Infinite State

I held out for a long time, but my kids got a Wii as a gift recently and I finally tried it out. Wow, those wireless input devices really are a blast. And the design of the system is so nice and smooth. I remember playing early games on my Apple II+, so I recognize the distances covered. The thing I didn’t expect was how much it made me want to hack the thing. Which led me to discover some very cool ways people are doing that already, including Johnny Chung Lee at CMU, shown in this video. He uses the Wiimote with a PC and a homemade LED pointer to do natural big-scale Tablet PC things with any PC — using a table or a wall as your desktop.

Given that you can buy Wii remotes for about $30 this is a very compelling setup.

I realized tonight that the way I listen to music at home has really changed: the MP3 player (eg iPod) is not only for listening while you go away from your home, but is actually the way you move music around your home. Here’s the layout:

• At my desk, I play digital music from my home server (an Infrant 1TB NAS) through my laptop/dock and powered speakers and subwoofer.
• In my bedroom, I play digital music by plugging my iPod into powered speakers and woofer.
• In the dining room, another set of powered speakers and woofer.
• In the kitchen, the radio has an AUX input that takes stereo mini, so the iPod can go into there, too.
• My kids go between their bedrooms (each one has an iHome clock/radio/speakers), so they can guest-DJ for each other. Sometimes they’ll bring their iPod into the kitchen to play some music while we cook.

This is not a high-tech or expensive solution, but it works just fine. I looked at Sonos, and also considered writing my own server/player software, wireless thin clients on tablets, yah yah. Turns out a ripoff $10 mini cable from Radio Shack pretty much does the trick if you’re willing to listen to what’s on your iPod as a subset of your full library. And generally I am. It probably helps that I’ve mellowed with age and no longer demand superb fidelity from my stereo components, or even the quality of my rips (VBR at a high rate is okay, since I’m not ready to go all-FLAC yet).

I’ve still got a real stereo amp, receiver, and CD player…tucked in a corner and unused. I’d love to get rid of all those CDs, but I’m not willing to pay (yet) to have someone convert them to FLAC for me, or re-file them into just sleeves that take up less room, or store them somewhere else for 10 years until something else changes and there’s no need for them ever again.

I’m tempted to wish for a 10x increase in storage space in the player so I could keep more music on it, but then the argument for switching to FLAC may get more compelling. Well, on my fundamental scale of progress things improve as devices get smaller and simpler. Since the iPod is a sliver of a full classic stereo plus CDs and there’s no loudness button on it, that’s progress.