ability to display lyrics of the currently playing song as well. Very slick. They provide the hooks into iTunes through a plugin called MultiPlugin. This plugin also changes the taskbar window to show the current song, can skin the titlebar, and all sorts of other cool stuff. I would really like to see the iTunes plugin scene explode, much as I love Firefox extensions.

The few things I would like to see yet in iTunes:

• Ability to auto-populate/auto-correct the ID3 data and album art for my songs.
• Monitor given folders for new music, and add it to the Music Library automatically.
• Filter the Music Library with filters that look like Smart Playlists.

I'm sure there are others I have thought of in the past, but I can't recall now. I will update this list from time to time, and if I find a way to accomplish one of these tasks, I will post that also. Stay Black Burt.