I just found a “must have” feature in the Chumby One that means it will be a definite travel companion – it’s a wireless router !

My Chumby has been doing its job as a simple weather report, watching facebook and twitter, classic flip clock, alarm, and calendar. It also lets me listen to Pandora and NPR (which, until now, has not been very interesting at home with the Sonos). Now I found out I can use it as a wireless router.

I just plug a simple USB ethernet adapter in the back, choose ‘wired” rather than wireless for the connectivity, and add a magic file. All of a sudden, I have an open router! The IP addresses are a bit strange but it lets me take a single wired Ethernet and use it with my laptop and iPod. Given that it’s “open” and I have not figured out how to change that, it’s good that it end up on it’s own subnet so if I am using it at home it does not expose any of my other systems.

This will be very handy since a few of the hotels I frequent only have wired ethernet and no wireless.

I’ll now have a wireless router, an internet radio, and a lot more in a box less than 4 inches cubed. Oh, and did I mention I can run it off of batteries ? !

I’ve become one of those "smoker bigots" – you know the kind … they quit smoking and *THEN* start preaching all the bad things that smoking does. My conversion was not that I was a smoker; it was the "mobile browser".

I am blogger and user of the web but until about 6 months ago I was mostly on my computer. I now read blogs, feeds, news, and more using my iPod and/or my Blackberry. I use if for Facebook, the weather, Twitter (a little), and most of my personal email. I realized my blog was not as friendly to these mobile devices as it could / should / and eventually would be.

So, I set about to add support for mobile devices and mobile users. It was easy for my blog since it uses Wordpress and there is the WPTouch plug-in that makes it nearly automatic. It added support for the devcies I use most often and I even added support for the Androids of the world. (If you have a mobile device and it is not working with my blog, add a comment and I’ll do my best).

So, now I grumble whenever I hit a website that *does not* have special support for mobile devices. I realize I am being zealous but that has not stopped me from small internal unseen spurts of frustration. Oh well. I guess I could seek counseling.

I’ve already said I will install Sonos in the farmhouse. The home office and the living room will have studio quality monitor speakers from Bowers & Wilkins (commonly known as B&W) and the whole house plus shop and deck will have ceiling speakers (thanks to monoprice). I have a test setup as I research installation details specific to the in-ceiling speakers. During my tests, I have also been working on “content management”. Here is what I’ve learned and what puts a smile on my face <giddily> …

• iTunes management of my digitized music library
• Genius to generate playlists of my music library
• WBUR and C-SPAN streaming radio
• last.fm for music and discovering new artists

The addition of last.fm is very recent. I had tried streaming music in the past but the quality and bandwidth were terrible. Things have definitely changed. I am guessing it is a combination of improvements in bandwidth as well as streaming technology.

It seems SONOS and last.fm were meant to meet, fall in love, and get married. I surely hope they have a long and passionate relationship!

Getting the two together was not as intuitive as I expected. Even Google was not much help getting the these two together for their first date. I finally found how to ignite the spark …

1. [First] go sign-up for a last.fm account
2. [Configuration via the SONOS CR100 controller] System Settings –> Music Service Setup –> Add
3. [Select] last.fm
4. [Enter] user name
5. [Enter] password
6. [Press] OK

This will add last.fm as a new source on the music menu. From there, you can enter an artist name and “play music like this” or browse tags and listen to associated music. Both methods work great. I entered James Taylor and listened for a while. I also gave Imogen Heap a long play. Later, I tried some of the pre-existing tags; “female vocalists” did a good job of hitting some of my favorite artists as well as exposing me to some new ones (although Blondie was a bit of an ear shock after many of the more alternative style tracks).

As much as SONOS works well with digitized music libraries, I’m finding I use it much more for streaming NPR and now last.fm – and happy happy happy.

logo art created with GIMP

My Thinkpad T61p widescreen has a very high resolution – 1920×1200 – but the physical screen is only 13 inches wide. This equates to approximately 18 characters per inch when using a word processor and when reading many web pages. Even with setting the operating system for things like “use large fonts” etc, most pages display tiny fonts. I will admit some of this is my eyes but it is most predominant on this high DPI display. The majority of the trouble was when reading web pages so I started increasing the font size in Firefox, first just hitting “CTRL-+” and then latter, installing the NoSquint plug-in. What I noticed was that some sites were making bad assumptions about the display font size. This manifested itself in text running into other text or text overlapping graphics. The problems begin when a web designer assumes both horizontal and vertical  screen real estate. When text can wrap and expand, pages work pretty well. Even when layout needs to be better managed, it’s possible to leave some “breathing room”. Obviously, accommodating for a wide range of scaling is not reasonable, it’s not out of reason to allow for 20% or even 50% increase. Here are some examples …

