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Touch Mouse by Logitech  is a simple app that makes your Touch a trackpad/keyboard to control a computer via wi-fi. You download the app to your Touch/iPhone and install a small applet on your computer available from Logitech.com. This is perfect in my living room for switching between Windows Media Center, Hulu, YouTube, and the History channel website. Most wireless or bluetooth keyboards won’t work beyond a few feet from the computer and who wants a keyboard mixed in with their remotes anyway. I cancelled my DirecTV and get all my TV from the Internet now. I stream audio and video to my AV receiver and old SD 32″ TV while my PC sits in the other room. I was stuck in Media Center which is fine for Netflix and IPTV selections Microsoft offers, but that is still pretty limited. Now I can switch applications and manipulate the screen from my comfy chair like I was in front of the computer. It’s free, simple to set up, and can work on Windows or Mac.

If you listen to audio books, you probably are a member of Audible.com and if you aren’t, you should be. Audible released it’s iPhone/iPod Touch app this week and it’s great. The Touch or iPhone will play audio books through it’s media player and it’s fine. The Audible app gives you more flexibility with the playback by letting you go backward and forward in 30 second increments and allows you to bookmark a spot for future reference. It allows you to access  your Audible library through wi-fi, so you can get away from iTunes , wonky syncs, and the whole computer, if you choose. Just open the app, connect and download anything from your Audible library online. Of course it also knows what is already on your device and you can play it from the app. There are stats on usage and some silly social badge things you can earn. I don’t really care about that stuff, but others might think it cool. It has the ability to tweet and post things to facebook and twitter and hooks into YouTube for videos of Authors and readers. I see I have 26 books and listened for 3 hours 29 minutes today ( I had to drive to Harrisburg). Another cool app for my Touch. I like it!

Here is some of the stuff I have used throughout 2009 and liked a lot. In no particular order…

ZOOM H2: a hand held recorder that I use to make recordings. It’ll record in WAV files and has multiple microphones for stereo and surround. It uses SD memory cards and does a good job. Great for noodling or recording riffs before you lose them. One downside is the USB 1.1 interface that is too slow and should have been 2.0.

DROBO: How I love the Drobo. Redundant expandable storage that is beautiful to look at. Right now I have 3 terabyte drives and one 750gb drive in it and have beau coup storage for all my music and other media.

Ipod Touch: 32GB model does everything I can think of. Games, photos, audiobooks, podcasts and tons of music. I hate trying to use it to surf, but when I need to connect it’s there and works.

FACEBOOK: Connecting with old friends is great. I have concerns with its privacy controls, but still think it the best social site out there.

Audible.com: I love books, but spend a lot of time in the car. I’m not sure I’m an aural info processor, so I use it for entertainment books mostly.

NetFlix: I’m using the watchnow feature for the most part and stream content to my TV using the Windows Media Center interface. I’m very close to ditching DirectTV and getting all my TV over the internet.

Windows 7: Latest and greatest Microsoft OS to date. It works and is still compatible with almost everything I have no matter how old.

BlueAnt Supertooth Light: Simple bluetooth speakerphone for the car. If your car doesn’t have a hands free system, you need to get one. This is stupid simple and inexpensive. New models have more features, but this is all I need. If you hold a phone while driving anymore, you are an IDIOT!

Added some new drives to the data robot recently. Now have a 1TB, 750GB, 500GB and a 320GB for 1.42TB of redundant, protected storage and about 600GB free at the moment. I Have dumped media from all but one external drive onto the drobo and now have several external drives that I don’t have a use for, at the moment. I think an immutable law of digital storage is you will find stuff, no matter its usefulness, to fill 80% of the storage available and then think how you can increase it before the last 20% is used up.

Remember, despite the redundancy of the drobo, you still need some sort of off site storage solution or you are at risk. Francis Ford Coppola had his computer and back-up drives stolen from his home in Argentina and he literally lost his life’s work. Microsoft’s Skydrive will give you 25GB of storage for free. Don’t risk losing the important documents, music and pictures you are accumulating.

