After about a year of enjoying how well my Ubuntu Linux home server downloads, organizes, and serves video files to my TV, I started to think harder about serving up music to devices around the house, and to my phone and/or PC while I’m at work. In the past, I’ve made my music library available on my home network via MediaTomb, minidlna, and Samba, but I never made use of it. Instead, I always used iTunes, which is good software, but very limiting.

In December, I realized two things:

1. I almost never sync my iPods to my computer anymore, because they charge in my car or in my home stereo’s dock.
2. I also never use my Android phone to listen to music, even though it is perfectly capable, because I never wanted to bother to get the USB cable out for my phone, and I haven’t found any software that I like to sync with.

My problem: syncing. I hate it. It is passé and worthless when everything is network connected and your music collection is vastly larger than what a reasonably-priced amount of flash memory will hold.

Around the same time, I received a Cr-48 from Google. It runs Chrome OS, which can play audio via the browser (Flash or HTML 5), but that’s it. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to find a good way to play my music library on it. I also wanted to store my library on my power-efficient Ubuntu Linux server, so I wouldn’t have to leave my power-hungry desktop on all day.

Searching for a Solution

I found two highly respected options that would allow me to stream music to a browser or other device: Ampache and Subsonic. Ampache is built on top of the LAMP stack, so it requires Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which a ton of Linux servers have installed on them. It has a good number of features, too, including an Android client and front-end support in Amarok and WinAmp. I ended up not liking it, however, for two main reasons: The system requirements are rather high, mostly because it depends on MySQL as a data store. Also, indexing my 80 GB music library was very slow.

What I ended up preferring, and falling in love with, was Subsonic. Subsonic is a Java app, which you can install either as a standalone Debian package in Ubuntu, or as a WAR file that you can run under TomCat or another Java Server. It runs on any host OS that supports Java, so Windows and Mac users can run it too. Subsonic scanned my music library surprisingly quickly, looks great, and worked right away. I have it installed under TomCat, and configured to use SSL (for security and to disguise my music downloading/streaming from network administrators).

Subsonic

Subsonic

Subsonic offers a somewhat complex, but attractive and skinnable, web interface. It offers playlist support (though not smart playlists as in iTunes), random playlists, search, and support for album art and metadata (including a tag editor). It is far more album-oriented than song oriented, which took some getting used to moving from iTunes. For example, albums can be rated, but not individual songs. Also, the home page on the interface defaults to random albums, which looks nice and pretty, but differs greatly from how I use iTunes. I really like the feature, though, because it allows me to rediscover music that has long been buried by my iTunes smart playlists.

Playback in the browser is done via an open-source Flash plugin, which works fine. Album art must be embedded in the files, or at least stored at the folder level, which was initially a challenge for me due to the way iTues handles album art in its library. I used MediaMonkey to help get my album art into shape. The server can be set up to transcode music in formats such as Flac to MP3 or AAC to support the client player’s capabilities and to limit bandwidth.

Subsonic doesn’t really stream your music; it downloads and caches it. The browser client caches the song you are playing, while the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 clients will cache a number of songs ahead of the current one. Caching is way better than streaming, because you don’t need a constant connection to the server. It works really well. The server has a “Status” window in which you can review all the connected clients and the bandwidth they are using, which is pretty cool.

Subsonic is free and open source software, though it does have a somewhat controversial donation requirement if you wish to use it via a phone app. You can connect to it via a web browser indefinitely, but if you use the Android app, as I do, it will tell you that you must donate to the project/developer after 30 days, or it will refuse to access the server. After seeing how well the Android app worked, I donated right away. Remember, even in the open source world, it is a good idea to support good developers.

By creating multiple user accounts, you can also use Subsonic to share music with friends and family. If you configure the server with SSL, you can do so securely and privately as well. Users can be given access to download and upload music, so it could become a music sharing platform for you and your close friends that flies under the radar.

All in all, I love Subsonic and recommend it to anyone who has a large music library that they wish to bring with them and share with close friends.

I like the product a lot; it completely blows the WD TV LIVE I have out of the water in all areas, and it offers a lot of good content that I otherwise not know anything about. Even the social aspects of the product are pretty smart. Still, I think that their choice to launch with one interface and have a new, shiny, different, and in-some-ways-inferior one appear as soon as you update the firmware was a misstep. That forms the basis of my review.

What’s great is that a Boxee employee has been reading the review (at least the first few dozen or so) and gave me his email address. I wrote him a long email about how I would improve the user interface. I hope that my ideas get incorporated. It is totally cool, however, to be able to talk back.

I hope Boxee continues to update the software and push it to the Boxee Box.

