I have a mediacenter with the brilliant EyeTV sitting in the center which accumulates a lot of video. We are also collecting quite a lot of HD video material shot with our Sony HD camera. At this moment, all the content is stored at the hard disk of my iMac and space is running out. So, I thought it was time to start looking for a centralized solution for storing and sharing the multi-media content in our house.
My wish list:
Sharing of music, video and photo across devices simultaneously
Possibility to backup both Mac and Windows systems automatically
Possibility to add more hard disk memory later in the future
I was thinking about an Apple Time Capsule or another dedicated NAS system. The Time Capsule is basically a wireless router and hard disk combined in one box. The great thing about it is the ease of use and the possibility to make backups of your laptop and other machines attached to the network using Apple’s Time Machine backup system. The drawbacks are that you cannot change the hard disk setup yourself so you’re limited to the 1 or 2 TB version you buy. And that content is piling up in the meantime… Furthermore, it doesn’t work as an iTunes server, which means you cannot play music on different devices simultaneously. And this is what killed this option for me. I want to be able to attach a SONOS system to my collection of music in the near future.
After doing some research I decided to go for a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ 4TB (thanks @owisscha!) This machine does all the stuff I want to as described above. It also works with Mac and Windows based computers at the same time. And, very nice, it is also Time Machine compatible.
One thing it led to is the need for a new wireless router. Currently I have a 5-year old Linksys WRT54G running the old 802.11g standard. I recently noticed that it choked now and then when used heavily by multiple clients. The newest routers pack the new 802.11n standard which is way faster. This comes in handy when transmitting HD video, for example. What to look for in a wireless router? Check out this article. Basically what I need is 802.11n, simultaneous dual-band, and ample 1GB ethernet ports for the different devices (modem, NAS, VOIP phone, PC and a future game machine). I went for the D-Link DIR-825.
Looking forward to the delivery of the goodies and will let you know how it works out.
Found this video through a link to an article placed in my Gmail next to a Steely Dan newsletter I was reading this morning. Features former Dan guitarist Wayne Krantz in a documentary on French national television where he explains that in order to sound like himself he had to let go of everything he loved so much. Beautifully said. And watch drummer Keith Carlock as well, this guy rocks big time.
To start off with the conclusion: I’m back. What? Yes, I’m back. So, you wrote this longish post to convince me that Tumblr rocks etc. and now you’re quitting it in favour of WordPress? Yes.
Why? To make a long answer short, a lot of people get scared of the idea but I actually want my history to follow me. And I couldn’t fight all the Google juice my blog at WordPress has built up over the last 5 years. Google juice? Yes, the number of links from other highly influential sites to my blog causing my WordPress blog to show up high in the Google results. Something my Tumblr blog is lacking and would take a long time to built up. Quite elementary but something I overlooked when making the switch to Tumblr. My WordPress blog will live under www.ronaldcarpentier.com in a few days.
So although I really, really love Tumblr I’m killing it as soon as I find a way to import the content into WordPress – ideas anyone? this one isn’t working. The one thing I am going to miss most is the Disqus commenting system. Awesome tool.
I started blogging on a corporate blog mid 2004 when I was still at Lost Boys. We used Blogger so when I started my personal blog a few months later I chose Blogger again. I think it was around 2006 when I moved to WordPress because Blogger was not innovating it’s product anymore and WordPress really impressed me with the functionalities and ease of use. And they still do until this very day.
But yet…. I seem to view this blog and the tool used to make it – the WordPress environment – as an environment that is perfectly suited for creating long-form text-based posts. Fact is that I don’t seem to be able to find the time to create long posts on a frequent basis anymore. And that results in “a World According to Carp” that is rather dead. And it sure isn’t!
I still have ideas and stuff I like to share but I seem to have moved on to other places and tools on the Web. I am a moderate user of Twitter, photoblog using Flickr etc. but looking back the real World According to Carp has moved to Tumblr.
I already wrote about it in December 2007, and what I really like about it is the simplicity of the tool, for example the browser bookmarklet in FireFox which I often use to select text quotes that are instantly posted to my Tumblog. It supports multiple forms of content – you can post audio, video, text etc. very easily. It is also a tool which I can use in different contexts, for example on my iPhone with an app that rocks and that lets me post anything from my phone to my blog. Just last week a Tumblr app was released for Boxee which enables me to watch photo’s and listen to music from the people I follow on Tumblr. Which brings me to the last point why I love Tumblr. The community of people within Tumblr that I can follow within the Tumblr editor is awesome.
In the line of something Clay Shirky said, Tumblr lowered the costs and difficulty of publishing big time. Just look at the frequency of my posts at Tumblr compared to the frequency of posts at my WordPress blog and notice the effects it has had on me. Therefore, it is time to move the World According to Carp over to Tumblr. You can expect a lot of short-form posts, ideas, snippets and the occasional longer post like I did at WordPress. As soon as Tumblr adds the functionality to import content from other blogs I will do so and delete this blog.
I will still use WordPress for our RealMee company blog in Dutch and English – and wish the WordPress team all the best in bringing their amazing platform forward.
