Sonos vs. Apple AirTunes – Using iPhone remote apps

I have been interested in creating a living room music-on-demand setup for our home for quite some time. One of my colleagues has been preaching to me that Sonos is the answer for a year or so now – but I’ve never really considered it because of it’s high cost of entry (~$999+). Recently, Sonos released a free iPhone/iPod touch remote control application. This allows a significantly less expensive entry cost, as now you only need to purchase a single Sonos ZonePlayer to get started… but I still felt that it was a be expensive (~$350)… especially when you compare it to using the AirTunes capability of the Apple AirPort express (~$99).

This past weekend he was kind enough to allow me to test out one of his Sonos ZonePlayers. The loan unit I had was a ZonePlayer ZP80, which is no longer being sold, but has been replaced with the ZP90 which now supports 802.11N. Neither the ZP80 nor ZP90 have internal amplifiers, so if you don’t have an amplifier you would need to consider the ZP120 (~$499).

So here are my brief thoughts and comments regarding the differences, pros and cons of the two solutions, and I’ll assume you already have the following (or workable equivalents):

• Mac, or PC with Windows (I used Windows 7 RC1)
• 802.11G/N wireless network
• Amplifier with speakers.
• iPhone (iPod touch will do the job too)

Apple AirTunes

What you’ll need:

• iTunes 8.2
• AirPort Express
• Apple Remote app.

Setup is rather simple, just need to ‘authorize’ the iPhone remote app to connect to our iTunes library.

Pros:

• Much less expensive. Only need to get an Apple AirPort express (~$99 for the 802.11N version)

• Plays Apple DRM tracks.

• iTunes DJ – this can be great for when friends come over.

Cons:

• Need to keep iTunes client open at all times. This can be a pain.

• Does not “remember” what you were you were listening too between PC reboots/iTunes restarts. I found this more annoying that I thought I would.

• No multi-room support. This doesn’t bother me much, my apartment is too small anyway.

• Does not support many audio formats. My collection is all MP3, so… no biggie.

• Does not provide access to some of the more popular audio streaming services, such as Rhapsody, Napster, SIRIUS, Pandora etc.

Sonos:

What you’ll need:

• Sonos Desktop Remote 2.8 (to perform initial ZonePlayer setup)
• Zone Player (ZP90 or ZP120).
• Sonos Remote app.

Pros:

• Better remote control app than the Apple one. A bunch of little features that make it better than the Apple one:
  >See the next track coming in the ‘Now Playing’ screen.
  >Great on-the-go queue (playlist) management.
  >When you choose a track you get the option of “Play now”, “Play next”, “Add to Queue”, “Replace current queue”.

• No need to any client applications open, you just need the PC on to allow access to the Windows file share.

• Remembers were you were. This I really liked… even though my PC had been off, once it is back on, the ZonePlayer will start were it left off (even mid-track)

• Multi-room support, provided you have purchased additional ZonePlayers.

• Better audio format support (Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA, AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, and Audible formats)

• Access to Rhapsody, Napster, SIRIUS, Pandora, Last.fm, and most terrestrial radio stations. I did not test this as most of these services are US centric – plus my broadband connection sucks for streaming content.

Cons:

• Expensive. $350 for the ZP90 (replacement for ZP80).

• Does not support Apple DRM tracks.

Conclusion:

I definitely enjoyed the experience of the Sonos solution more. There are many small, often unquantifiable, nuances that make it a more complete and enjoyable experience. The Apple AirTunes solution I described is workable, but not perfect.

If money was no object, then Sonos all the way, but unfortunately money is a big consideration. For now I’m going to hold onto these facts I’ve learnt – then see if I can convience myself to take the dive.

eBuddy IM client – iPhone 3.0 push notifications

eBuddy appears to be the first free multi-protocol IM client for iPhone 3.0 with push notifications. The client supports MSN messenger, Yahoo! messenger, AIM, GTalk, Facebook and ICQ. I’ve confirmed it to work with GTalk on 3G/GPRS & WiFi… but there is one catch, it will only work for a maximum of 30mins after you close the application.

