There were a few discoveries. Like the box of Ethernet cable I left up there from last time, plus wire cutter and a drill. We used up that 500ft box and another 50ft of additional cable. I drilled one hole for the computer to discover that the boards were 6-8″ thick. When we went to run the Kitchen cable there was already a hole drilled. That really saved a lot of energy at the end. It would have been difficult with all the air vents and chimney.

All the major locations have a run to the attic hole. Some locations have other runs. Like between the old and new computer rooms and the new computer room and the kitchen. Though that last one was a mistake. Measure before you cut. The attic hole is close to the house phone line, before it splits. I’m very excited to cut it and rewire the house phones through a DSL filter and put the DSL router closer to the telephone box. So, all the runs to the attic are for getting Internet from one spot. I’ll drop a battery backup up there and run the DSL router, wired Router/Firewall, and Pogoplug off it. I’m really excited at the prospect of faster Internet by cutting out all the interference from the house telephone wiring.

The wall wired Ethernet should make it easier to plug in most anything. At this point, the house is basically networked. Yay.

Cdcovers.cc – Contains fan scanned DVD covers. Many are non-english and non-US and in a wide variety of resolutions.
Amazon.com – has small images and some have this zoom feature that makes them unobtainable and Flash-y.
Netflix – seems to have everything, but only in tiny 5 kb files. Last resort.

Just right click the image and save it. Don’t forget to crop it. Backsides from CDCovers and white edging from Amazon.com are annoying and unnecessary. Macs make this exceedingly easy with Preview.

The Cube by itself doesn’t have enough storage for the songs plus videos. That’s were the Drobo upgrades come in. Two new 1.5Ts in the big box put two 640gigs in the small box and two 500gigs came out without a home. These two can go in an external box and hold more than enough iTunes library to the Cube for the little AppleTV.

That means that videos aren’t limited to being played at my house. We can watch anything at Jennifer’s too. And it provides an offsite backup. Yay

It seems like my computers have sought to colonize every room in the house and to temporarily “go abroad”.

The other interesting item is the expanded Genius functionality. Not sure how well it will work, but it seems they have acquired a massive amount of data on people’s songs (54 billion).

Some stuff is kind of dumb. The LP functionality. Really? I’m supposed to want text and graphics that record labels stopped making 25+ years ago when we moved to tape. Uh, yeah, I’ve so been missing album covers and I would never have thought of going to the internet to look for that kind of stuff, because I’m so stupid.

And the sync by genre and artist functionality. What the? I thought Apple got it with the Genius feature. Show me music I like. Who cares who wrote it, sung it, or how it was arbitrarily classified. Most of my songs are ripped from a Windows machine anyway. There is no genre info on a lot of them and many are just wrong. Sync by playlist was fine. The rest just adds more complexity.

http://lifehacker.com/5048189/five-best-calendar-applications

http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar

One Mac Mini was moved into the bedroom to make video files from TiVo and VCR tapes. It’s a new one and unfortunately they only work with digital TVs (none of mine) and I had to resort to dragging in a computer monitor to put on the floor. This really bugs me. Now though, I have run coax cable from the bedroom to the kitchen and computer room and move the computer. The new Mac OS 10.6 should arrive on Friday and this little gem is the only box to get the upgrade. It’s been working great at transcode DVDs to AppleTV and iPhone formats. The VCRs can move with the Mac Mini too. Clears up a lot of clutter.

The cable used to run along the floor and stop in the guest bathroom. Now it goes through the walls and runs down the hallway (still visible) to the kitchen TV. We’ve been using the AppleTV a lot and it only spits out digital, which is very expensive to move around the house. VCR, DVD, and TV all work fine over the coax. The new wire cleans up the signal a lot and we want AppleTV in the kitchen without spending $200 to do it.

So, I checked an older Mac Mini that I wasn’t sure of, one that can output analog composite video, and discovered that it works fine. Better than fine since it can play on any of my TVs. With the proper cable that is. Which will come in on Friday too. This Mini was 10.4 and is upgraded to 10.5. It’s flakiness came from a possible botched upgrade from 512 meg to 2 gig. Seems like the upgrade was successful. This little gem will go in the kitchen TV. I need to run an Ethernet wire to this spot, but the wireless is ok.