One final remark. The most fun part of having a blog like this are your comments. If you enjoyed reading and commenting on it as well and are using a feed reader you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed over here. I will add a commenting system to my Tumblog during the coming days.
So, the new standard on iTunes has become iTunes Plus. Files purchased at Apple’s store before this move were encoded at a rate of 128 kbps in Apple’s AAC format. With iTunes Plus, they doubled the rate to 256 kbps.
So what? Well, this is still a lossy file format which means the quality is not as good as with the original lossless files used on CD’s for example. So, if you want to be able to replay your digital music files on a high end stereo set like I do with the best possible audio result, this is still not the way to go. I will stick with CD’s – for now – and import them using Apple’s lossless format. Do you use iTunes as well for your digital music management and want to know more about these file formats? Check out this forum and this wiki.
BTW I imported my complete 500+ CD collection into iTunes 3 years ago in iTunes using a lossy format. Wasn’t aware of the way it would limit me at the time. Ouch. Maybe this post will prevent you from making the same mistake as I did back then.
So, if someone knows about a ripping service like this one which also covers Europe, Apple Lossless and will cost me less than say $500 you will make my day Or maybe a nice job to submit at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
I lost Aussie blogger Ben Barren a few months ago but found him again today at his new blog:
“Mad Man – Ben Barren.com: “DON DRAPER OR DICK WHITMAN I AIN’T. I WASN’T A MADISON AVENUE AD MAN IN 1963, BUT GOOGLE™ AND FLICKR™ DID DELETE MY BLOG AND PHOTOS IN 2008 SO WHY NOT DOCUMENT MY LIFESTREAM HERE; HIRED GUN / ENTREPRENEUR ””
It turns out that the reason I lost the guy in my RSS reader was that Google/the Google-bot killed his blog. Because it/they thought it was a splog. Ouch. He moved to his own domain www.benbarren.com using WordPress. In the meantime, the new Blogger/FeedBurner kahuna switched on his old blogspot account again, so he was able to tell me about his whereabouts.
Big lesson: there is a risk using and running all these social tools at domains you don’t own. Maybe I should move to ronaldcarpentier.com as well.
BTW the Mad Men series is awesome. Last summer I watched the first season on DVD with Margot. Can’t wait for season 2 to arrive on DVD as well. Apparantly, they just won the Golden Globe for best TV drama for the second time in a row.
In Uncategorized on January 16, 2009 by Ronald Carpentier
I find this article mindblowing (via Umair Haque). Check it out if you want to know where the losses at Merryl Lynch came from.
“Clawing back the 2006 bonuses at Merrill would not come close to making up for the company’s losses, which exceed all the profits that the firm earned over the previous 20 years.”
I have just finished reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I can heartily recommend it. Tom Peters calls it the best business book of the decade.
The book covers a very current subject, with the global meltdown of our financial institutions in the process of unfolding. His basic thesis is that a few events, which nobody can predict, can have a major impact on society, you as person etc. Think 9/11, the astonishing business success of Google, the current financial and economic crisis etc. He calls these events Black Swans. You can have them with both positive and negative outcomes.
I also remember reading this post from Seth Godin a few months ago. It really changed my view on the role of business books. It is all about action: if you do not want to change anything in your behaviour the read is a waste of time. So, I took his advice and these are the three things that I am going to change in my behaviour.
“Luck favors the prepared” as Louis Pasteur said. He knew something about accidental discoveries. You make them more likely by being exposed to the maximum amount. In his case, this meant “keep researching”. In my case, as an entrepreneur, this implies to keep trying new things and new routes to an existing opportunity in order to make serendipity happen – finding things of value you weren’t looking for in the first place.
“Collect opportunities”, as Nicholas Taleb calls it. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like an opportunity. Being exposed to positive Black Swans is one thing, realizing you are getting a lucky break is equally important. This would mean that you cancel anything you have planned if some big-shot client or business partner is willing to meet. Which sounds logical but isn’t because everyday live and rhythm can make you more or less numb for these kind of signals.
I have always had the tendency to plan rigorously but this habit has been put to the test by the arguments of Taleb. Planning: yes, but to a certain extent. See your plan as a rough guideline only which has “to be tinkered with”, as Tom Peters would say. Better yet: be prepared. One killer question in the book: think about the one or two most defining moments in your life for a second. Were they planned? Wow…
It’s taken a while but I have made my choice. I have ordered an iPhone.
The camera kind of sucks, no video – although there is a way around it, I hear mixed reviews about typing because of the lack of non-tactile feedback but….. the applications rock. And it integrates nicely with my media center: it will transfer recorded movies automatically from iMac to iPhone when I enter the living room. Handy when I am going for a trip. Lastly, my iTunes library is shared seemlessly between media center and iPhone.
I thought the Windows based mobiles were a bit too clunky and I don’t need the Qwerti keyboard.
So, what apps do I want when the device arrives in a week or two? These are my favourites so far:
Don’t ask me how I ended up at www.zara.com but I dare you to try and change the language into English. It took me seven times to actually make it happen. This must be the worst sidewide navigation ever made in the history of the Web. Unbelievable. It gives new meaning to the concept of Computer Related Anger.
Or maybe a nice job to submit at 
I have just finished reading 
