Squeezebox Boom

Home, media, mp3, network

I’ve been a user of SlimDevices products for a good few years now.  I started off with a Slimp3 and don’t know how I’d be able to manage my music without it.  My spare bedroom has around 1000 CDs stashed away, and I don’t know about you  but I can’t be bothered sifting through them all if I want to listen to a specific song.  Having them all encoded as MP3 and available within seconds is great.

Anyway, I’d been toying with the idea of getting a Squeezebox Boom for quite a while now, and a recent promotion at Amazon meant I could get hold of one for only £129, £50 off the standard price.  Too good to miss.

Although the unit is pretty small, the sound it produces is almost too good to be believable.  Rich bass (doubly surprising from the 2” drivers), crisp high end and a generally tight and well controlled delivery. As you can probably tell, I’m impressed with the sound quality.

All the features you’d expect from this kind of networked music system are there – instant access to all the artists, albums of songs in your collection, random playlists, user-defined playlists and favourite track selection.  In addition, you can also synchronise all the players in your home.  That’s pretty cool if you’re having a party and want the same songs playing throughout the environment, and have them all exactly in sync.

If you’re in the market for a player like this, then I’d really recommend you consider the Squeezebox Boom.

More information : SlimDevices website : SlimDevices Boom Forum : Amazon.co.uk

Windows 7 on the MacBook

.NET, MacBook, Win7, windows

I’ve just installed Windows 7 on my MacBook’s BootCamp partition, and so far it looks great.  I’m not new to Win7, having had it installed in a Parallels VM since it was released.  The experience on the MacBook’s native hardware, though, is so much better.  For a start, it doesn’t die when you try to run (or create) a WPF application.  For a developer, that’s a pretty important thing. :)

One niggle, though, I can’t get audio.  I know there’s a fix, but after inserting my Leopard DVD, the drive has stopped responding.  Now I have to boot back into OS X in order to eject the disc.

Oh well, I’m going back to playing with this OS, and seeing what it can really do.

…with Bells On

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I don’t know if this is just a clever marketing pitch, or if this is genuinely worthy of the attention, but I’m blogging about it anyway.

Morris : A Life With Bells On looks like it could possibly be the next massive British film to come out of left field.  It has pretty much all the elements of a great story.  And morris dancing.  I know – it sounds awful, but if you head over to the site and watch the trailer, maybe, just maybe you’ll agree with me that it looks great.

Unfortunately, the release isn’t quite what the makers hope.  It seems to be available only in a select few cinemas mostly around the south-west.  There’s a petition on the site, though, hopefully to get a nationwide release.

I’ll tell you one more thing – if I am being caught up in some kind of elaborate hoax and this film doesn’t actually exist outside the trailer, then it damn well should.

*UPDATE*

Come on, distributors!  Someone take a chance on this film and get it out nationwide.  Stop being so afraid of “niche”!

Twitter – the new crack?

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<aside>I can’t believe I used that as a subject for this post, but it is oddly appropriate.</aside>

I’ve been getting into Twitter more and more recently.  Not just since the inestimable Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) talked about it on his appearance on the Jonathan Ross (@wossy)) show – I started following him long before that, and was able to read about the process of filming the show, too.  It’s hard to describe why it is so addictive to hear what someone you’ve never met is up to, what problems they’re having on the way to the airport, or how they’re snowed in.

I guess the best description I’ve seen is by Scott Hansellman in his post How to Twitter – First Steps and a Twitter Glossary

I recommend you have a read and see if tweeting is for you, but be warned, you may never want to leave!

iLife ’09 – a quick first look

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Yesterday evening I picked up a copy of iLife ’09 from my local Apple store.  I’d been waiting for it to be released since the keynote earlier in January, and now it was finally in my hands.

Installation was as simple as you’d expect from an Apple product, but it does completely blow away any previous versions of iLife.  If you want to downgrade, make sure you have the original media in order to do so.

I only really use iPhoto and GarageBand, and as a result, these are the only two components I looked at last night.

iPhoto: The latest version of iPhoto supports a couple of nice new features – locations and faces.  When you first start up the app, it converts your old iPhoto library into the new format, and then scans each picture for faces.  It actually does a pretty good job of detecting and grouping faces – I was particularly impressed that it managed to keep track of the growth of my nephew from a few month old up to his current age of around 20 months.  Tag one photo of the person, and all others with the same face are also tagged.

The mapping feature is also pretty cool.  If your camera supports GPS data, iPhoto will read this data and associate the photos with locations on a (Google-provided) map within the application.  If it doesn’t support GPS, you can add the location data manually.  Searching for a location is very easy, just type in a city and it will suggest all the possible matches.  Even better, you can specify more specific locations (e.g. “Sea World, Orlando”) and these will (mostly) appear along with the correct location on a map.

Garageband: I didn’t have much time last night to delve into all the new features here, but I had a quick poke around with the new tutorial elements.  The much-vaunted celebrity lessons are available from launch day, with UK pricing for this premium content initially set at £3.99 per lesson.  Pretty good value if you want to learn one of the ten songs available from the original musicians involved.  Also available are quite a few more general guitar and piano lessons.  These are free of charge.

Tonight, I hope to play with some of the new guitar amp and stompbox effects that come with the product, so I’ll hopefully be able to post about them in the next day or two.

Overall, my first impression of the upgrade is very favourable.  The interface is familiar enough to not cause concern while also giving access to the new features.  As you’d expect from Apple, it’s very intuitive and gives a helping hand where it thinks you may need it.

Initial score : 10/10, but what do I know?  I’m just a user. :)

Another year almost over

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In a few hours another year will be behind us, and what a year it has been.  

2008 has seen me change jobs, take a radically different direction in the industry in which I work and start to get my personal life a little more organised.  Let’s see what 2009 has to offer.

Best wishes to you all.

Hashtags problem

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A few days ago, I learned about hashtags and their role within the Twitter microblogging platform.  Very useful for some pruposes, although I accept that some people have issues with their use.

I thought I’d experiment with the service, and followed the instructions (basically, follow the hashtags user, wait for them to automatically follow you, and then create a new tag by prefacing a meaningful word an a tweet with a hash sign [that’s the one you crazy Americans call the pound sign ;) ] ).

All was well until creating the tag.  Nothing happened.  No tag was created.  Perhaps I’m missing an important step here, but I just can’t get it to work.  Can anyone shed any light on where I may be going wrong?

Upgraded the MacBook Hard Drive

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After getting perilously close to a full disk in OS X, I decided to upgrade the drive in my MacBook yesterday.  The process was incredibly simple (are you listening Microsoft?)

  1. Physically swap out the hard drives
  2. Place the original drive in an external caddy
  3. Boot the MacBook from the USB device (hold down Alt while booting to choose the boot device)
  4. Run SuperDuper! to clone the USB drive to the internal one
  5. Reboot.
Simple.  I now have 320GB to play with, rather than the originally supplied 80GB.  
Next step – Bootcamp.