Running the wires along the wall is annoying, but the attic is just too hot, cramped, and awful it’s worth it. The drop in the kitchen works for both the kitchen and living room. That’s very handy. This wires most of the house; kitchen, living room, master bedroom, and one bedroom (computer room). Though I still need coax and Ethernet to the bathrooms and a bedroom. And the “server closet” in one bedroom might need to move to the garage or hall closet.

I’m really hoping for new Macs in September or October. Not so much to get a new one, but to get a current one on clearance for $200-400 less. Maybe, a 24″ with 4 gig and a dedicated video card. The Minis are fine and I love my overheating upgraded Cube, but I would really would like to have transcoding take 1/3 of the time and to have at least one powerful machine. For a long time I wanted a Mac tower, but I just don’t have enough work to make up the $2200+ price tag. This box would replace the Cube as the desktop machine and I could use it as a spare web browser. It will output S Video to a TV, a very handy ability.

A little separate note on cutting off the cable..
The antenna works well and money spent on cable has gone to buying cheap movies and TV series at Walmart. The AppleTV has been a gem, but only because we rip the DVDs we buy and transcode them for it. All the shows are in one enormous list. Purchasing though Apple is ok, but they have not obtained new episodes and shows for everything and rental fees and terms are outrageous compared to Hastings, and downloads take hours or days through standard DSL. There are cheaper boxes that do the same thing, but without iTunes, and I would have chosen one of those if I were doing this again. The Mini going in the kitchen is saving transcoding time and space and $200+ worth of hardware. It’s outrageous how expensive it is to push a component video signal 50′ vs coax.

For the bike ride, I looked to conserve weight were ever possible and the iPhone does a lot of things. The camera, internet, phone, and text messaging are the beginning. The apps are like the cherry on top. The inability to send or receive photos is annoying. So, I took the iPhone and left the Netbook and camera at home. There were reports of dead batteries and cracked screens (Jessica). So, I got a case that doubles as a spare battery, the Mophie.

Right before the trip I realized that I could put video on the iPhone and then, with a special cable, play it on the motel TV. This was an invaluable feature. I thought I had a cable to do it, but was mistaken. After a visit to a nearby Apple store in Seattle I was all set. The cable is pricey at $50, but probably a knockoff would be cheaper. Since then I convert all my DVDs to play on the iPhone so they can come along. When we went home to Canadian a couple of weeks after the Seattle ride we brought Gran Torino and played it for Grandma.

The phone worked great most of the trip. I got 150 photos in the first 3 days. The phone worked and the internet is just really handy to have. The motel’s internet was unnecessary and the lack of a tactile keyboard really just kept my typing short and my thoughts down to 1-2 sentences, because that’s all you can see at a time. The text messaging was very helpful. And I found an app for Facebook to update that status too. As I went along on the ride I would send a single word, the name of the town I was in.

Somewhere in the despair portion of the second day the iPhone died. Nothing I did would wake it up. It’s really too bad. I wish I had photos of the finish line and last rest stop. The best photos of me taken by Marathonfoto were of that last 10 mile or so stretch. I got 4 of them. They are really good. Because of the rain all the second day I thought little iPhone was dead, but I charged it up anyway to see and within 10 minutes it was apparent that the battery had totally drain somewhere along the ride and my backup hadn’t helped it.

It was great for the rest of the trip with my cousin and her family. Monday morning I got to listen to my TWiT (This Weak in Tech) podcast. Now, I did bring along my iPod Nano. That was and still is the music box. The battery life is just so much better than the iPhone. Which is one of the major reasons I got it. The Nano is 16 gig and it holds a lot more music without competing for photo, video, and app space.

The first App on my iPhone was Pandora. And it’s really helped me discover music like I used to. I can listen at work and tag songs. Normally streaming music is blocked. The iPhone’s Internet connection gives me a private “unfiltered” Internet. I’ve been playing with it to find and tag music to buy for the Mexico trip.

The second App was Facebook. My peeps are on Facebook instead of Twitter. And the third was a copy of the bible for when I forget mine for church. It’s come in very handy.

I really like the iPhone, much more than I expected. It’s very nice to have the Internet so close at hand. And I discover new apps or features. Some are quite amazing. For example the Amazon Mobile app lets you take a photo of something and then matches it to a product Amazon sells and displays a list of sellers. It’s not for everyone. The slick glass keyboard and 1 day long battery life are problems. And it would just confuse my grandmother. It’s a good device for me.

Oh, and the cats pissed into the outlets on the battery side of one and it is now dead.