I’m not really a gadget freak. I’ve got a smart phone and a laptop and an iPod. I don’t have the latest and greatest of any of these and I don’t have a netbook or an ereader. And though a couple of those could have been followed by ‘yet’ I don’t really want all of them. How do you keep up with them and how to you justify the cost of them all.
I like the SyFy channel show Eureka! It appeals to the geek in me. So many interesting things being created and gadgets everyone has and just all the cool science. It just really appeals.
There are somethings they have on the show that we are starting to get pretty close to having in our everyday likes. We have smart phones that do things Alexander Graham Bell never dreamed would be possible, let alone happening on a phone not connected by wires. We have eReaders that let us read books on a device that takes a library of several square feet and puts it all in a space less then the size of a ream of paper. We have laptops and netbooks that are also smaller than the size of a ream of paper and with computing power that you couldn’t get in a full size desktop computer 10 years ago. We have tablets that are almost as powerful as the netbooks and do things that we only saw in sci-fi movies. How many of us watched Star Trek and thought the PADD was so cool. Really, carry all your homework in one hand, no backpack required.
One thing that I’m working towards is a being able to access my media all from several locations/devices. Ok, yes I live in an apartment and I could just put the cd on in the living room and hear it in the other rooms. That’s really not the point. I don’t want to have to turn on the stereo, dig out the cd and put it in and then decide if I want to listen to it over and over or if I will just get up and change it. I get busy and a lot of times the cd has been over for 2 or 3 hours before I get up to do anything about it. Or being able to have sheet music at the tip of your fingers in moments without having to carry around stacks of books. Or for that matter being able to access whatever reference books easily without lugging them around.
I want to be able to remotely access whatever I want to listen to from whichever room and be able to select all of it or some of it or whatever I’m in the mood for. Ok. I know there is iTunes and there are playlists for Media player and a number of other music players out there. I want to be able to have the music, words or chords to some of the songs I like to play easily available and not a mess of papers stuffed in a folder or a notebook. I’d even like to be able to access the movies I already have on DVD without having to take the thing with me.
I know it’s all possible. I may not know how to do all of it yet but I’m getting there. The biggest part of this project is getting all the cd’s ripped to electronic format. Yeah, I could by them that way. I know. I’ll get there. I’m still a little old school on that. Then there is the scanning of everything to pdf. That’s going to take some time.
Unfortunately that means that I get to spend a lot of time ripping all my cds and then I will have to put them all in one locations, with a backup of course and then there will be all the scanning and possibly ripping the DVD’s to storage. Just that part is a big project. In the mean time, I’ve get to try to find the device or devices that I want to use for listening to the electronic of the music. I know my iPhone won’t be the best choice. It’s not very adhoc for that sort of thing. I’m thinking that some of the Android devices might be what I’m looking for.