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The biggest problem of course with moving to digital is how are you going to get the videos or music to where you want them to be.   I’ve really fought with this problem literally for over a decade now (yes in 1995 I had a computer hooked up to a stereo and a TV).

The last incarnation I was using was a first generation Mac Mini.  The problem was that the streaming wasn’t fast enough for the Mac Mini (ironically every other computer in the house streamed just fine).   So I would have to copy video files over to the computer manually to get completely stutter free playback.  I dealt though until just a couple months ago.

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In November I purchased my first original X-Box (yes I’m behind the times).   I had always wanted to run XBOX Media Center on it, but didn’t want to go through the soldering effort to put a mod chip in, or track down esoteric software with the action replay kit to soft mod it.  I did manage to find instructions on how to mod the x-box and install XBMC with things I already had, such as a computer and screw drivers.  The most frightening thing about it was hot swapping a live IDE hard drive.   Years of tech work has told me this is a no-no, but I did it anyway and it worked.

I even went out and purchased a remote control for the X-Box and can now browse from the couch.   I went back and forth on whether to get a wireless controller or the remote, I settled on the remote because it was cheaper and more intuitive for anyone other then myself.

For MP3 playback we sometimes use the X-Box installation, but more then likely we are either using ipods, our N810′s, or the whole main floor audio we have going.   In the basement we have a computer working as an MP3 jukebox.  Off of this machine there is 3 different sets of speakers (one is the main stereo system) – that can cover the whole first floor of the house in zoned audio.    Each room has it’s own volume control and it works fairly well.  In the next year I will more then likely start running the cables upstairs to work on whole house audio.

This post has multiple parts to it, so fair warning I’m guessing this one is going to be long.   Lately I’ve been more and more annoyed at traditional hard copy media.  It’s a pain in the butt to deal with and takes up way too much physical space (for those that know me you find that sentence greatly amusing).

Pictures

This started happening over the last year with photo albums.   Photo albums are terrible.   It means normally that one person has a copy of the image and you can’t share them.  It is essentially technology of the last generation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in having prints, but the pictures themselves.

I’ve made it my mission to start getting the family photos and scanning them in.   I’ve managed to get most of my father’s photos from the era he was with my mother.   The ones I’m missing are any he has of the kids hanging on the walls in his house.   My next run is going to be the pictures from his current family (so a good 15-16 years worth of pictures to go).

My grandmother on the other hand has been very tightfisted with her photos.  I can understand her being protective, but so far I’ve managed to get 59 photos out of her to scan (out of literally over a 1000-2000).   I have managed to scan my photo album, and more recently used the digital SLR and took pictures of my scrap book from high school.   So both of these can be tucked away in boxes that I don’t need to look at and take up physical space in my house.

All the photos I have are now uploaded to Flickr.   You can also read about my photo sharing issue with my mother over here.

Continued tomorrow in part 2

My complete and daily online activity for you to go all voyeuristic on.

	8:00am	Creeva shared a link on Google Reader. Enjoy the Sounds of Classic Arcade Videogames
	8:00am	Creeva scrobbled 2 songs on Last.fm. (Hide Details) leolaporte – TWiT 180: How Is Babby Formed leolaporte – TWiT 181: I Am Not Spock
	8:22am	Creeva posted 8 items. (Hide Details) LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar [none] [none] [none] We Are Having A Baby [none] [none] [none]
	9:30am	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent tired and cranky.
	10:59am	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar – http://s3nt.com/da0x.
	11:00am	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar – http://s3nt.com/da0x
	11:02am	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar
	11:27am	Creeva posted 14 photos on Flickr. (Hide Details)
	11:27am	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. 02-26-09_1122
	11:38am	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. 02-26-09_1128
	11:54am	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar
	12:36pm	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent so much to do, so little time.
	1:24pm	Creeva dugg 12 links on Digg. (Hide Details)
	1:24pm	Creeva dugg 2 links on Digg. (Hide Details) Riding the Rails? Know Your Hobo Signs (PIC) Will Ferrell & Mark Wahlberg Team Up For A-Team Spoof
	2:34pm	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent water – it does a body good.
	2:48pm	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent This weeks chain mail of the week is about a drug recall from 2000 – not even worth blogging about, so just sending out an fyi.
	4:56pm	Creeva posted 2 items. (Hide Details) LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar We Are Having A Baby
	5:55pm	Creeva posted 2 items. (Hide Details) LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar We Are Having A Baby
	5:55pm	Creeva published 4 blog posts. (Hide Details) LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar We Are Having A Baby We Are Having A Baby LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar
	5:55pm	Creeva updated their status on Facebook. Brent We Are Having A Baby – http://s3nt.com/dbme.
	5:56pm	Creeva bookmarked 14 links on Delicious. (Hide Details) No description available. LeVar Burton – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia No description available. No description available. Burton’s Star on Flickr – Photo Sharing! LeVar Burton — Because 140 characters isn’t always enough Diggnation — Revision3 The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte Twitter / BrentSpiner Twitter / creeva Twitter / levarburton LeVar Burton Adobe – Adobe Flash Player
	5:56pm	Creeva posted 6 tweets on Twitter. (Hide Details) tired and cranky LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar – http://s3nt.com/da0x so much to do, so little time water – it does a body good This weeks chain mail of the week is about a drug recall from 2000 – not even worth blogging about, so just sending out an fyi We Are Having A Baby – http://s3nt.com/dbme
	5:56pm	Creeva posted 6 Jaikus on Jaiku. (Hide Details) tired and cranky LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar – http://s3nt.com/da0x so much to do, so little time water – it does a body good This weeks chain mail of the week is about a drug recall from 2000 – not even worth blogging about, so just sending out an fyi We Are Having A Baby – http://s3nt.com/dbme
	5:56pm	Creeva posted 2 items. (Hide Details) LeVar Burton, The Internet’s Latest Superstar We Are Having A Baby
	5:57pm	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. We Are Having A Baby
	6:54pm	Creeva posted a note on Tumblr. We Are Having A Baby

