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Taking the Chromebook Challenge

Acer C7 Chromebook

The Gadget Wisdom labs has recently acquired an Acer C7 Chromebook for testing purposes. The C7 has a list price of $199 and offers an 11.6″ screen, a Celeron processor. The hard drive and memory are upgradeable.

It’s competition in the Chromebook space is the $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook.  But, while the Samsung is sleeker than the Acer C7, it lacks the possible benefits of a x86 processor and upgradable components if you want to hack the thing.

But, why buy a Chromebook(other than the compelling price for a secondary system), even if you want to hack it to pieces? Many people live in their browser anyway, so why not have a computer that lives entirely in the browser?

So, that is a challenge we’re prepared to try. We’ve been setting up web-based equivalents of our standard daily programs, and will be trying to live with ChromeOS only while our primary machine gets a clean install of the latest version of its OS.

Will we last a whole week, which is the goal? Or is ChromeOS only good for trips where all you want is a browser? How does it compare to our experiments with the Asus Transformer, which is Android with a keyboard dock.

Stay tuned.

 

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Published on January 18, 2013
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Back to Thinking About Podcasting Studios

Alesis MultiMix 8 USB Podcast setup left side ...

Audio equipment has a special passion for us for some reason. None amongst our numbers are musicians per se, but the interest remains.

As you may know, the Android Buffet podcast is also a project of the Weneca Media Group, the unofficial parent of Gadget Wisdom and a few other sites. Much of our sound equipment collection is based on serving the needs of that podcast…and actually consists of three basic studio models.

  1. The Home Studio – This is a permanent installation…well, as permanent as we get
  2. The Mobile Studio – This is the single-person mobile studio, designed to fit in a carry-on bag.
  3. The SELF Studio – Used only once, at the SouthEast Linux Fest, this was enough equipment to do a multi-person show live.

Everything continues to evolve each time we assemble it for a trip. The requirements we have are simple.

  1. A co-host and/or guest, coming in over the Internet.
  2. A mostly live to tape performance…editing a podcast is a pain…so we quickly gave it up.
  3. Live audio streaming.

Video sounds like a lot of fun, at least as fun as doing audio. However, the amount of work and cost required to do video is exponentially higher for less of a return. Many podcasts do video as merely an extension of audio. You end up with talking heads, which is sometimes interesting, but not quite worth the effort.

Streaming, when coupled with a live chat room, is a great thing. Many shows offer both of these, and it has become essential to our podcast model. We started out hosting ourselves, but now use a third-party Icecast server. It’s running right now, running repeats. Tune in at androidbuffet.com/live.

The issues come in designing the equipment to run this. We tried slaving everything through a single computer, but using an analog mixer meant connections went into the computer and back out again, which was also confusing. So, ideally, each function should have an independent system.

  1. Co-Host/Outside Audio
    • This has been done by a computer of varying processing capabilities as well as an old Android phone.
  2. Streamer
    • There is no Icecast streamer for Android(volunteers to port it, anyone?)
    • Tried using a Raspberry Pi, but there were some issues. Will be revisiting this with the new 512MB Pi.
  3. Recorder
    • This has been another computer, but also a dedicated hardware recorder which supports line-in and records to SD cards for easy and quick editing.

Part of the problem is, of course, Linux. There are some limitations in Linux compatibility and software. But we aren’t changing that, or using a hardware mixer. Everything else is up for grabs.

More specifics to come, but would appreciate suggestions to simplify this, while maintaining the quality and ease of recording.

Published on December 26, 2012
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Equipping your UPS – Planning

Geek out: Power protection

Hot on the heels of discussing emergency power for mobile, it is time to discuss thoughts about Uninterruptable Power Supplies(UPS). These battery backup devices use heavy-duty batteries to power your electronics in the event of failure. When power is lost, it automatically powers using the batteries.

The first rule of UPSes is to always get ones with a removable/replaceable battery. You can get replacement batteries without much issue, although manufacturers would obviously prefer you replace the unit.

Our current favorite simple UPS for home use is the APC BE550G. This is an 8 outlet 550VA UPS. The green feature is a master outlet, which turns controlled outlets off when the master device is off. This is also a great green feature for various surge protectors.

