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I wrote about the PepperPad last year when it was introduced at Demo2004. Neat idea - a simple well built tablet to use for email, web browsing, etc. around the house. Ran Linux and Firefox.
I never ended up buying one like I thought I would, and I guess I was not alone. The thing died in the market and PC Mag just named it one of the worst products of 2005.
Achoo.
I've been a big fan of this program for a while - sophisticated tagging, decent level of image manipulation and repair, clean printing options . . .
But tonight this thing has taken revenge and has cost me and my wife several hours of hassle.
At first I created an album by pulling in images across the home network. I keep all of the images on the Media Center PC in another room. However, "PSA" was really sluggish in working with these photos over the network, to the point of being unusable, so the next night I decided to just copy the files locally and create a new album. Photos imported nicely, but thing has hung several times now, after looking at an image, scrolling through images, to the point where I would rather just wipe it from the drive forever rather than put the time into debugging it.
Aaargh!
The sluggishness is not likely the network, then, but some corrupted crapola in the app itself.
I know - perhaps the app figured out that I now work at Microsoft?! But the joke is on Adobe since I will load up Digital Image Suite tomorrow.
I was on a panel recently at Fall Focus in San Jose, CA talking about mobile media. After the talk I met someone from Sonic Breakdown.
This service is pretty cool and falls under the category "why hasn't someone done this before?" Basically they have a download that scans your music directory and then notifies you about upcoming CDs, concerts and news about these artists. They generate a few different RSS feeds that are personalized to your music collection. Yowza! I am digging that.
I have hundreds of artists in my collection so the news stream could be a bit too much. One thing to tweak would be if they prioritized artists that had tracks rated at four or five stars rather than no rating. You could assume that I would be more interested in highly rated artists. That complicates the scanning algorithm but other than that I think this is a neat service (and it's free, ad funded).
When I started working at Microsoft about six months ago I started a blog there. I thought I could have a Microsoft-centric blog there and keep Digital Dad here. However, it's just not working out and I've decided to consolidate it all here at "DDad." That means these posts may lean toward Microsoft stuff occasionally but I will categorize accordingly.
In other news, I've been awarded the registered trademark for Digital Dad so from now on it's technically Digital Dad®. Hoorah.
Funny post over at The Onion - an excerpt:
"On standard 4:3 televisions, ADHDTV programs will be shown in letterbox format, with the top and bottom of the screen alternately filled with bright, flittering butterflies, undulating rainbow-colored patterns, and singing hamsters in top hats."
When they launched they were going to charge $10 a month. I never got a bill, assuming it was because I was so special. In fact, they never invoiced anyone and now the service is free. Orb will get paid by serving up ads on the Orb site, and maybe even within the content. You need a PC for Orb, unlike Slingbox, but hey it's free!
I installed Orb on my Media Center PC and it is quite slick, although the web based navigation is still a bit cumbersome (and the UI looks like it was designed by engineers). One great scenario is that I can whip out my IBM X41 and view a recorded show anywhere in the house (or on the road). My kids can even catch up on some Fairly Odd Parents on the Mac G4 upstairs.
The quality is quite reasonable over 11b WiFi (10Mbps). I've used my Windows Mobile phone to watch shows using WiFi but i suspect that GPRS would be too slow. The music functions for listening remotely are cumbersome - I'd like something that integrates better with the library features of Windows Media Player, but hey - it's free!
I 'm thinking of switching to an over-the-air antenna for my HDTV, away from Comcast HD cable.
Several reasons:
The negative is that I won't get HBO in HD. I'll live.
As part of this research I found a great site called HDTV Pub. You can put in your zip code and get reviews of antenna coverage and service providers in your neighborhood. I found a guy who bought a Zenith HDTV antenna and is getting outstanding reception in my zip code - hooray!
My new Sony Media Center PC is "wicked cool" but I'm a bit disappointed that I can't easily get high quality audio out of it.
That's not entirely true - it has a optical digital audio out connect that sounds great - unfortunately my receiver (Denon, sweet) only has one optical digital audio input, currently used by my DVD player (or it could be used by my Comcast HD box!). I need a three-way optical audio input switcher, which I don't think exists.
Short of that the Sony only has a headphone out jack - not even RCA left/right connectors! Boo. The headphone out jack is ok in a pinch but it carriers an amplified signal, which means you'll be getting some distortion with that audio output as well.
So short of that jack, I have, well, jack.
