Tag Archives: devices
Peg Meet Hole
For those who follow my misadventures over on my personal blog, you may be familiar with the fact that I recently finished construction on my basement. While it’s nice having a third bathroom, fourth bedroom, and laundry room, the best part about it is the family room. I wired the room to accommodate a 7.1 home theater. I even built a shelf over my fireplace that will be home to a 52″ LCD television. The whole setup is very sweet and I take great pride in knowing that it was my hands that built it all.
Despite construction having been mostly completed for weeks, it has only been within the past few days that I’ve had the time to begin moving my electronics into place. Unfortunately, I haven’t upgraded my components yet so I’m using a 12-year-old Pioneer four-channel receiver with a seven-year-old 27″ television.
In addition to the speaker and sub-woofer lines, I also ran coax for cable television and HDMI and component cables for the new HD television and receiver that I’m hoping will be mine next spring. We’re all familiar with the old adage concerning fitting a square peg into a round hole; that’s basically what I’m trying to do here. The problem is that my receiver doesn’t have television RCA inputs, coax inputs, or even auxiliary RCA inputs so running my television through the speakers poses a problem. It does have a video out connection though so it’s not totally obsolete.
I also have a problem with getting video from my DVD player to the television. Fortunately, my receiver does have connections for a DVD/Laser Disc (yeah, it’s that old) so I can connect the DVD player to the receiver; however, because of how the room is set up, I can’t run cables directly from my various devices to the television so the receiver and accompanying wall ports are all that I have to work with.
With my current setup I can listen to a DVD, but what good is it if there’s no video? I got to thinking about component cables, and since they’re basically just standard RCA cables on steroids (how’s that for a basic comparison?), I decided to try hooking the television up to the receiver using these via my wall ports. It worked beautifully. I can now see and hear a DVD but the problem of having sound piping through the speakers when just watching TV still posed a problem. To fix this, I finally decided to unhook the VCR from the back of the receiver and use those ports for the TV which worked well.
It’s been almost a week since I started hooking up wires and praying to the gods of outdated electronics but things are finally working. Granted, I still have two speakers and a sub-woofer that can’t be hooked up to the receiver but at least what can be working actually is.
You may be wondering why I’m sharing this little story. I mostly just wanted to post something but there is a moral. If you plan on building anything that could be considered “cutting edge” or “state of the art”, make sure that all of your parts are up to date. Jury-rigging old stuff will only get you so far but, if you’re good, it can get you pretty close to where you want to be. Unless you’re playing with rockets in Blood Gulch though, close may not be good enough.
They have finally made it!
Schmidty and I were once talking about what I’d want out of a personal device; connectivity, storage, integration, navigation, and an operating system flexible enough to evolve with the needs of its user. We both dismissed this immediately, since no company is in-tune with it’s consumer base to that degree, and figured such a device will never exist.
Well, it’s still not perfect, but Garmin has gotten much closer than anyone else so far.
This thing has nearly everything I could want in a phone. What it doesn’t have, just may not have been announced yet (I don’t know). It has a better GPS system than any other phone out there (let’s face it, it’s Garmin) which ties seamlessly into Google services, and then has the Wi-Fi 3.5G and phone capabilities with it.
Let’s say you’re talking on the phone and get into your car. You sit down and place it in it’s dock, and the call is immediately made hands free. On top of that, the device also switches straight into navigation mode. While talking on the phone, viewing the map, you notice you are running low on gas. So you hit the touchscreen, select the Google Services, and in real-time it tells you all nearby stations and their current prices. It can even guide you there.
While I don’t own an iPhone, I have used one a few times. It’s hard to say how the Nuvifone’s keyboard is in comparison to iPhone, though it looks more responsive. I still have issues with “typing” on a flat surface, but that just may be me. I simply might have to admit that the time of actual keyboards might be ending.
Some things to add that would just utterly complete the package for me:
- Stereo bluetooth, as well as BT sync or Wi-Fi sync with bundled software. It’s Palm OS (update below) so I don’t think that will actually be a problem.
- Satellite Radio capability. I don’t use it, but it’d make this next suggestion all the better for me.
- Have the car dock also interact with your car stereo. Any music on the device can be played from the device to your car speakers when you plug it into its dock.
- Open up the OS a bit. I know it isn’t released quite yet, and so this part might change, but the response time in the video looked a little laggy. Part of Windows Mobile strength (and no doubt Android’s as well) is that you can access the OS registry and do whatever you want with the thing.
- Massive onboard storage. Maybe I’m asking too much with that one. It’d really help #3 though! At the very least, let us use those nice 32GB SDHC cards.