The best thing about e-books is that you can get many titles for free and read them on devices you already own (your computer, your smartphone). Dedicated e-book readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook, are now relatively cheap (about the price of 10-15 books) and offer better readability than cell phone and computer screens. I really like my Kindle, and find that I can read faster on it and focus my attention on the text far better than on non-dedicated e-readers.

Devices such as the Kindle have built-in or preferred e-book stores, but you don’t have to rely on them only to get books. Project Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Internet Archive, Google Books, and even (if you’re inclined) BitTorrent offer a ton of free or low-cost books. Sometimes, however, the books you get from these secondary sources aren’t in the correct format to read on your device, so you’ll have to convert them (hopefully for free!) before you can read them. To convert them to a new format, I recommend using Calibre.

Calibre

Calibre is a free and open source application which aims to be, for e-books, what iTunes is for music and video files. It does a little bit of everything, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes.

Here is a list of its most prominent features:
• Organize and manage your e-book library
• Edit and automatically edit e-book metadata and assign covers images
• Convert e-books between formats (its killer feature)
• Syncing books to/from numerous hardware devices (Android phones, iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.)
• Supports all e-book formats, including EPUB and MOBI (though it does not overcome DRM)
• Downloads news from web sites and transfers it to your e-reader device
• Allows you to run a content server to access your e-books via the web
• Read e-books (though its built-in reader is slow and kind of horrible)

Calibre isn’t the prettiest looking software. The icons are bright and clunky, though immediately decipherable. There are too few keyboard shortcuts and way too many right-click options. There is a lot of dead space in the main window, which is the main reason, in my opinion, that it looks amateurish compared to, say, iTunes.

That said, looks aren’t everything. Calibre is free, it’s updated and improved very frequently, and it does a heck of a lot. Its e-book conversion routines are probably the best available to date (and definitely the best available for free). It’s automatic metadata and cover download feature saves a ton of data entry time. The interface is very customizable, allowing you to change the window layout from wide to tall, and to select any number of data columns. Calibre supports user-defined tags, categories, saved searches, and even user-defined data fields, which allow you to organize your e-books in a myriad of ways. All in all, Calibre is extremely powerful. That said, most of the time you’ll spend in two windows (the library and the metadata windows), and use the handful of toolbar icons to navigate from function to function.

I love using Calibre to maintain my e-book library, and to convert e-books to the MOBI format, which is one of the few open formats that my Kindle supports. E-book conversion isn’t perfect, but it is very, very good, and represents Calibre’s killer feature. In the near future, I plan to post some recommendations on converting e-books from PDF to MOBI for reading on a Kindle.

Barrage Lite

Barrage Lite is free and includes the entire game. You can purchase the paid version to add more weapons, remove the unobtrusive ads from certain non-gameplay screens, and save your high scores and publish them for all players to see. Sadly, there is no online play, though that would be awesome. Still, it’s very good, and I heartily recommend it if you played the original in the DOS days!

Gentle Alarm

Thanks to the Motorola Droid’s dock and clock (ahem, “Multimedia Station”) mode, my phone became my alarm clock the day I brought it home. (Of course, due to the insanely bright LED lights on the Droid, I have to shut off the display before turning in for bed! The LEDs Hack doesn’t work for me very well.) Android’s default alarm clock is fine, but I really wanted an alarm that didn’t blast me out of bed in the morning, but started out quietly instead, and gradually increased in volume until it woke me up. Luckily, the Gentle Alarm app exists for just this purpose.

Gentle Alarm's Main Screen

Gentle Alarm provides alarms that fade in over a user-definable period, and customizable snooze times, too. It can ring any alarm, audio file, or ringtone on your phone. (The app, and your Android ROM, come with a number of alarm sounds by default.) Gentle Alarm’s defining feature is its “pre-alarm” feature, which tries to take advantage of your sleep cycles to wake you up when you are refreshed. The idea is to ring a very quiet alarm, prior to your normal wake-up time, to rouse you if you are already almost awake. If you are still in a deep sleep, you won’t be able to hear it. (It’s true!) The app helps you calibrate the volume, so the pre-alarm will only wake you up when you are not sleeping deeply, and the main alarm will always ring loud enough (eventually) to rouse you out bed. I’ve found that the pre-alarm helps me wake up earlier, or at least hit snooze less often, and still refreshed.

Gentle Alarm's Profiles Screen

If you’re worried about replacing Android’s tried and true alarm system with a third-party, and potentially unstable, application, don’t be. Gentle Alarm hooks into Android’s normal alarm routines, so, short of your battery dying, you can be assured that the alarm will ring.

Gentle Alarm's Alarms Screen

It took only one night’s trial for me to fall in love with and purchase the Gentle Alarm app. (The free version only works 6 days per week.)