the amazing drobo click for larger image

I finally got myself a drobo. It’s a unique storage   device that adds unlimited capacity and data redundancy in a very simple product. They market it as a ‘data robot’ and thus the name drobo. It’s  a USB 2.0 or firewire 800/400 (that’s ieee1394 or ilink to some people) external drive enclosure that will hold up to 4 sata drives of any capacity. Some geeks love to set up RAID arrays and will argue whether RAID 5 or Raid 10 is best. I’d rather not have to worry about striped and/or mirrored arrays where you must use disks of the same size (and usually exact brand and model or you are likely to have problems). The drobo eliminates all the hassle. You just slide in two or more drives of any capacity and connect the USB or firewire cable. There is a simple software application that gives you the drobo dashboard. You first decide how you want to format the drives. NTFS is best for windows user, but Mac and linux users have their options too. In a couple of minutes the drives are formatted and you have one large volume that you can map as any available drive letter and name whatever you want (Mine is the X: drive named drobo). Now I can dump anything I want on that drive and it is safe from system crashes and hard drive failures on my computer and even more importantly on the drobo itself. the drobo uses a proprietary sytem (it’s not RAID!) that allows the drobo to rebuild itself when a drive fails with no loss of data. All your precious pictures, music, video, even your memoirs are protected against drive failures. The cost of this is reduced capacity of all the drives. You can figure about a third of the total capacity is lost to this redundancy. A small price figuratively and literally when you look at hard drives these days.

Drobo has 4 bays and accepts any sized sata drive

I had a 250gb, a 320gb, and a new 1terabyte drive on hand and slid them in. This is not the most efficient combination since the available storage is less than 500gb overall due to the difference in sizes and how the data is spread over all the drives so that the failure of any drive allows all the data to be recovered from the other two. The drobo is smart. It’ll tell you when a drive is getting full or is in danger of crashing. Just slide out the smallest drive and add a bigger one. The drobo will rebuild all the data with no muss or fuss. This is a great data protection and back up solution for anyone who has important information on their computer(s). Keep in mind that while drobo will guard your data at home or office, it can’t protect against fire, flood, earthquake or even thieves. A comprehensive data storage and protection system has to incorporate some sort of off site storage plan. This could be an external drive with your critical data that you take to work, or a dvd your burn and send to your mother, brother, or friend.  There are online solutions like carbonite or amazon’s S3 service. Microsoft has Windows Live (http://home.live.com) and you get 25gb of free storage and a number of other interesting services as well. However you choose to do it, you need to have multiple copies of important data in more than one place or you are only one act of God away from lost data. Drobo is pricey compared to simple external hard drives. I have a small forest of drives next to my computer for storage and back-ups. The drobo will be replacing most of them due to its set and forget ease of use. I can use a free app like SyncToy from Microsoft and set up folders on the drobo that mirror folders and files on my desktop and laptop machines. SyncToy will copy any changes and keep the folders synched. Check out the drobo and see if it fits into your back-up and storage plan. www.drobo.com

I currently run a HP m8120n. (Refurbished from Newegg for $600 delivered. I couldn’t build a new box for anywhere near that.) It has an Intel quadcore Q6600 at 2.4ghz, 3gb RAM, 2x320gb HD’s, Hauppauge digital tuner card, and I threw in a Radeon 3650 video card because I didn’t want to bother with a new PSU. I have an HP Media Vault for media storage/back-up and it has 800gb of storage. I have several Seagate external USB drives ranging from 250-500gb. I’m trying to get started ripping hundreds of CD’s. I use a 24″ BenQ Super PVA LCD monitor because I hate the color shift and viewing angles on most consumer panels. I run Vista because that’s what it came with and I haven’t had a problem with it. I actually like it.
I use the media center a lot now. I still have a 32″ CRT for my livingroom home theatre. I run a composite out from the PC to it and use the HP remote to stream content. Works fine for standard def and video podcasts. Hope to upgrade to a HDTV soon.

Viacom is evil! They just don’t get it. Everyone should be outraged at the invasion of their privacy. The ‘old’ media companies are so ignorant. Youtube is the best advertisement and product placement tool they could want and they just can’t see beyond the rabbit ear antennas of a few people. They think they can squeeze some money out of Google and scare the net into ‘protecting’ their content for them.
I predict the backlash against Viacom will cost them more than anything they get from Google. The genie will not be placed back in its bottle. The people watching Youtube are not watching content on their TVs. Viacom is arguing they are being harmed by people seeing content they wouldn’t watch on conventional OTA, cable or satellite. Youtube is not taking away from their market, IT’S a NEW MARKET YOU IDIOTS!! And instead of exploiting it, Viacom wants to crush it. So long Viacom, I hope my pension fund isn’t investing in you.