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However, the basic UPSes may have trouble with some power supplies, so mileage may vary. The issue is voltage regulation, and pure sine waves(necessary for Active PFC power supplies). There are more expensive UPSes, and more full featured ones. There are advantages to voltage regulation and purer power, but for some devices, it doesn’t matter.

Also, there are some issues with APC. We had used Belkin for a while, but had longevity and design issues. The Belkins we had tended to put the outlets on the top, which made placement difficult. There is also Cyberpower, which some people enjoy, but we’ve never tried one. We may next time.

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This Cyberpower Unit looks promises, offering an LCD control screen with basic stats. This looks rather promising for non-computer uses.

These devices were originally marketed for computers. They were designed for safe shutdown of a computer and monitor, and things have changed. More people are using these to power other devices. In preparing for this post, we started reading reviews, and people are powering big screen TVs and other devices.

So, that is the sort of planning we want to discuss. For your cable modem, your router, etc. We have a simple 300VA UPS hooked up to our cordless telephone system, so it will work for a while in a power outage. As these devices are much lower power than a computer, many can run for hours with just a few necessary networking components hooked in.

The first step, even if you do not want to get into the wattage details, is to make an inventory of the devices you want to power. Make separate lists for extended outages, power hiccups, and voltage drops. Basically, most computers you may want to merely make a graceful shutdown, but you may want your networking gear to last for hours.

We predict, in our area, lots of people will be hiring electricians to install transfer switches for portable or permanent generators, after extended periods of power loss. But for the installation of a manual transfer switch will be close to a thousand dollars, if not more, as it requires disconnecting your house power in order to install the cutoff, and probably an adjustment of your house breaker box.

If your area isn’t prone to long power outages, you want to cover a few hours of power outage or irregular power, which is much less expensive than generators.

In the end, always buy UPSes with replaceable batteries, pick the devices that works for you, and do the advance planning.

What are your tips for planning for power loss with UPSes?

 

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Published on November 25, 2012
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Give the Gift of Emergency Power This Holiday Season

English: A side by side line up of D, C, AA, A...

Last month, Hurricane Sandy hit hard in the New York area, in many places that hadn’t seen devastation of that level in half a century. Many people lost power and internet for days. Many people lost more than that…and our sympathies go out to them.

But, while we fortunately came out of it without any serious issues, it as given us a lot of time to think about emergency preparedness. The need to prepare for the unexpected.

One of the coolest devices we saw being used during this was the BioLite CampStove. This is a small portable camp stove that, when stowed, is the size of a water bottle. It uses twigs and other simple fuel, and can not only cook, but provide USB charging. The company took to the streets during the power outages to offer power and a warm drink. The list price is roughly $130 direct, and the money is partially used to fund a larger version used in third-world countries.

Most people will need to handle an outage of hours or a perhaps a day or two. A long extended outage does happen, but in most areas is not as common. In the case of New York, individuals were heading to areas that had power in search of a charge. Corporations sent in portable charging stations, people crowded around generators, and more.

Now, for individuals on the go in urban areas, carrying a camp stove is not a viable option. Solar is a possibility, but charging by solar takes hours. We haven’t had much luck in solar charging, but we haven’t tried lately. There have been a lot of developments in this area. We may try again.

Crank chargers seem like a lot of fun, and are great for portable radios and lights, but powering a cell phone is a bit hard. In testing, fifteen minutes of cranking got a few percent points of power back into a smartphone, but the crank broke off right after that, so future testing will not be possible.

That leads us to the most useful of emergency power measures….the battery. Buying extra batteries for devices works. But every time you get a new cell phone or other specialty device, you end up needing to buy new batteries. Devices that use standardized batteries, such as AA and AAA, are easier to keep batteries on hand for. But, with the increasing number of devices that use USB charging, you can get a battery with USB output, that will work with a variety of devices.

Buying batteries is not a problem. The issue is being prepared. In many cases, you can prepare for an emergency…bad weather, etc. may cause you to check your equipment. But many things will happen unexpectedly.  It is a good idea to keep good care of these items.