Sleep Now

Sleep Now is a great app for the power napper or anyone who has trouble getting to sleep at night. It’s a fancy white-noise generator and alarm clock wrapped up into one package. I really like it, because I think it helps me fall asleep faster, and sleep more soundly, than I did without it.

Sleep Now's Main Screen

You set up programs to fall asleep to music or white noise.

1. Relax to music (whatever is on your phone), white noise, or other sounds included with the app.
2. Sleep to white noise, other sounds, or silence.
3. Wake up to a gentle alarm.

Programs can be configured to a fixed sleep timeframe, such as a 20-minute power nap, or to prompt you for a sleep duration when you run them. The alarms are similar to the Gentle Alarm app, but cannot be scheduled to exact times of day, and do not include the pre-alarm function. Like Gentle Alarm, Sleep Now allows you to calibrate your volume.

Sleep Now's Sleep Programs Screen

Two Apps?!

I bought both apps and use them every day. I think that Gentle Alarm could be folded into Sleep Now, because only two features of Gentle Alarm (alarm scheduling and the pre-alarm) are missing from Sleep Now as it is. The developer may do that in the future. Because the apps are not that expensive, I use them every day, and I like to support small developers, I didn’t hesitate to buy both.

Timeriffic allows you to change your phone’s volume (ringer and notifications), wifi, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and airplane mode, based on whatever day and time schedules you create. It is easy to set up (though the UI colors are kind of garish), stable (no force closes), and has almost no effect on battery life.

Timeriffic

I use Timeriffic to silence my phone while I am asleep. Typically, I don’t receive phone calls in the middle of the night, but I receive a lot of notifications, which I don’t want to wake me up. Silencing the ringer or notifications with Timeriffic is an all-or-nothing setting. The downside to Timeriffic, as opposed to Locale, is that you can’t “whitelist” phone numbers to ensure that certain people can reach you, even when you’re phone is set to silent. That isn’t a problem for me, but then again, I don’t have a job that requires me to be on call.

Locale has more features and a better user interface, but it is way too expensive, for what it is, to recommend. For my needs, the free Timeriffic is more than adequate.

I hate shopping, especially for stupid little things, like trash bags, facial tissues, and toilet paper. The list goes on, actually. There’s all sorts of stuff that I need, but is no fun to buy. Luckily for folks like me, there’s a service for that.

Thanks to an article on the state of online grocery shopping at Ars Technica, I found out about a useful shopping website called Alice.com. I’m really exited about it, because it promises to save me a lot of time shopping for mundane, boring items that my wife and I need, and run out of, regularly.

Alice.com Screen Shot

Alice.com specializes in toiletries (their tagline is “never run out of toilet paper!”), cleaning supplies, a nonperishable pantry items (cereal, coffee, tea), and all sorts of other household products that we need on a regular basis. You tell Alice what items you use, how often you use them, and Alice will remind you when you need them, and get them to your door. Shipping is free, provided you order at least six items. Ordering six items at a time isn’t a big deal, considering an item can be as small as box of tea bags or a tube of toothpaste. You don’t have to order each product in bulk, which is great for normal people and households. Alice promises all that, plus automatically-applied coupons and the lowest prices around.

Chasing Rabbits

I am incredibly frugal. I prefer generic drugs, store-brand foods, no-name detergents, and so on. That said, I find that most of the products my wife and I buy are name brands of some kind or another. All of those name brands are available on Alice.com. They have about half of the biggest ten consumer-packaged goods companies on board with their offerings.

Noticeably absent from this site, from a frugal shopper’s point of view, are generics. Everything on the site comes from a recognizable, quality name brand. In fact, the companies that own those brands are selling to you directly, and paying Alice.com a fee to collect data about your shopping habits and your opinions of their products. I don’t mind the data collection, because every grocery and drug store I shop at does it, too. It’s a really interesting business model.

The web site is oddly addictive, considering the mundane products for sale. It’s a very effective interface for shopping, and for getting you to complete your ultimate shopping list. You have to try it to believe me.

Manufacturer’s coupons are added automatically whenever they are available. The site pushes all sorts coupons in your face, to be honest, which is good for helping you save money, and spend more money, which betrays Alice’s true purpose: marketing.

A well-integrated price comparison engine, promises to prove that their prices are always the lower available online. I never trust a company’s listing of competitor’s prices, but a few spot checks revealed that Alice is honest about other online stores. If you are willing to buy slightly different products or package sizes, though, all bets are off on cross-site price comparisons. You’ll have to do your comparison shopping the old fashioned way: yourself.

The site also has a slick “Budget” feature, which shows how much you spend on average in each of the site’s product categories, and how much you saved using its coupons.

All told, prices on the site do seem reasonable, considering shipping is free with no dollar minimums. (Note that they do charge your local sales taxes, unlike some other online stores.)

