Forget and Ipod Dock

Music is a one form of media that is very important to me, forget TV, the internet, books, magazines etc. music for a long time has been a living breathing hobby. Up until recently I have been using minidiscs almost exclusively for my home music collection (I have over 500 - picture later). Minidisc for a number of reasons, mainly as a legacy to my youth, producing mixes and trading discs, but also as I loved having something physical to slot into a hifi and hit play - music as dot.mp3 files seem so bland by comparison to a labled minidsc, CD or vinyl. I have had a 30 gb Ipod for a couple of years now, but I just struggle with the concept of having all my music with me. I just hit skip all the time. I now believe 2 gb is the optimum size for a DAP for me.

Anyway enough of all that back to the project.

Given that I never really clicked with my ipod I never really got into a docking system for it. As such my home stereo was still quite a traditional set-up > Amp > CD > Minidisc > Speakers (all Yamaha for what its worth). I've been toying with the idea of a fully integrated HDD set-up with all my albums for a while. To cut a long story short, I did a it of research and a bit of ebay searching and settled on an old piece of technology (I'm a tight git and hate spending money). I bought a Fujitsu Stylistic 3400 touchscreen PC. £75 from ebay with two batteries wireless card, stand and case - a bargain. The specs aren't going to blow anyone away but I don't need much horsepower. I upgraded the ram to 192mb and its quite spritley with windows 2000. It is now hooked up to my stereo and an external 300GB hard drive and it is one sweet touchscreen jukebox - pictures and movies are worth more than words check it out:

Forget a dock, scrap the Touch - this thing is sweet!




Other cool things about this little device are;

• It will sit there as a digital photo frame - never wanted one really but now I have a LCD sitting there it makes sense to have some memories popping up.
• Being a tablet PC it takes very little power to run (see above I am a tight git).
  
• I was thinking about buying a NAS drive - no need the media drive is networked through wifi on this bad boy.
  
• Currently I am running mediajukebox as a mediaplayer as it works very well with as touchscreen - however given I'm running an OS I'm not restricted to any 1 proprietry interface.
  
• If I want to download MP3's to my DAP I just use the jukebox - no need to head to the office.
  
• As above for photos from my camera - no need to fire-up my laptop or desktop.
• Its all internet connected - mp3 tagging, biogs, cover art etc - no probs.
  
• Web browsing - of course the touchscreen keyboard is annoying, but standby to internet = 15 seconds (importantly stanbdy to music is the same). Want to quickly check our household gcal (is it recylcing with the bins tonight?) no probs. I use Opera and SpeedDial helps
• If I felt the need to I could keep the tablet running 24/7 and expose a port outside my firewall - run something like vibestreamer and access all my music from any internet connection.
  

Anyway this litle piece of Fujitsu kit retailed in excess of $1500 at launch around the year 2000. For 75 notes it is now utilised as a great touchscreen jukebox - in my opinion beats an ipod dock hands down. You have to have a play with it to truley appreciate it! Dinner parties will rock!

Couple more movies

Boot to a paused playlist from standby in under 10 seconds



Web browsing with the touchscreen - sweet




Cheers
Bish

Listening to - Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Thier Heads (not sure its very good - may be a grower)

INSPIRE and the Social Web

Talking about metadata recently with a customer and showing off our new bit of kit - Stratus Gallery. The chap I was talking to made a suggestion that users would want to comment on the metadata records.

Comments that may include items such as:

• Subjective rating 1-10
• Previous Projects the data has been used for
• References to other data that may be useful.

I also notice that IBM have just launched a beta Enterprise 2.0 collaborative working portal type thingy - Bluehouse (strange name)

INSPIRE is all about collaborative working, sharing data, and making great use of the data available. You think those boys over in Brussels may be considering some of these social web-based capabilities - then again maybe not.

Cheers

Bish

Listening to - James Morrison - Songs for you, truths for me