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A little over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiquitous and people cared more about having actual bits of paper for the monetary worth, I had a discussion with a friend about how the world would  eventually move to a cashless society.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a venture going forward.   He did have one good point in his argument – anonymity.

He believed due to corruption (or anything else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for citizens to have an anonymous usage of money in society.   I had several more arguments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity factor, especially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity factor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effectively will destroy anonymity in a cash based society.   The technology was developed as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowledge in hand we can make some assumptions.  The first is that the dust can be used to verify the authenticity of the bills.   The second, when it is truly embedded in the bills and not sprinkled into batches of money – that the RFID will contain a serial that will match the serial number on the bill itself.

If the dollar can “beacon” the serial number, then how does it become anonymous.   In theory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but eventually that will no longer work either.  The next argument would be that only the government has the readers – this would be a “for how long argument”.   Think of the theft and tracking of the flow of money analysis that could be gained solely on a research perspective.  I can see in 20-30 years as the technology becomes cheaper and centralized databases are more available – that this type of tracking could be the norm.

I’ve written about software currently that can track the flow of money, there is no reason we wouldn’t be able to see real time tracking of every single penny in circulation by utilizing this technology.   The only thing stopping it right now is cost, which will drop.

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We hear time and time again about all the newspapers and magazines going out of business.   How much longer will they survive in the same sense that we have seen during our lifetime?  More importantly how are we going to explain them.  In one sense we can it would be easy to explain them since we’ll still have them in libraries aging the perfect yellow gracefully, surviving on microfiche since the companies and libraries don’t seem too interested in digitally converting them, and being used as padding in boxes in the dark reaches of the attic.   So there will be some visual styling and physical copies that they can examine.   What was there purpose though?

We will explain to them it was to deliver news to the general public so they could be informed about the world around them.  It was in the pre digital era (which may as well be prehistoric to them) so these papers were printed out by the millions on a daily basis so there was a communal knowledge shared amongst the populace.   That on Sunday’s we got full colored comics to entertain the kids and full color coupons to entertain the families.   That we got our daily stock quotes from it.   If we wanted to sell something in the town next to ours we used the classified system.   If someone died we would be alerted.

Let’s look at this though – I’m thirty-two years old, so we are going to speak of this in the context of my lifetime.   Why did we have newspapers, except because we didn’t want to read a chapter of a book.   News was piped into our lives via the nightly news on TV and all day via radio.   It would have been simple for towns to start a local (by local I mean town level) radio station for news, classifieds, and obituaries.   Most municipalities already do that though through the local cable company. I remember people buying “classified” ads on it.   Obituaries were missing from that system.   So what have we left, stock quotes and obituaries?  This transition could have been done literally decades ago.   How about an all stock quote radio station?

