better living through electronics

I'm reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, translated from the Chinese. It's really good, on its own terms, but also in the same way Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon is good, which is that it's a non-Western example of a (largely) Western genre. Translation is a miserable set of tradeoffs, but the translators have written English that probably no native speaker would write, which combined with the Chinese names does keep it fresh.

I've been sick all week, starting right after I spent Thursday and Friday in the office last week. I mostly only go there when I have a new minion starting, and #10 started on Monday of last week. Monday is my big meeting day, so I pushed through that, then I was useless Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday I wore myself out with 90 minutes of hiring tasks.

As you might imagine, I handle the home IT tasks, which extends to the A/V gear. We've been running for a while on my Yamaha "PianoCraft" receiver that was already discontinued when I bought it in 2008. In addition to the companion DVD player dying (who plays DVDs any more?), it doesn't handle modern video cables (HDMI), and as is always the case with these kinds of setups, only the person who set it up can really remember that in order to use the PlayStation you have to set the receiver to TAPE/MD and use the HDMI Y-junction to select Input A, and the Windows gaming laptop is DVD/CD on the receiver and Input B on the HDMI. The speakers are nice enough, though.

I did the usual research on how to solve this problem, and the answer appears to be precisely the kind of Home Theater AVR (Audio/Video Receiver) that I've avoided as being too awkward and expensive, which was true until recently. They look like this:

Incredible as it seems, I have avoided them, as they are large, and used to be expensive. My late housemate J.D. bought one, a Harman-Kardon, and I'm not sure he ever got the full value from it. They're better now in pretty much every way, and the base models start at $180: not too shabby for something that will stay mostly up-to-date for a decade.

This being the Bay Area, people are always selling this caliber of stuff, so after some painstaking research to count HDMI ports and try to understand what I'd be able to do with it, I picked up an older sibling of the Denon shown above, for $75 from a very nice Irishman who moved into a smaller place. Maybe his new place was too small for 5.1 Surround Sound? Dunno.

The digital music devices I use, the now-Logitech Squeezeboxes, were originally made by/for audiophiles, so they have a digital optical output I've never used. But behold! a few minutes with the on-screen menu, and I've reassigned the OPT port to the DOCK source, rename DOCK to "Squeezebox" (because changing the name is a thing you can do), and it's done! BD (Blu-ray Disc) becomes "PS3," DVD becomes "Laptop," and then that's it. If we ever get the yen for more speakers, there's 3 more speaker outputs, and an automatic setup function using the included calibrating microphone, although I don't remember where it is.

In other respects, it's been an extraordinarily messy few weeks. But the stereo is easy to use now!

We do what we can.

good packing choices: electronics

I'm home today with some sinus pressure and a beautiful and unseasonably cold rainy day, and before going back to sleep, I was sorting through the computer stuff I brought. It's all worked so well that I thought I might make a list.

• Asus Eee PC 1005PE - This is a fantastic little netbook. Under Windows it actually gets the 11-hour battery life, and the keyboard is great. I usually use Linux on it, which works quite well. The new ones are even shinier, with dual-core processors.
• Flash memory thumb drives - 2x8GB and 1x4GB. These are great for sharing and printing documents--Chileans all have them (they're called pendrive in Spanish, which few people seem to notice is a loanword). I use one for shuttling documents around, and one will boot Linux if something goes wrong. (I would like to have such a thing for Windows, but I think it doesn't exist.) And then one more, just in case, and it was $12.
• USB SD card reader - Haven't actually needed it since the Asus has a card reader built-in, but I'm glad I have it.
• Secure Digital flash memory cards - I have 2x2GB, 1x1GB, and 1x256MB. I used a 2GB for my camera, but having spares is handy: the 256MB is now in my old camera, and combined with the SD card reader, these can serve the same functions as thumb drives. Also, incredibly cheap. (The 2GB cards are actually tiny MicroSD cards in full-size SD adapters.)
• iPod Nano - Actually, the battery on this is about dead and I haven't used it at all.
• Kodak EasyShare C813 - Oh, man. This was a step up from my years-old Canon digital--and only $60 off Woot.com--but what a crappy camera. I finally replaced it with my incredibly drool-tastic Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7, which has a gigantic Leica lens and sees better in the dark than I do. Don't buy the Kodak if you can buy anything nicer.

Except for the Kodak, everything has been rock-solid reliable and really useful. I should have brought more dress shirts, but hey, at least I can plan for technology.