March 22nd, 2005
I’ve been missing in action recently due to currently obsessing over my swanky new HTPC and waiting for the boneheads at Sony Service to get my notebook back to me and give me back my AC Adapter that I shipped in with the notebook (they ask you to do this).
At any rate, everything is mostly back in order and I can continue working on stuff.
So, back to the new HTPC. I had been discussing this heavily with one of my friends and I had been keen on setting up a Pentium M based HTPC. I figured Pentium M would give me excellent performance while allowing me to create a fairly quiet system. However, the pickings are slim for Pentium M motherboards and they’re extremely expensive. For the price of the Pentium M motherboard alone, I could get an Athlon 64 3000+ chip AND a brand new ATI Radeon Xpress 200 based motherboard.
I will be doing a full write up on my new HTPC and a smaller story on my first HTPC. Basically, I took the lessons learned from my first HTPC and applied it to my second HTPC. Of course, even now as I approach the completion of the second HTPC, I realized a lot of new things I hadn’t considered. Still, I’m extremely happy about this second HTPC as its working very well so far.
March 21st, 2005
Well, Sony finally rolled out the much anticipated SonicStage 3.0 software for use with it’s multitude of digital audio players. Most importantly, it supports the latest HDD, flash, and HiMD units being released from Sony.
After playing around with it for the last week I’m now at a loss for words. On the one hand, it introduces a slew of improvements and better performance. However, some of the annoying traits remain in addition to new quirks that are totally lame. If Sony was hoping to use this new software along with their new players to really re-establish themselves, they’d better go back to the drawing board really quick.
Here’s my list of issues with SonicStage 3.0 in no particular order.
1. There’s no multilingual support. This is purely shortsighted thinking on the part of the programmers. As a multilingual person who has a collection of Western and Asian language media, I cannot use SonicStage 3.0 at all because it does not have the ability to display double byte text. SonicStage 2.3 didn’t have this either but at least you could install the Japanese language version of the software that did support both languages. In version 3.0 of the Japanese version, it no longer displays Japanese text. Additionally, the interface text is mangled. FWIW, iTunes supports non-English text just fine although it will occasionally mangle some of the text (due to weird ID3 tags).
2. You cannot drag and drop music into the SonicStage interface. This is the most basic of Windows functionality. iTunes supports drag and drop in and out of it’s interface which is brilliant. Also, iTunes will either copy the files into your library or just link to your existing files depending on your preference.
3. The English version of SonicStage has check-in/out functionality activated by default whereas the Japanese version has it disabled. What’s up with that?
4. The interface is still cluttered. Sony actually cleaned it up a bit but it still wastes a lot of space and doesn’t allow you to fully see what’s on your audio device. It forces you to scroll horizontally to see all the info. Also, you cannot sort by the criteria on the media side which is extremely annoying since it makes it difficult to manage your library on the device especially if you’ve been using the drag and drop Music Move/VAIO Music applet. Poor UI design!
5. If you have a HDD based device, you must re-initialize it which means you must RELOAD all of your music back onto the device. If you manage all your music with SonicStage already then this isn’t too big of a problem. However, if you simply used the Music Move applet to drag and drop music over to your device then you’re out of luck and must re-transfer it all over.
For now, I’ll stick with the Japanese version of SonicStage 2.3 that works fine on my English version of Windows XP Professional and hope that Sony releases a SonicStage 3.x that fixes some or all of these problems. So, I don’t know if this is the complete rewrite we were all expecting. It may have been rewritten from scratch, but they certainly didn’t do any usability testing whatsoever.
February 21st, 2005
I’m still alive but have been both extremely busy and extremely lazy since the new year. Actually, part of my “excuse” is that my notebook’s hard disk died during Christmas and as you all know, I rely heavily on my notebook to get any work done even though I have plenty of desktop systems.
I have been spending time with my HTPC that I built before the holidays and researching a new HTPC that I will be building soon. My first attempt at building a HTPC was an eye-opening experience and I’ve definitely learned a lot about building one and what one needs to truly think about when putting one of these together.
My first “prototype” HTPC consists of the following setup:
- Shuttle SK83G Barebones System
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2Ghz, 512KB cache)
- 1GB DDR DRAM PC2700
- 200GB Maxtor 8MB cache 7200RPM
- NEC-3510A 8x DVD-RW/+RW/DL
- ATI Radeon 9600SE 256MB AGP Video Card
- Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 PCI Capture Card
- Phillips MCE Remote
- Windows Media Center 2005
It’s connected to my Zenith/LG L23W36 23” LCD TV (1280x768) via my VGA connector and it’s a solid setup. The system is actually pretty powerful for a HTPC. Most HTPCs don’t really need to be all that powerful but of course it depends on what you want to use it for. I’ll have a full write up about it soon before I start my HTPC 2 project next month.
December 18th, 2004
I’ve noticed this annoying trend where my inkjet printers seem to die just after a few years of use. Even though I take pretty good care of my stuff and don’t use 3rd party inks, I find that the printers just develop problems after a fair amount of time. Also, the inks seem to go faster and faster and the heads get dirty and clogged so fast now.
I’m currently using an Epson Stylus Photo 780 (6 color version) which has been wonderful when it’s working. I only use 6-color or higher printers because the end results always look better to me than your regular 4-color printer. The only problem with this printer is that it still uses a single cartridge for all of the colors meaning relatively expensive replacements even if 4 of the 5 colors are fine. Inks cartridges are the dirty secret of the printing industry. These companies make no money on the hardware and make a killing on the ink. We’re all crack addicts on the comeback for more INK.
I will not skimp on the next color printer I get. It will have 6-colors and all of them will be separate. It should be more economical in the long run and I should be able to get more prints out. I’m especially interested in larger format printing based on some work I’ve seen. I had a photoshop project printed out at a professional studio in large format on archival watercolor paper and the results were astounding. So, I’d like to be able to do miniature versions of that kind of stuff at home. I still need to shop around some more. I’m really partial to Epson even though I know HP stuff is now pretty good as well.
Oh, and profound advice for the night. Don’t ever buy more ink cartridges than you need unless you’re going to be printing a ton of stuff at the moment. These inks dry up after a while so you’re better off going to the store and buying the inks as you need them. It’s a hassle but saves you headaches in the long run.
I ended up having to clean hundreds of entries out of the database. I lost count but it was close to 800 posts. I had another site that had nearly 3000 posts that needed cleaning.
Some behind the scenes code changes have been implemented and should help block the spam from being added to the forum. So, feel free to leave comments now. Thanks for your patience.
