Archives for the 'Gadgets' Category
World’s Smallest MP3 Player
About a month ago, I spotted this mp3 player mentioned on a blog and I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t been marketed yet. I’m guessing this company spent most of their time securing a deal with Wal-Mart because they seem to be the only ones selling this little gem.
mobiBLU’s DAH1500i is now considered the world’s smallest mp3 player, which has a cube shape about the size of a quarter (USD). It comes in two different storage sizes (512MB and 1GB) and six different colors (Black, Pink, Blue, Silver, Orange and Red). For something so small and the technology being used here, you’d think you’d pay $200+, but that is not the case. Wal-Mart is selling the 512MB model for $99 and the 1GB for $129. Obviously the 1GB is the better deal and most everyone else thought so too because it is completely sold out now. Check out the line-up here at WalMart.com.
Digital Phone Service
I’ve been contemplating switching to digital phone service for over a year and now that everyone around me is doing it, I figured now is as good a time as any to ‘jump off the bridge.’ There are definitely more pros than cons especially if you currently subscribe to cable broadband and have cellular phone access. I say cellular phone access because in the rare event you need to make a call and RoadRunner has fouled something up, you can still get in touch with the rest of the world. I’m really looking forward to getting out of the clutches of SBC, who always seemed to be charging way too much for way too little. Bring on Vonage.
Current Gadgets and Computer Lineup
For some reason, I felt like listing these out, then I figured, “why not blog it?”
Gadgets:
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Canon Digital Rebel: 6MP Digital SLR Camera
Sony DSC-S70: 3MP Digital Camera with LQ (Low Quality) MPEG movie recording
Sony DSC-F1: SubMegapixel Digital Camera - The First ever Sony Cybershot
Philips DVP-642: Progressive Scan DVD Player that plays DiVX movies as well as MP3s, MPEGs, and VCDs. (I have two of these)
OmniFi DMS1: Device for streaming audio files via 802.11b or Ethernet to a home audio system
OmniFi DMP1: Device for playing digital music in the car using a 20GB HDD
Rio Chiba 128: Portable MP3 player with an additional 256MB SD Card
Computers:
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AMD64 System: (Windows XP SP2) AMD 64-bit processor (3500+) 1 GB of PC3200 DDR Dual Channel RAM 36GB Western Digital Raptor SATA Drive 120GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive 40GB Seagate IDE Drive Sony 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Sony DVD-ROM Visioneer 9120USB Scanner ATI Radeon 7500 DVI-Out (64MB) ATI HDTV Wonder Samsung 19” Flat Panel Monitor
Reliable Linux System: (Ubuntu 5.04) Intel 1GHz Celeron processor 1 GB of PC133 SDRAM 40GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive 40GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive HP 4x DVD+RW Matrox G450 (32MB) KDS 19” CRT Monitor
Alex’s System: (Windows XP SP2) AMD 2600+ processor 1 GB of PC3200 DDR RAM 13GB Maxtor IDE Drive NEC 4x DVD+RW Nvidia GeForce 2 MX (64MB) Compaq 17” CRT Monitor
Sony Notebook: (Windows XP SP2) 1 Ghz Pentium III-M 256MB SDRAM 40GB HDD 12” Screen
Yamaha Missing The Boat?
Unless this is in Japan dollars (I know there is no such thing), this DVD player will surely ‘miss the boat’ at a high price of $950.00. Sure it plays DiVX, WMA, and MP3, but so does my $70 Philips player. My Philips DVP-642 also has Progressive Scan, so unless this thing is HDTV, or a 700-watt THX receiver built-in, I’m sure DiVX lovers will pass since (lack of spending) money is typically the motive for downloading DiVX movies.
Check out the Yamaha article at Tom’s Hardware.