Let’s look as some other aspects of this picture – in theory most of us are evil human beings since we don’t utilize public transportation  and drive our oil guzzling vehicles around the country daily.   What about all the trees and wilderness decimated by using wood pulp to supply the newspapers (millions a day) for the little bit of news that we couldn’t get somewhere else?  This was rampant going well into the age of recycling, if it wasn’t for the ubiquity of the Internet we would still be doing it today.  What example does this set.   We could have used hemp as paper, since hemp is infinitely more renewable then wood pulp paper, but we didn’t.   Some people didn’t like that idea and wanted to increase their own wealth.  This is also not to forget all the oil trucks used for transporting, the coal and oil used to power these places that printed them.

The other thing I can see my child asking when he becomes aware, doesn’t it give too much power to one entity?  Some towns managed to have two newspapers that provided coverage for their area, but what we are stuck with is just two viewpoints.   What if there was a story that neither wanted to print, in that era it may has well never have happened if it didn’t make TV, radio, or newsprint.   History and stories have been lost for decades since the story wouldn’t get more readers, so these companies could not sell more advertising.  Then I would also have to explain the theory of Yellow Journalism.

Now I’m sure in the age of digital living that these children and grand-children will understand advertising sponsorship to the news.  What they will have a harder time is news that was set typographically so that it couldn’t be manipulated.  A system where you had to buy the paper just to know the news (a news tax as such).   A system where if you wanted to sell something you were lucky if you had the audience of a fifty-mile radius.  That we gave the control of so much to so few and enjoyed it….  That we were so wasteful in our resources, when looking back it was just pure gluttony.   I’m not sure how they will ever understand.

I can say I used wrestle the comics from my grandfather as he read the paper so I could enjoy them, and that is a fond family memory.  I can’t say looking back that even I understood their purpose.      This story is coming from someone who was a newspaper boy, yet has never had a newspaper subscription in my life.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the NYPD want the ability to turn disable cellphone coverage in the case of a terrorist attack. Now it seems that states and local governments are fighting for their own ability to do that.   In my previous story I pointed how fruitless and ineffective it would truly be during a terrorist attack, I think it’s insane.   The question I have now has anyone thought about how this is a terrorist attack against our own people?

The idea of a terrorist is that they use fear as an attack weapon.   If there is an emergency going on and people can not get through to there loved ones that this wouldn’t inspire fear.   Heck it may scare some people if they can’t send a message about the emergency to Twitter or Facebook.  We’ve all seen enough movies that we are ingrained as a people if hte enemy is going to attack they will cut off our communications so we can not coordinate a counter offensive properly.   This is an of it’s self stupid since something will always get through, example Independence Day and the Morse Code maneuver.  Yet this would scare and dare I say terrorize people since not only would you be scared since you can’t call, no one around you can call and is freaking out also.

This is a sad side effect of living in the era of constant communication, we take it for granted.   When it would be ripped away form us, and we wouldn’t know what is going on, what ideas is that going to put in your mind.  People in the middle america may think a cell tower is down, what if they drive an hour – even the most idiotic person isn’t going to think all the towers are down.   Some people may think since I’m saying that the government has an inadvertant take on an idea that could become a terrorist weapon that I’m a nut job.   I however think this is a fairly obvious look at human psychology.

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Why are MSRP’s so far off of the real price of an item?  Even non-internet shoppers are quite aware that you almost never pay the MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) for anything.   It’s not even their fault 99% of everything in life is priced below MSRP.   Let’s look at the big things first, with the exception of the buy one get one free deals that seem to be in vogue with Kia there is almost no one on the planet that expects to pay the sticker price on a new car.  There are times that in retail companies have been caught trying to control the price of their wares, but in normal scenarios it doesn’t work out.

My problem however is when they say for example a 2 GB flash memory card has an MSRP of $20.00.   Now almost everywhere in the planet you can get this same card for $9.99.    Most stores will advertise that the price is fifty percent off the MSRP and it’s a huge discount off.   Unfortunately they are merely price matching.   In some scenarios the vendors themselves  try this tactic.  Now if a vendor is selling something (full time mind you not a once in awhile sale) for $9.99, how can they say their MSRP is $20.00.   Sorry just another advertisement about MSRP and comparing the “low price” you can get it for (standard price) bragging about the sale set me off.

Sorry for the rant.

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The stupid mile long pier.    It’s located in Huron, Ohio and at the end of the pier is the Huron Lighthouse.   Growing up in Vermilion, Ohio there wasn’t much to do that we didn’t do on a regular basis.  One of the odd-ball things we did was go out to the mile long pier.   The official name wasn’t the mile long pier, but it is supposedly a mile long – so the local nickname stuck.  For some reason the trips were a bit more frequent once I managed to get the woman who would one day be my wife.