Do note that the application signs you out immediately by default, hence rendering the push notifications useless, so be sure to set the app to only sign you out after 30mins (max).

FYI – Appadvise.com are maintaining a list of all apps that support push notifications – check it out here

Get Firefox Flash sound working in Ubuntu

Install this: libflashsupport from Synaptic

Keep-alive script for OWA under Firefox

http://blog.hacker.dk/2007/10/greasemonkey-owa-mailcheck-keepalive/

Mark messages unread in OWA (Outlook Web Access) under Firefox

http://david-burger.blogspot.com/2008/07/firefox-greasemonkey-outlook-web-access_19.html

Panoramas on Linux

Larger version: here

This shot is made up of 7 RAW shots from my Canon EOS 400D (aka Rebel XTi) w/ EF-S 17-85mm IS USM lens, here was the process I followed:

The shoot:

1. Mounted the camera on a tripod in portrait orientation, doing this has two benefits… firstly puts the barrel distortion introduced by your lens on the top and bottom making the shots easier to blend and stitch, also it’ll give your pano more height. The down side of course is that you’ll need to take more shots than you would with landscape to get the same field of view.

2. Put the camera in Manual mode to ensure that the exposure is locked. If you use any of the Auto/Semi-auto modes… your camera will re-meter for exposure for each shot – causing the brightness of each shot to differ.

3. Then I selected a specific white balance, in this case ‘daylight’ – but the important thing is not to have it on Auto White Balance, otherwise each shot is likely to be a different temperature.

4. Next I dialed in the aperture to a tiny (F/22), this is to ensure that I get the deepest Depth of Field (DoF) as possible so the foreground and background are sharp and in focus.

5. Then I used the auto focus to do the focus work for me, then once focus was achieved I switched to Manual Focus to ensure that each shot is taken with the same focus.

6. Finally, using my Canon IR remote I shot off the first shot then carefully panned by tripod head until there was approximately 20% overlap from the previous shot then shot off again… then continued until I had the complete field of view I was after.

The post processing:

I did the post processing on my Linux (Ubuntu) box, as a minimum you’ll need the following:

• ImageMagick – http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html
• Hugin, Enblend, libpano13, Hugin, Autopano-sift-C – compilation instructions for Ubuntu (and other distros) are available here  – http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_Compiling_ubuntu

Here is the process I followed:

1. Converted my RAW images to JPEG using dcraw. I used a custom version of the script available here: http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/here-is-a-little-something-for-your-blog/

2. Renamed the .JPEG output to .JPG, because Autopano-sift-C fails with .JPEG extensions.

3. Batch rotated JPEGs using mogrify from ImageMagick (mogrify -rotate “-90″ *.JPG)

4. Opened images in Hugin, and got it to use Autopano-sift-C to automatically find the control points between the set of images.

5. Hugin then uses ‘nano’ to modify the geometry of the images, then ‘enblend’ to stitch them all together.

FYI – I did run into an issue with the latest CVS version of Enblend (v3.2), and had to downgrade to a previous version to make it work.

Canon 5D Mark II – Sample shots and video

Vincent Laforet’s video – here
Sample stills taken from the above video – here
Lovegrove’s samples – here

Singapore F1… and I have a three day pass!

Killing hung Windows apps

Task manager does not always do a very good job at shutting down some applications when they hang/misbehave.

Here are two ways of dealing with it:

The manual way:

1. Open task manager, click ‘View’ then ‘Columns’, then choose ‘PID’
2. In the ‘Applications’ tab, right click on the application that is misbehaving, then click ‘Go to process’.
3. Now it should select the owning process in the ‘Processes’ tab, now take note of the PID (Process ID).
4. Open the command prompt, and issue the command ‘kill <PID>’ (e.g. kill 3437)

The easier way:
1. Install WiXKill from here, it will then sit in your taskbar.
2. Right click on the new task bar icon, and select ‘preferences’ then select ‘kill process’.
2. Now whenever an app hangs and task manager will not kill it, click on the WiXKill utility in your taskbase and just click on the affending application to kill it.

The Office: Every single “That’s what she said”