Remember What the Dormouse Said

I think the social networking aspects built into the website are pretty laughable. Do people, especially people keen on avoiding the messy human contact of big box stores, really want to talk to other people about toothpaste and contact lens solution?

Wonderland

My first Alice.com order was delivered two days after I placed it. I’m very pleased with the service, and think it will save my wife and me a lot of time going forward.

My first Alice.com delivery was waiting for me when I got home in the evening, two days after I placed the order.

If you are interested in signing up for Alice.com, please use my affiliate link. If you do so, you will receive $10 off the first $50 you spend there. Other than the referral link, I am not receiving anything from Alice.com, so you can be sure my review is unbiased.

Though I’ve learned to love Twitter the service, as evidenced by my frequently-updated Twitter stream, I still have grave concerns about Twitter the company. First, the service is overloaded, and fails quite often. Second, everyone’s on the same system, so a failure affects all its users simultaneously. Third, Twitter gives away everything, and has no sustainable revenue model (in my opinion). What happens if (when?) it fails?

Twitter Fail Whale

These practical, technical considerations led me to think that Twitter should not control the entirety of microblogging. It should be set up to work like email or instant messaging (that is, like XMPP/Jabber, not like AIM), with a network of independent, multiple providers communicating with each other.

Email, unlike Twitter, is an open system. Anyone can become or subscribe to an email provider. No matter which provider you use, you can email people who use different providers than you do. If you dislike your email provider’s terms or level of service, you can leave and find another one, but you can still email everyone you did from your old provider. When your email provider goes down, not everybody loses email. If, on the other hand, Twitter goes belly up, we all lose the ability to post and connect.

In order for a Twitter-like service to stand the test of time, it should be decentralized, run on open standards, and be flexible, to accommodate different classes of users. Decentralization removes the single point of failure, so a fail-whale would only affect Twitter users, and not those of other, compatible platforms. Open standards allow for inexpensive and broad implementations. Every university and business with an email server could run a Twitter-like server to accommodate its user base; so could cable and DLS providers. Flexible, open-source implementations would allow people to improve the platform collaboratively, or to tailer their own software for special-use cases, such as a private intranet service for intra-company communications.

Identica

My description above is already coming to fruition, thanks to an open source project called StatusNet, and the OpenMicroBlogging group’s initiatives. The leading open-source microblogging implementation is Identi.ca, a service that runs on the open-source StatusNet platform. It’s basically an open source Twitter, with some cool functions you might not expect. For example, you can subscribe to users on any other StatusNet or OpenMicroBlogging provider, such as the TWIT Army. You can subscribe to groups, which are basically lists of people who share your interests. Your messages are covered by the Creative Commons license, not by some Company’s terms of service (which I like) You can host your own instance on your own server, if you want, too. And lastly, it sports a Twitter-compliant API, so third party microblogging apps like Twhirl support it.

It is a great service. It isn’t perfect—the Twitter integration doesn’t work well yet, in my experience—but it is a great product to try out and support. It has a great user community of technical professionals and open-source aficionados that I’ve already learned a lot from.

I am really rooting for Identica and StatusNet to succeed, and encourage you to try it out to support open microblogging standards. You can find me at http://identi.ca/mjdescy.

The dusty old PC that runs Ubuntu Linux like a champ.

A basic Ubuntu Jaunty desktop. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Next, I bought a $40 Linksys NSLU2, which is called the “Slug” by enthusiasts. It’s a tiny, silent, ultra-efficient  network attached storage device (NAS) that hooks up to an external hard drive. I was able to install Debian Linux on it, and run a web server (lighthppd), a barebones but excellent BitTorrent client (rtorrent), and cross-platform network file sharing (Samba). It was a fun challenge to get everything working from the command line.

The Slug, which is about the size of a small paperback or a large deck of cards.

At work, I got an assignment which required me to work with huge, many-gigabyte -sized files. These files often needed simple things done on them, such as removal or appending of file headers, concatenation of multiple files, simple filtering to pull rows we are examining, and so on, before they could be used for testing. Since I couldn’t open these files up in the editor, and the ACL software I’m using is painfully slow and cumbersome to use for these tasks, I relied on my Linux command line knowledge. I installed CygWin on my Windows XP machine to create a virtual Linux command line (or, more accurately, a POSIX environment). It was incredibly useful for my work. I made great use out of Bash scripting, and the cat, head, tail, sed, and grep commands. I also used rsync to run our data backup scripts, which ran a lot more reliably than Windows copy commands, and were just as fast as third party file copying tools such as TeraCopy.

I am very impressed with Linux, and learn more and more about the benefits of using free and libre open source software every day.