Next, we’ll be discussing UPS power…

Published on November 23, 2012
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Shrinking Your Electronics by Thinking Embedded Systems

English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at Tr...

Electronics are getting smaller.  People don’t have desktops in as large a number as they once did. Many have laptops, netbooks, tablets, etc.

This is an area we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, mostly due to the flood of inexpensive systems on a board, led by the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a computer the size of a credit card, and the commonly sold version includes RCA video, HDMI video, two USB ports, and an Ethernet Port. The entire assembly is powered by a microUSB charger of the sort bundled with phones and other electronics. The GPU onboard is capable of blu-ray quality playback. There is no built in drive, the OS is loaded off of an SD card. You can hook in a USB drive, but not as a boot drive.

There is a special version of Fedora, Debian, and even an XBMC port to turn the Pi into a full-fledged media center

Now, this won’t be taking the place of a full-fledged PC for many things, but the Pi, and some of the competing devices are perfect for ’embedded system’ type functions.

An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. With something like a Pi, with its pricing, even with the purchase of a case(we mentioned case not included, right?) you can buy multiple Pis and use them to do one thing.

This changes design conceptions a lot. When you are trying to figure out your connected home and life, you can build a Pi to boot, launch a function, and perform it well, just like your cable box(well, like your cable box could be), VoIP phone, etc.

We currently have a quad-core server, that does multiple functions. It does do CPU scaling when idle, but many of the functions could be taken over by a Pi. Using Wake On Lan functionality, the Pi could even wake up the full computer and transfer control to it.

There are a lot of good ideas here. Have a device that does one thing, and nothing else. This would mean incredible long term stability, and because the Pi loads its OS on an SD card, you could have different SD cards to change the Pi’s functionality.

What ideas do you have? We’re just getting started.

Published on October 12, 2012
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Feed Changes

English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...

To All RSS Subscribers:

Due to the recent uncertainty regarding the future of Feedburner, we are removing all redirects to Feedburner. All links on the site will now use local feeds. If possible, please update your subscriptions.

If not, the Feedburner feeds will continue to be maintained for as long as Google continues to offer the service, but we feel that self-hosting all feeds is the more prudent long-term move.

Feed: http://www.gadgetwisdom.com/feed/

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Published on October 7, 2012
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Amazon MP3 Drops Linux Support, Adds DRM-Lite

DRM Is Killing Music

As we’ve previously mentioned, we’ve been redoing our music collection. Now, after weeks of part-time ripping, and some cleanup, it is time to upload the music to various sites, as a test.

Amazon has discontinued its music downloader for Linux and is no longer allowing Linux users to download the .azw file for use with a third-party application. The AZW files are used to download an entire album when purchased.

This occurred concurrently with the rollout of their new Cloud Player product, which included one other fun feature. DRM. Not on the file level. Amazon proudly sells DRM-free MP3s, but to upload or download albums, you need to authorize your device. You are allowed a maximum of 10 devices, you can deauthorize a device and the slot will reopen thirty days later. This includes Android devices. If you don’t do this, you can only download albums one track at a time.

We wanted to see who else was pointing out that this is a DRM-like feature, and came up with an interesting analysis of same by The Leisurely Historian. His theories are: (Comments are ours)

  • Compromise negotiated with music labels over cloud player – This seems the most likely. But, is increased monitoring of download/uploads really an unreasonable restriction? We made a complete backup of all of our Amazon purchases locally and we can copy it anywhere(even back to Amazon Cloud Drive, ironically.
  • Back door to DRM – We agree that DRM on Kindle and Video has been good to Amazon. But they can’t reverse course on music. So, they’ve created this hybrid model to support keeping people in their ecosystem.
  • This is all about User Tracking – This is quite possible. We have the tab…”You listened to ___, people who listened to ___ also bought ____.” This is the classic Amazon upsell method of getting you to buy more, based on offering you things they think you will like.
Basically, Amazon wants people to use Cloud Player and the Cloud Player apps. This keeps people inside their garden. So, bad enough we are forced to boot up Windows, which we never use, to retrieve/upload our music…but there is no indication from Amazon that they plan to restore Linux support in the future.
Even if they do not want to write Linux apps, they could provide developers with an API to build support into their products, but third-party support is not what they want on any platform.
Just to be fair, the web player does work on Linux. And, while we gave them $25 for a year of service, it does not mean we will next year…although it would cost more to store the same amount as data on Amazon S3(although there is always Glacier). It is just disappointing.
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Published on August 27, 2012
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Send Once, Read Everywhere – Kindle Everywhere

English: Amazon Kindle wordmark.
English: Amazon Kindle wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Earlier this week, Amazon launched the Send to Kindle Browser Extension for Chrome.