The most common errors occur in the banner of a page. The three examples above – IRS.com, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com were all viewed at 120% 0f normal. The IRS website loses an entire line of links. Without moving the cursor under the button bar, a user would never even notice there is an entire row of links. Over at CNN, there is left aligned text together with right aligned text and anything in between gets crushed. MSNBC has a search box in the banner and it grows left into the corporate logo while the “sign in” to MSN space falls off the right.

Amazon.com does a pretty good job at handling display changes. The image on the left is at 120% and the one on the right is 150%. The “Shop Departments” menu on the homepage was not as forgiving. The text can expand beyond the underlying graphic.

Probably one of the more interesting is the pop-up on Microsoft.com. The “Click to Install” text is not part of the button and thus can wrap onto a new line and below the button’s graphics.

In most of these cases, the issue is the web design separates text from graphics but expects them to stay in lock-step. In early web design, the solution was easy – the text was part of the graphic. This practice fell out of favor as accessibility became a priority. Screen readers can read the text of a webpage but can not read graphics. There are a number of ways to address screen readers – “alt text”, “tags”, alternate pages, and separating the text from the graphics.

It’s easy to make a graphical and visually appealing web site. It’s more difficult to make it accessible. Screen reader support has been the big priority. Color support has been another priority. I think text size should get more attention.

The advent of mobile devices, higher resolution screens, the UMPC fad, and web TV, dictates we revisit the construction of web pages. Perhaps HTML has reached the extent of its applicability. It may be time for some structured XML to focus on web sites with multiple possible renderings.

I’ve got a tight budget for my farmhouse project. I bet most people who are building a new house or taking on a major home improvement project are no different.

My recent bathroom faucet purchase is a good example of how I trade some of my personal time to save significant money. In this case I used a few tools and websites to get that $170 faucet for $51 ($41 + $10 shipping).

First, I started looking at Amazon.com for a starting point on price. I also checked a few on-line plumbing supply outfits. This gave me a baseline for what I might need to pay. Next, I checked eBay.com and found multiple auctions for the faucet. This is a good sign. I also saw multiple auctions from a single eBay store. Also a good sign. I checked the feedback for the seller and they showed both a very large number of transactions and very good feedback. Yet another good sign. Finally, I looked at the series of auctions and saw that there were staggered by about 12 hours each. I came to the conclusion that at some point in the series of auctions, at least one of these would not be bid up as much as the others. I used an auction service and created a “bid group” that contained all of the available auctions for the item and set a rather low bid. (A bid group allows you to set maximum bid for each item in a group of items and the auction service will bid on each one just as that auction is about to close. Once it wins an item on your behalf, it cancels all other bidding in the group – so you don’t end up with more copies than you want.)

This process worked and I won the faucet for only a small bid over the starting price.

All of this takes time. There is research to find the item; time to find a reasonable price; time for finding the items; times for setting up the best auction process; and time for completing the transaction. This effort is not for everyone. For those who can afford it, you can get what you want quickly and with a minimum of effort. However, if you can trade time for money, you can get really good deals.

BUT WAIT! Not everything is wine and roses. You will not always get the best deal using eBay, auctions, bidding, etc. Take as an example the Milano “rainfall” Showerhead that will get installed in my wetroom. The best price was at Overstock.com. The $75 showerhead was available for $34 with free shipping.

This holiday season I have learned that on-line shopping means checked websites everyday. The same item may be on sale one day and not another. Or the price on Tuesday and Thursday is not as good as it is on Wednesday. Amazon.com has been a good example of this. I bought some of my small kitchen appliances for much better than expected deals. A mixer was listed at 38% discount but on one day that jumped to %61. I used dealnews.com as my first point of contact. Every morning I checked the list of deals to see if anything on my project list was on sale. I also used this site as the starting point for much of my Christmas shopping. I should point out that people with loose wallets should be careful as it is very easy to feel a deal is just too good to ignore and end up buying stuff you didn’t need.

I have spent a lot of time researching products and shopping for deals. It bears repeating – I am not suggesting this process is for everyone. However, it you have caviar taste on a fish egg budget, give this a try. You can start with one item and see how you like it. You might find that budget shopping is for you.