Personal media management and consumption are a mess. For instance, I use Picasa for photos and short video clips coming off my camera onto my laptop. But given the large number of photos and video, I then move everything to an EasyNAS RAID array. Pictures from my mobile phone go to flickr. For music and video downloads I use iTunes on my laptop, but in my living room I have a Sonos. My PVR is from the cable company and (big surprise) doesn’t talk to anything else. My DVDs are largely not rip...

Personal media management and consumption are a mess. For instance, I use Picasa for photos and short video clips coming off my camera onto my laptop. But given the large number of photos and video, I then move everything to an EasyNAS RAID array. Pictures from my mobile phone go to flickr. For music and video downloads I use iTunes on my laptop, but in my living room I have a Sonos. My PVR is from the cable company and (big surprise) doesn’t talk to anything else. My DVDs are largely not rip...

A couple of years ago we more or less stopped watching live television. Instead we use a PVR supplied by Cablevision which works more or less on the “Tivo” model, i.e. you have a limited amount of recording space and need to decide upfront which shows you want to record. For my birthday a few weeks ago, I got a Sonos. While I have a bit of a music library the main way I have been listening is via Rhapsody, i.e. completely on demand. It’s made me convinced that this is a far superior access mo...

A couple of years ago we more or less stopped watching live television. Instead we use a PVR supplied by Cablevision which works more or less on the “Tivo” model, i.e. you have a limited amount of recording space and need to decide upfront which shows you want to record. For my birthday a few weeks ago, I got a Sonos. While I have a bit of a music library the main way I have been listening is via Rhapsody, i.e. completely on demand. It’s made me convinced that this is a far superior access mo...

A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit. I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV. Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it. Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set up and so far has proven flaky. This is a big flaw as far as I am concerned. I have almost 1TB of storage...

A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit. I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV. Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it. Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set up and so far has proven flaky. This is a big flaw as far as I am concerned. I have almost 1TB of storage...