This adds to the Kindle ecosystem by allowing you to send web content to your Kindle, and choose to read it, or archive it for future use as part of the Kindle Personal Document Library.

Amazon continues to try to build the ecosystem of the Kindle. There are several third-party applications that had similar functionality, and multiple read it later services. But, one of the brilliant moves made with the Kindle is that it is completely platform agnostic. Amazon may make a Kindle Fire, and the e-ink line of Kindles, but they have desktop apps, mobile apps, a browser based reader, and continue to add functionality to the ecosystem completely independent of any hardware.

This is all part of the plan. People may complain about the walled gardens of certain closed systems, but if you can use your content on everything, then that is as close to open as you can get without actually being so.

Personal Documents was a good move on Amazon’s part, because it allowed reading of any document. People had been side-loading their own content anyway. Some even bought a Kindle and only acquired public-domain and free e-books. It makes the platform more valuable, which the tendency to buy from Amazon. Not only is your paid content there, but your personal content.

This is the sort of all-encompassing presence that turned Google into a verb for “To Search Online,” and iPad a synonym for any tablet(much as we correct people when they say so). Kindle is becoming a synonym for e-book, because of their presence in the market.

Once again, Amazon is getting our business because they have made it so easy, and removed the restrictions…although we hold out hope for more liberal policies in certain areas, we have already accepted the compromises.

That said, Send to Kindle is one more option that allows us to put more into the system, and makes it easy to do so, offering more options and integration than existing third-party options. Thus, it is worth a look.

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Published on August 17, 2012
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Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life

The KeePass Password Safe icon.

Every tech pundit out there has been talking about the heartbreaking story of Mat Honan of Wired and how hackers used social engineering to gain access to one of his accounts, and the chain reaction results.

One of Honan’s problems stemmed from how his accounts were daisy-chained together. `The recovery email for one account led to another, account names on different networks were consistent, etc. Figuring out how to mitigate this requires some thought. We have multiple email accounts, and it will probably require some diagramming and planning to figure everything out there.

Then there are passwords. We admit to people all the time that we don’t even know half our passwords. We use a two-pronged attack on this. One is the open-source, multi-platform app KeePass. KeePass offers a password vault stored as a file, encrypted using a single Master Password. All of the passwords in it are generated by the program and impossible for most people to remember.

We also use Lastpass as a service. Lastpass has a plugin for every browser, offers one click login, form filling, and more. The basic service is free, but the premium version adds mobile support and additional features. We’re not using half of the options that it offers, even with the $12 a year we give them for premium.

But, as part of a redundant philosophy, you should have your most important passwords in multiple locations. Also, having passwords even you don’t know in vault means you can easily change your credentials regularly for individual sites, should you choose to. do so.

Two factor authentication, although it could be a bit more user friendly, is enabled for all Google accounts and Lastpass. This is not a challenge for hackers to hack. There’s nothing very interesting there anyway.

In security, the mantra is trust no one. Try to walk the line between paranoia and rationality very carefully.

The second issue is backup. This is an area where we could be better. We have a backup plan that needs to be upgraded. We have various cloud backup solutions, and a few local ones. They need to be unified. We’ll get back to this in a future post, once we create a checklist.

But, for those of you out there, let’s cover a few basics. Periodically, extract your online data and store a copy somewhere, both locally and remotely, in addition to your cloud storage. Try a relative’s house. The likelihood of you and your relative both suffering calamities is probably slim. Remember that sending your data to a remote drive and deleting your original copy is an archive, not a backup.

Make a plan, automate as much as possible, because manual action is so easy to get behind on.

