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Harvey Danger So Harvey Danger, who had a big hit with “Flagpole Sitta” a few years back is embracing the value of file sharing and putting their new album “Little by Little” up on BiTorrent and direct download. Do yourselves a favor folks, check it out. And if you like it, donate or buy a real copy. This is how the model should work, but it won’t if the fans don’t support it.

Compfused.com20-20LA20to20NYC A time-lapse video of a drive from LA to New York in a convertible. I can’t stop watching, but it desperately needs music.

Due to my housemate picking up and heading south, we’ll be forced to sell our house here in the Bay Area. As we’ve had it for several years now, we’ll make a decent profit off of it. The downside is, it’s not nearly enough profit to buy into anything worthwhile in the area and I’m rather pessimistic about Bay Area real-estate anyhow. The whole point of this is that I’ve been reading up on personal finance books. Three that I’ve checked out recently are “Rich Dad/Poor Dad”, The Motley Fool’s “What To Do With Your Money Now” and “The Wealthy Barber”.

“Rich Dad/Poor Dad” was apparently at the top of the NYT reading list for a while. This is either a bad omen for the NYT reading list, or a really sorry statement on the financial awareness of the average readre. I’m fully annoyed by books that can be summarized in a single page. The synopsis of Rich Dad/Poor Dad follows: “Learn about investing, and put yourself into financial harm’s way as an incentive to work harder”. Not even two lines…

Another big thumbs down for the Motely Fool book, “What To Do With Your Money Now”. Here’s an exercise: First: load up a random page on the Motely Fool website, and measure out the percentage of the page that’s devoted to advertising (including self-promotion). Hint - As of this writing, the fool.com home page loads with a pop-up that blacks out the entire page pushing you to sign up. Second: Calculate the percentage of pages in the “What To Do With Your Money Now” that contain a plug to a members-only page on the fool.com site. Compare the two. My guess is the book contains a higher percentage of advertising than the site. There might have been some good information in it, but I was so annoyed with the constant ads that I gave up halfway, feeling altogether ripped off. Seriously, I kept thinking of the “Make Money Now” spams and late night infomercials. Credit where credit is due, their model works - the Fools got my money, but that’s all they’ll get from me in the future.

On the other hand, “The Wealthy Barber” has been a great book so far. Similar to RD/PD, It presents investment guidance in the form of a novel, but provides advice based on actual resources and tools, going into details on the positives and negatives of each and how to use them to your advantage. It’s an entry-level book to be sure, but provides some very accessible first steps towards getting your finances in order.

So I’ve spent some time with the AVel LinkPlayer 2 and thought I’d post an update… Yeah, most of this is negative, but that’s how it is with any gadget - all shiny and pretty until you start peeling the onion.

Some new cool things I’ve discovered: The latest firmware supports streaming radio and video - I can now listen to my favorite net stations Radio Paradise and Groove Salad through the stereo without needing the crazy iTunes hookup. I found a pretty cool back end software called WizD that provides a decent UI for navigating server shares. It’s pretty much a standalone server app that does the job. There’s some better ones out there, but they all seem to require Apache 2, which I’ve not got installed. This may be a moot point as I’m considering going with local storage anyhow (see below). The other media back-ends look pretty feature-rich, caching the library in a MySQL database for faster parsing, storing album and DVD cover images, and allowing searches and such. Speaking of browsing though, the browser is horribly slow. I thought it was the server itself, but I can browse the backend on my laptop at blazing speeds. The LinkPlayer takes almost a full 2 seconds to load and render a page. Painfully slow in this day and age. My setup uses a wireless bridge, which just doesn’t provide enough bandwidth for some of the higher bitrate video (mounted DVDs, downloaded HD TV shows, WMV-HD stuff). There’s supposedly several USB/Networked storage devices that are supported by the LinkPlayer, I might just look into hanging one of them off the back of the stereo (yay! More wires!). The DVD mechanism itself is a bit sketchy, it’s success rate reading some DVDs can be pretty sporadic and it’s rather loud when a disk is fully spun-up. This is apparently fairly common and there’s several writeups on exchanging the mechanism for a faster, quieter OEM one. I did pick up the OEM JVC D4-to-component cable and the picture now looks really nice. Decently-encoded media looks as good or better than most of the HD content on DirecTV.

Still, it’s a lot nicer than having that fat PC sitting next to the TV and still cost about a grand less.

I use a Sony SR7k laptop as a travel machine and keep my Garmin MapSource software on it so I can put new maps on my GPS while on the road. The laptop is an ultra-portable that doesn’t have a built-in CD-ROM drive.

I recently picked up Garmin’s Topo software (topographical maps of the United States) but ran into a hitch - the software doesn’t allow you to install the data to your hard disk and you must mount the appropriate CD to view a particular region.

I’ve run into this plenty of times before and my usual solution is to rip the CD with Alcohol or Nero or whatever to an ISO then use the excellent Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a virtual drive. It’s rather cumbersome, but it does work.

Rather than making yet more ISO’s, I found out where the Garmin software stores it’s data paths in the registry and fixed it there, so now I can just copy all of the Topo maps to the local hard disk and everything runs just fine.

Here’s the step-by-step on what to do if you’re in the same boat:

You need to edit the registry to change where the Garmin software looks for the files and manually copy the files to the hard disk.

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT A REGISTRY IS OR DO NOT FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH EDITING ONE - PLEASE DO NOT FOLLOW THIS PROCEDURE! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MAY OCCUR DUE TO THIS PROCEDURE! IRREVOCABLE DAMAGE MAY RESULT IF A MISTAKE IS MADE!

On each CD, there’s a folder containing the .IMG files (The folders are East, West, Alaska, and Hawaii). Create a folder on your hard disk and copy the folders for the particular regions you want into it (I went with C:\Garmin\Topo).

In the registry, the paths are stored in HKEYLOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Garmin\MapSource\Products\X\Loc Where X above is a number (for Topo, there’s 6, 7, 8, and 9). Each number corresponds to one of the maps. You want to change each entry for Loc to the path to where you copied the files. For instance, in my case, 6 is for East and I changed it from D: to C:\Garmin\Topo\East. Double-click on the Loc text to open a dialog to change the Value Data to the path where you copied the files. Repeat for each of the 4 entries that you copied to your hard disk. If you didn’t want to put all that data on (say you never plan to geocache in Alaska), just don’t copy that folder to your disk and leave the registry entry as it was.

Odeo: Play, Download, and Create Podcasts I’ve been a fan of podcasts for a while, finding they’re perfect for listening to during the commute or whatnot. The big problem I’ve been having is actually finding good ones. The iTunes interface is absolutely horrible, far too few categories and no real information. Podcast.net at least has a wide variety of categories, but not much beyond that. Enter Odeo - they’ve actually got previews and ratings and comments and all kinds of good stuffs. Within a few minutes, I was able to find a couple of good Creative Commons music podcasts I’d not heard of before - I was able to screen out the other CC podcasts that weren’t in my genre and the UI to subscribing was pretty straightforward. There is added value for being a subscriber, but I was able to search and get rss URL’s without logging in. Two thumbs up from me!

Because I subscribe to Pat’s theory that “The number of bikes you should own is exactly one more than you currently have”, I decided to up my poseur points a bit and added this sweet thang to my garage. I tellya, the hardest thing about a new bike is the break in period limits your RPM’s to just above where the real power comes on, so you only get a tiny taste of how fast the bike really is.

Plus, it’s got built in bun warmers!