My wife always enjoyed the mile long pier, except when she managed to get to the end of it she had to use the restroom.  This almost always made it a pain since as soon as we made to the end of the end of the pier we immediately had to turn around and head back in most occasions.   When a group of us wanted to head out there we started making her use the restroom at the Riverview Bowling alley just up the street from the pier.

It was one of those places that youth go and hang out in groups.   Usually the minimum number of people we took was three, but I can think of a couple times it was almost a dozen of us.   Climbing from rock to rock to make it to the end of the pier.  Since most the time it was in the evening or close to it, we watched the sunset down.   Otherwise we just headed out and stared into the darkness that was the water of Lake Erie at night time.

Was it a fantastic experience, not in anything that I say that you must do.  It was a time period where the friends and the memories make it important.   Too many times the pier started off as a springboard for other activities.   Whether it was friends in high school or friends from my early twenties.   It was a gathering spot of sorts.  Eventually I’ll get around to heading back and taking some pictures – for now it has to exist solely in memories.

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I’m going to go out on a limb and call out ages here, I could be wrong.   The first time my brother operated a vehicle he was four years old, which would make me around nine at the time.  The location – my grandparent’s house.  My grandparent’s driveway used to be on a hill.   I always enjoyed just speeding a bike down that hill – if I had to guess it was probably about five cars deep.  So it was about fifty feet long with about twenty of that being mostly flat.

We were getting ready to leave my grandparent’s house and my mother sent my brother and myself out to the car.   Now since this was along time ago (in a galaxy far far away?) some details on which family car this was has been lost in the ages.  I remember one car and different parents remember others.   I’m fairly sure at the age my brother was he doesn’t remember which car it was at all.   What I can tell you is that it was a stick shift.

I was sitting in the back seat of the car and my brother was climbing around the front of the car.   I was reading a book or comic book in the back seat of the car and I noticed my mother coming out of my grandparent’s garage and walking towards the car.   At some point in this my brother had removed the parking break and managed to get the car into neutral.  The car started rolling down the hill.   My mother saw this and started running towards the car.  She made it to the driver’s side car door, but she couldn’t open it.  Somehow my brother had managed to lock the car door.  I was in the back seat frozen in fear (shock?) at what was going on.   My mother was yelling at me to jump in the front seat and stop the car or unlock the door.   I just couldn’t move.

Down and down the hill we went, I know that it took less then a minute or so , but at the time looking back it felt a lot longer.   We passed the end of the driveway and were moving into the street.   We crossed the street and ended up in the yard of the house across the street (luckily my grandmother lived in a cul-de-sac and there was no cross traffic).  In the yard across the street my brother managed to scratch the side of the car across a telephone pole, just missing hitting it by inches.

Since he didn’t hit the pole I guess you could say his first experience was a success.   That isn’t what it felt like for me sitting in the back seat.

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The other day I was browsing Craig’s List and noticed a listing for some free software.   It wasn’t anything I was interested in, but I did stop an think about it.   We talk about all the time about verifying where you download software from.   We hear all the time about pirated software that looks the same as legitimate software.     So why would you take free software from Craig’s List?

I guess this is just more an observation.  I’m just pointing out common sense that people should be thinking.  I’m just trying to point out that there is no such thing as a more trustable anonymous source.   It would be easy to compromise a computer by offering free software on Craig’s List and manipulating it before handing it out.

I’m not saying not to take – just think twice.

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Google reader, I love you – I also hate you.    You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface.     I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service – a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into.  You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging – is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue:

Saved feed items by date – if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from – by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down.   Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. – when all I want to do is read stories from feed78.     There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject.   I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva

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For all those Trekkies out there (or do you really prefer Trekkers?) Brent Spiner just joined Twitter today.  I looked at who he was following, and there we get Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton.  So now you can get your Trek on with Twitter.   Go forth and follow – and while you are there you can give a little follow to me also.   Please let me know if you find any other Star Trek performers on twitter and I’ll update this post as necesssary.

I look at my data on Flickr and I get overwhelmed.  I’m missing meta data, missing tags, missing proper titles.   Though when you are looking at organizing and maintaining  over 3000 images anything you can do to start to organize them can get a little overwhelming.

I’m assuming the number of pictures I’m going to upload to Flickr this year to my account is going to at least double.   That means if I do not get a handle it on it soon, I’m going to be looking at 6000 photos to edit by this time next year, and I think that is being selective.

How do the rest of you handle problems of this magnitude?