So, backup, secure your accounts, do some planning…we’ll be back with more. Consider yourself warned.

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Published on August 12, 2012
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Ripping Music Revisited

Bundle of CDs.

Amazon MP3 Tech Support is useless. Of course, as friendly as Amazon is, they have been consistent useless to us. From insisting our package would be delivered when UPS insisted it had been delayed to the latest, asking us to email log files repeatedly to an address that sent back it did not accept incoming emails…and it was apparently correct as we’re still waiting.

At the beginning of the month, we wrote about Amazon upgrading Cloud Player. It prompted us to break out our music collection and try uploading it. Now, we’ve gone back and forth about cloud based music, having tried the now defunct mp3tunes, Moozone, Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Player.

We’ve also bought a lot of DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon during sales. Amazon is great at sales.

So, it made sense to give Amazon a shot, as they’ll store anything you buy from them for free. Their new model is $25 a year for more song space than we can use, and a good amount of general file storage. If only they had full Linux support and/or an API. But we hope this will come soon, at least for the Cloud Drive.

So, we uploaded the entire collection overnight. However, it was several messed up in the metadata department. We spoke to Amazon, and they did not offer any suggestions. We’d had similar problems with Moozone and with Google Music.

Deciding the problem was likely with the decisions made during the initial ripping, we made the decision to rerip the entire collection. Armed with an old laptop and an external hard drive, we’ve been slowly making our way through the collection.

One of the issues came from the decision to originally rip into the Ogg Vorbis format. Now, this was a freedom based decision. We wanted to support open standards, and still do. But, the limitations of this have come to bite us many times. Most notably that Moozone is the only cloud storage that offers decent Ogg support without transcoding, and Moozone appears to be dead in terms of development.

That alone wouldn’t have caused us to go back and destroy all the old files. We’re not audiophile enough to try 320kbps or FLAC, but the original files did show some encoding glitches, and we will be encoding at 256kbps MP3 as opposed to the originally quality of roughly 192kbps, but the big issue was metadata. Our metadata was in horrible shape, and made it impossible to find things.

The hardest type of album to deal with, of which we have many, are ones with multiple artists. ID3 tags initially did not have support. The Album Artist tag came later. In fact, up until more recently, our audio file tagging program on Linux, Easytag, didn’t support the Album Artist tag. It now does, which is most helpful. The other helpful tool was the free MusicBrainz Picard, available for multiple platforms, which encodes files with metadata from the MusicBrainz database.

Even with this, being the musical mavericks we are, there are plenty of CDs we have that have nonexistent or incomplete entries in these databases, that we’ll be going through manually. Also, this has inspired us to fill some gaps in the collection. Some of the files were encoded from audio cassettes, and we’ve been using Amazon Marketplace to purchase selected used CDs of said content for cheap, allowing high quality copies to be made.

It may be time to finally throw away the tapes., however, and go completely digital. As we migrate further from analog media, it is odd we have no intention of chucking the vinyl. What makes vinyl so nostalgic and tapes..not?

So, the above chronicles the journey from freedom loving Ogg user in search of a cloud to freedom-hating individual seeking to be locked into one platform…or not. The truth is, no matter what, we’re committed to a local copy. Cloud services are wonderful for keeping a backup copy, and pulling music on the go when you have a hankering for something from your collection, but trusting any service 100% is foolish, and we all need to be more diligent about that.

Our ripping is being done with Linux based tools. Audex is currently handling the ripping, Easytag the tag editing, and Picard filling in extra metadata. Amazon is providing cover art and data for manual correction as needed from their vast library of pages. This is vastly different from last time. Although things have changed, and ripping music from CDs isn’t as popular as it once was in this digital age, would be curious to see what people think, which is the purpose for this post.

How do you build a perfect digital music collection, what tools(Linux-based preferably) do you use to build it, and what do you do with your collection?

For one, we’ve never created a single playlist. Playlists are the mix-tapes of the modern era. Perhaps it is time to find the mix tape we made in the 90s…Songs to Be Depressed By, and recreate it for the modern era. (Songs to Be Depressed By were actually uplifting songs)

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Published on August 11, 2012
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