Sonos First Impressions

First impression: It's awesome.  End of post.  Good day.

Oh, you wanted more detail?  Okay, so I just bought a Sonos Play:3 and Bridge unit.  I've been looking for something forever that would stream music over wifi from my nas, and let me control what's playing with my Android tablet.  It's been such an obsession that I've even learned to develop Android applications and read through the specifications of the DLNA protocol.  Seriously.  And then this Sonos company comes along and builds a slick product exactly to my wishes and desires.

The Good:
It works, and it's easy.  The library software chewed through my collection (40k songs, ~300GB) in about 40 minutes.  Very nice, as lots of software will choke on libraries that large (cough, iTunes, cough).  The Android app is eminently usable.  I just got it all set up this morning, and I'm already scheming on buying another Play:3 or Play:5 to add to the network.  The bridge unit even has a two-port switch on the back, so it effectively doesn't burn a switch port.

The Bad:
I'm hoping the Android tablet app ends up looking more like the iPad app as they develop it further.  From what I've seen, the iPad app is a beautiful multi-paned affair that looks basically like the Mac or Windows Sonos console.  The Android app is perfectly serviceable, though.

The Ugly:
Found out my wireless router (an Actiontec MI424WR) won't propagate multicast between its wired and wireless interfaces, so I had to go buy an el-cheapo Linksys router (a WRT120N) and set it up as a layer 2 access point.

In Conclusion:

Update Jan 7, 2012:  Downloaded Patton Oswalt's new album off Amazon this morning.  Went and hit the "Update Music Library" button and hopped in the shower.  It was done rescanning the entire library and had made the album accessible by the time I got out of the shower.  With iTunes, I would've had to add the album manually, or delete and recreate my library from scratch over the course of about 8 hours.  Sonos, you rock.

Medicine

Went to Walgreen's, got my prescription flavored with "Ghoulish Grape."  Later that night, when a ghost grape visited me, I couldn't stop screaming in terroir.

Lowe's Attack

So I've been fixing up the baseboards in my house.  There are a lot of them that are pretty messed up, having been removed and nailed back on due to floor work.

Anyway, I had to run to Lowe's this weekend to get one more piece of trim.  I picked it out, carried it over to the saw, and went looking for a helpful associate.

"No sir, the saw is down"

"No, we can't use any of the circular saws in the store"

"No, we can't use a handsaw either"

"No, you can't bring your own saw"

Well, crap.  There's no fitting a 16-foot board into my car.

As I left, something shiny glinted from the corner of my eye: an electrical plug cover just by the door.  A plan quickly formed itself.  I'd go get my circular saw and a couple of cinder blocks, buy the long piece of trim and cut it up just outside the door like a parking lot ninja.

"I'd better check the plug to make sure it's right," I said to myself.  I went over to open it up.

In addition to a few 110V plugs was a large nest of wasps.  They weren't happy.  Also, my opening the cover knocked their nest onto the ground.  They got even less happy.

So I ran away, and bought my trim at Home Depot.  So much for being a parking lot home improvement ninja.

Projects Lately

Fixing the Trim
When we put in tile awhile back, I put the same baseboards back into the bathrooms and kitchen, and they looked terrible.  I'm finally getting around to replacing them.   Pics coming.

Android Progamming
Built my first hello world app last weekend.  Reading the O'Reilly Android book now.  Very fun stuff. 

Socks.  Yes, socks.
I've got a couple of pairs of running socks that I've owned for about six years, since I was living in Dallas.  This morning I put one on and it felt very weird, like it was pulling on the wrong side of my foot.  After a moment, light broke free of the clouds and granted me wisdom: These socks are left-right differentiated, and I was feeling the arch support on the wrong side of my foot.  One has a grey logo, and the other a black so you can tell them apart.  I've owned them for six years and had no idea (granted, I don't wear them often).
 

