Terabytes
Sweet Junie has flown back to Eau Claire, so it's just me, Ms. Emily and a
cloud of fruit-flies. They almost certainly arose spontaneously from that
banana peel in the waste basket next to my desk and wandered upstairs to see
what the vittles were like up there. I have a soft spot for Drosophila
melanogaster, having raised so many of them in my youth. My biology
teacher, Mr. Ailstock, got me started with petri dishes and agar agar early on,
doing genetics experiments the details of which I forget, but which had
something to do with tracking various traits among successive generations of
offspring. The fruit flies also came into play when we were raising
Latrodectus mactans (black widow spiders) from a egg sac that Mr. Ailstock has
found in his wood pile. It was my job to put a couple of the little widows
into a test tube and make sure that every day they got a fruit fly or two as a
snack. The little spiders were quite beautiful with black bodies and red
stripes. We didn't have them long enough for them to develop their
trademark hourglass, as Mr. Ailstock had a friend who wanted the batch for their
silk, which he used to make scope cross-hairs. One day we packed up a
couple of dozen of the test tubes and mailed them off. I've often wondered
if that was legal.
~~~
Well, I decided to try out the Western Digital WD TV ($120 at BestBuy). It
is a multimedia player that you connect to a USB hard disk as input, and to a TV
or audio system as output. I bought a terabyte USB drive for just over
$100 and started ripping all my CDs to it. I figured I might as well just
use lossless WAV files (the underlying content format for CDs), since my 200 CDs
were still not going to consume 10% of the terabyte drive. I plugged the
USB drive into my main workstation, fired up Windows Media Player 11, and
popped in one CD after another. I had already set the options for WAV and
rip-on-CD-detection, so it was pretty smooth. WMP went out to CDDB and
looked up the CD name, track titles, and other metadata, and organized the CDs
by artist, with subfolders for each album.
I'm just about done ripping. I'll take the small WD TV upstairs (it fits
in your palm), plug in the USB drive, and power it up. The HDMI cable will
go between the WD TV and the Sony Bravia (so I can see the on-screen-display),
and then I'll route the audio from the Sony via optical audio cable to my Denon
receiver. If all goes well, I will have gotten rid of my big, clunky,
unreliable Sony 300-CD changer, and gained a lot of footprint on the top stereo
shelf. Then, I can sort the CD's back into their respective jewel cases,
pack them up, and store them in some corner of the basement.
Next up will be video. The WD TV purports to handle a dozen different
video formats in resolution up to 1080p. There are plenty of DVD ripping
software packages, but I have my eye SlySoft's AnyDVD, which claims to be able
to handle Blu-Ray also. How do they avoid prosecution under our DRM
protection legislation? They're based in Antigua.
DVD's run about 4 GB apiece, so I should have room for another hundred CD's and
maybe 200 DVDs. Half of that if they were Blu-Ray. If I run out of
room, I can just plug the terabyte drive into my PC and copy it to a 2 TB drive
(about $250 retail). By the time that gets filled they should have 4
TB drives, I'm guessing.
~~~
Junie had some great ideas for the wedding, including a beautiful 1920's dress
for her and a modified zoot suit for me. She's on the lookout for
Art Deco table decorations and we have to learn the Charleston for The First
Dance.
~~~
Junie and I had breakfast with my BIL Roy and my M.D. nephew as they took a
break from their cross-country drive from Louisville to Redding, where he will
be taking up residence as an ER doc. Being of a liberal bent (said nephew
has a Masters degree in public health and worked with Doctors Without Borders in
Central America), we discussed the woes of the current health-care system, and
the degree to which it motivates physicians to a) specialize, b) reduce patient
loads, c) raise prices, and d) decline to accept Medicare patients.
~~~
I'm almost done with the latest player firmware for my favorite client.
The units play audio books and music flawlessly, and the navigation glitches
seem to be out of the way. The last big bug is that when you turn off the
player, it doesn't really turn off, and you have to pop the battery out to get
going again. Nearly identical firmware sources don't do that on the
development board, of course. Nor does a prior release that I created.
I've posted a HELP message with Our Chip Vendor's support staff, but they're all
in Shenzhen and I won't hear back until Sunday evening, when it's Monday in
China. I need to get this right, as the firmware will be shipped in
millions of retail units.
~~~
One thing you learn when ripping your CD collection is how many times you bought
an album that you probably played once and then forgot about. Not the
Door's first album, of course, or The Best of Ella Fitzgerald, more like that
Sarah Brightman album you bought after being infatuated with Phantom.