Nero MediaHome
Nero Ultra Edition comes with a nice collection of software that many times I have no idea what they do because I just never open them if I install them at all. I just stumbled across this package while perusing the media-servers.com forums. Nero MediaHome is an UPnP Media Server capable for serving Music, Photos, and Videos over the network. I have it configured, but not being home right now, I cannot test its capabilities just yet. My OmniFi DMS1 was detected immediately and should be able to browse the directory I shared through MediaHome. This software is similar to MS Media Connect, and neither of them have the full-featuredness of SimpleCenter, the software that comes with the OmniFi unit. SimpleCenter is more of a media manager, but if you don’t need those capabilities, and I do not, then MediaHome and Media Connect should do just fine.
Shared Directories
Status
Windows Media Connect
Coincidentally, I found Windows Media Connect at the same time I purchased my OmniFi Media Streamer (DMS1). This is a very simplistic media software that sets up a share for your compatible streaming device to pull media from. In my case, it is only needed for Music, but it appears to support Photos and Videos as well. Check out the details here. The only bug/feature that hinders my use of the application is that it doesn’t support network drives. Your shared music, must be on a local drive. Unfortunately, I keep all of my music on my Linux box.
This program came already installed with my Windows XP (with SP2) disk, but it is available at the above link for download.
OmniFi DMS1
I got my DMS1 yesterday and got it all hooked up to my stereo and home network via 802.11b. It works very well and I’m very pleased with the quality of the unit. It connects to your music through a Java-based program called SimpleCenter, which retreives and organizes your music for use on your DMS1. This program uses ID3 tags to organize music which is fine except that I’ve been really, really lazy about my ID3 tags and half of my collection is out of whack, so sorting by Genre is far beyond useful at this point. I’m going to spend the next couple of days or so cleaning up my tags and reloading into SimpleCenter.
Before my unit would work via Wifi, I had to connect to my network using Ethernet and using SimpleCenter, upgrade the device firmware. After the upgrage, the Wifi connected without a hitch. I had previously turned off WEP on my Access Point when I had some troubles, but I’ll try enabling WEP tonight and post anything interesting that happens.
Streaming Music OmniFi Style
Well, I just read a post today on bloglines about the OmniFi Digital Media Streamer, a cool product that will stream wma and mp3 files from your local network via Ethernet or 802.11b. The unit comes with the Ethernet dongle, but has USB 1.1 ports on the rear to accomodate a USB Wifi adapter. From what I’ve researched, this device is running a light version of Linux with the 2.4 kernel or something in that area. OmniFi, a Rockford Fosgate Company, has a product for home and for auto use. I’m actually quite interested in both.
Good News: I bought it!
Cybershot DSC-F1 and Linux
After having issues with my DSC-F1 digital camera, which uses a serial cable for transfer, and Windows, I decided to try my luck with Linux. I was beginning to think my camera was a goner since it stopped working under Windows, but much to my surprise, I located a small program called stillgrab. Stillgrab is a very simple command line application for grabbing photos from the DSC-F1 in PMP format and dumping them onto the hard drive in JPG format. Once I figured out which COM port my digicam was on, the program was off and running. It pulled 9 photos from the camera before failing. While searching for some answers, I ran across another application called chotplay, a japanese photo retrieval program. I haven’t tried this program yet, but I’ll be looking into it today.
On another note, tired of dealing with the serial connection, I decided to order a USB-to-Serial cable to see how well the camera will behave going through the different BUS. Of course, this is all assuming that the issue is more a communication problem through the COM port and not a problem with the camera. I’ll post more detail later.
Rio Mp3 Players and Linux
I played with this in the past, but was unsuccessful. This time however, with a newer version and more Linux experience under my belt, I was able to get this working. Using an application called rioutil, a sourceforge project, I was able to interact with my Rio Chiba portable Mp3 player. By interact, I mean I was able to list the songs currently on my player and successfully upload 5 more songs. Though this application uses a command line interface, it doesn’t require that many options. Since it is a fairly simple program, creating a webbased front-end shouldn’t be that difficult. I could also get more guts and attempt to write something in GTK or something. We’ll see. Screenshot of song list.