Vegas

Just got back late last night from a week in Las Vegas for EMC World.  A few observations:

• At the Las Vegas airport, every restaurant tries to sell you four dollar shots of liquor with everything you order.  Not "Would you like a four-dollar shot of bourbon?"  No, it's "Would you like a four-dollar shot of liquor?"  That's both skeezy and ambiguous. 
• A lot of people who happen in Vegas should stay in Vegas
• Went to Delmonico - best meal I had all week.  Emeril Lagasse can cook.
• Found Tiffany an Elvis bobblehead.  It was an epic quest.  After hitting every tchotchke shop on a mile long section of the strip, I looked up and saw a hundred-foot Elvis on the side of the Aria, bathed in sunlight.  And lo, there is an entire store of Elvis-themed crap inside.
• I found myself constantly wondering whether scantily-clad women were ladies of the night, or just girls who decided to wear six-inch heels on their trip to Vegas.  And you can never really find out: It's like asking a fat woman if she's pregnant. Bad idea. Some things are best left a mystery.
• People often compare Las Vegas convention centers to airplane hangars.  I disagree.  I think they're for when you're like "Oh man, I need a building to put all my airplane hangars in!"
• Las Vegas also has armies of cooks and waiters that can usher 8000 people into one of those airplane hangar-hangars, and feed them all in like 30 minutes.  It's a well-oiled machine with layers of logistics, and it's a beautiful thing to watch.
• It's good to be back and play with Raz again.

Clamz MP3 Downloader

Just installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my shiny new SSD drive (I was going to have to double-install Windows 7, since I only had an upgrade - huge pain)

Anyway, it turns out that Amazon hasn't ever released a version of their MP3 downloader for 64-bit platforms.  So after some searching, I found clamz, which is a command line Amazon downloader.

The only deal is, when you go to the man page, it has no description of how to configure its config file.  So here's how I think it's done, after diving into the code. 

ForbidChars "!\"$*:;<>?\\`|~"
OutputDir "/nfs/music/${album_artist}/${album}"
NameFormat "${tracknum}. ${album_artist} - ${title}.${suffix}"
AllowUppercase True

At least I think that's right.  I haven't been able to find an example online anywhere.  So I'm going to go purchase an album and report back.

If every other mistake I made in Linux cost me five bucks, I would have been evicted from my house by now. 

Reading List #2

Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Yup, it's good.  As usual, KSR is dense with ideas, which is really the whole reason to read sci-fi - without cool ideas, it's just space opera, man.  In this one he explores the societal impacts of hyper-longevity, the development of systems of government, the impermanence of memory, and much more. 

Gideon's Sword, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Breezed through this one in a couple days.  It almost seems like the authors are intentionally trying to make the sort of character and story that can be easily turned into a marketable movie.  And hey, there's nothing wrong with that - good on ya, guys.  I was taken out of the story a bit at the end - a character asks about some gaping plot holes, and Hari Seldon Eli Glinn explains that it had to be that way because he had computer simulations of what all the people involved would do.  Cheese.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
What a great book this was!  In the same way that Kim Stanley Robinson fills every page with great ideas and philosophy, Jonathan Strange is a thousand pages of magical weirdness.  It's a little bit like a book-length version of that Old Spice commercial: "Look up, look down, look back at me.  I'm on the Raven King's horse."  Seriously, it's worth the price of admission for the chapter where Jonathan Strange decides he needs to go mad (Spoiler: he does.)

Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi
You can't beat Scalzi.  This is just great, clever sci-fi.

The Last Colony, John Scalzi
About halfway through this right now.  Again, you can't beat Scalzi with a stick.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoesvsky
About fifty pages in.  Looks interesting so far. 

National Geographic Travel Guide to Costa Rica
Apparently there's a village in Costa Rica with a strong bruja tradition.  There's an evil spirit there which will seduce men, and after they've made love, will turn into a horse.  In completely unrelated news, there's a village in Costa Rica with a strong horse-fucking animal husbandry tradition.