Posts from — February 2011

It should come at no surprise that staring into a bright light for an extended period of time will keep you awake longer. So, it didn’t surprise me when I saw the article below in the LA Times discussing sleep habits and E-Reading, but it got me thinking. Since acquiring my iPad last year, I have downloaded and read 16 e-books for the B&N, Kindle, and iBooks apps (I like to see the different versions in action), in addition to the dozen or so paper-bound books. In essence, I’ve more than doubled my reading, mostly before bed, getting in an extra hour a night because of the backlit screen. Usually, I will nod off after 10-15 minutes of reading a paperbound book. That’s 4 hours a night during the weeknights, which at my average pace (around 250 words per min) with the averaged sized novel (let’s say 100,000 words) results in about 60% of my reading time. Not bad – thanks Apple.

So, in response, to the LA Time article, I’m not sure I apply to the expert advice. My sleep quality hasn’t changed, of course, my retina will probably have permanent burn-in where I can read text with my eyes shut.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/04/ipad-kindle-ebook-sleep.html

With very little effort I recently implemented a home streaming video environment.  It is pretty slick having an at-home multimedia hub for movies, music, and photos.  Since then, a few people have asked me what steps I took.  If you have an existing WIFI-enabled home then you can stream video and music to almost any display with a few extra ingredients.

Here’s are the two main ingredients for just under $500.  Since time is also a commodity, I’d say there is about 2 hours of manual work, and 10-12 hours (depending on the size of the disk space) of time needed by devices to build themselves (overnight if you can swing it).

1.  One (1) NAS Device ($300) – Network Area Storage, otherwise known as a NAS device, is basically a mini-computer with a set of hard drives, usually two or more for redundancy in case one drive fails.  I went with the Synology DS209 that supports two drives and a streaming media software service that runs on the device.  If the DS209 is no longer available, then I recommend another 2-Bay Synology NAS like the DS211 (shown below).

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