June 2011

One of the really bad jokes that is omnipresent in the Manor is how much money I spend in iTunes. It’s really pitiful if you think about it. Having worked in radio for 15 years, I tend to remember every one hit wonder that hit the Top 40 stage anywhere from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s. I have this habit of remembering a song, getting it stuck in my head and subsequently buying it on iTunes. Then I’ll play it a dozen times and forget about it completely, the ear bug having been completely squashed. It can be (and is) an expensive habit and something that I needed to rectify. There was the Great Zune Experiment last year, where I bought a Zune and used the Zune monthly subscription service to satisfy these musical needs. The Zune is a nifty little device, but it seemed like every track I looked up on the Zune Marketplace would show the album cover, artist and everything and then come with a little note to the side “Not Available.” Why show the damn thing if you’re not going to make it available?

I have mentioned before that I follow several tech podcasts (net casts) from the TwIT network, more specifically iPad Today, MacBreak Weekly and This Week In Google. I will admit that I am a little hard to deal with in the morning and this mood doesn’t usually dissipate until 11:00 or so, but I have been finding it hard to get through the MacBreak Weekly episodes lately, especially since there are screeching Edith Bunker impersonations (no one but Jean Stapleton can do Edith Bunker), hosts that have apparently not prepared for the episode and are subsequently asking repetitive or downright moronic questions, instances of ultra hamming it up with needless accents and carrying on more appropriate for a Top 40 Morning Zoo show and singing and dancing to a song called “Rat Hole”.

But I digress as I just had to get that little venting out of my system.

The reason I bring up the music consumption habit and the podcasts in tandem is because amongst all the inane chatter I got through this morning, the always lovely Veronica Belmont brought up the fact that she has moved away from using iTunes altogether over the past six months and is now using a service called Rdio. She mentioned that she has used Pandora and a couple of the other alternative music services. Like me, she mentioned that Pandora seems to play the same songs over and over again. (I have an additional problem with Pandora in that as the playlist progresses the tempo gets slower and slower and slower until I am snoring through a suicide inducing track that is suspiciously part of what should be a 70s disco love fest).

Again, I digress.

Rdio is brilliant. It is a subscription service that lets you stream music through a web browser, to a whole assortment of mobile devices or through native applications built for your favorite computing platform. Well, not entirely native, some apps are written through Adobe Air, but that’s better than nothing.

The best part of Rdio is that you can store tracks on your mobile device for offline listening, perfect for those that are copping some wifi in the office and lose connectivity once in a while. (I don’t know who would do that).

There are a couple of subscription price levels. I believe the most expensive is $9.99 per month for unlimited offline music downloads, which is far less than what I was paying for Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and a hell of a lot cheaper than my monthly iTunes habit.

An added bonus for Rdio is that it has social networking features built in, much like the Ping service on iTunes. So I can see what my Twitter followers are listening to if they use Rdio and then try those songs out. In fact, I took a look at what Veronica Belmont was listening to and discovered Foster The People, which is an awesome band that I highly recommend. They had me bopping in my cubicle this morning. I even downloaded the Scissor Sisters, which I haven’t done on iTunes because they keep getting moved to the back of the “purchasing agenda”.

I think everyone will hear a sigh of relief from my husbear when I settle on using Rdio for my music listening needs. If I find anything that breaks the deal I’ll be sure to share my findings here, but I have a good feeling that this service is going to be a keeper for my musical needs.

Now, if I could just find a way to avoid the bad stand up routines on the TwIT podcasts.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

So I have had a couple of people ask how the CatCam works. Here’s the short version of it.

In the kitchen we have a MacMini acting as our kitchen television. This allows us to stream internet content, Netflix, Hulu, etc. to a new 19-inch display, which is a vast improvement over the 13-inch television that used to sit in the corner. The remote included with the MacMini allows us to move around the FrontRow software, much like you would on an original Apple TV. The MacMini isn’t really anything exceptional; it’s several years old and is the first incarnation of the Intel-based MacMinis. In fact, it’s not even a Core2 Duo, I believe they call it a “Core Solo”.

Since the MacMini is a full blown computer, it can do a whole lot more! We had an original firewire iSight camera that was left over from my old PowerMac G4 from back in the day, so I decided to hook it up and see if it works. It works beautifully, as you can see.

I found a nifty piece of software called EvoCam. EvoCam has a bunch of features that I haven’t even begun to explore yet, but I like it because it has motion detection and timestamping. It also has the ability to upload pictures to the webhost that serves up jpnearl.com. The cam is always active, looking for some sort of motion in front of Tom’s food and water bowls. When it senses motion, it snaps a picture and overwrites the previous picture on the server. That way, I can easily display it using one line of HTML code on the webpage, instead of having to accommodate different filenames.

The motion sensor is looking at a particular spot, so from time to time you’ll notice that one of us walking around in the kitchen will trip the sensor, even when Tom is somewhere else in the house napping or whatnot. I have reminded everyone of this fact so that everyone can make sure they’re properly clothed when passing through the kitchen (Tom included). So far the system is working pretty good. The software is currently on a 15 day free trial. I’m going to mess around with it a little more before deciding if I want to plonk down the money to buy it or try something else.

The things we do on a rainy day.

I’m a geek. I added a new feature to the sidebar. It’s down near the bottom. It looks something like this.