Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Noxon

So, I got to the point where I didn't want my music server to run on my laptop. The little iBook was pretty good, but I didn't want to deal with music playing on it at all times. I just wanted something to play music from the NSLU2.

So I did a bit of research and considered players from Terratec, Roku and SlimSystems.

Roku had the soundbridge. It was a fairly cool looking cylindrical player. There was a smaller, cheaper version as well. The big problem was that my home network was now 802.11G, and the soundbridge only did 802.11B. That meant slowing down my wireless network. That wouldn't do.

Slim Systems had their Squeezebox, which is still a popular system. The problem with the Squeezebox is that it was still way too expensive, and it only had support for 802.11B networking.

Then there was the Noxon 2 from Terratec. It was basically a Phillips Streamium. Swisscom had a decent deal on the Noxon, so I got one. I was able to configure the Twonky UPNP server to feed music to the Noxon 2. The Noxon also supported more modern wireless and wireless encryption, so that it would work with my wireless network much better. I could run Elgato's EyeConnect software to allow the Noxon to play from iTunes. This worked okay. But I tended to use the Noxon to listen to Internet radio stations, especially to NPR when I had my bike set up on rollers to do some exercise. I'd use the Noxon for a couple of years. I was never really happy with it, as Terratec had made a special model for Swisscom and then abandoned it while upgrading the firmware for all of the other Noxon 2 units. But the Noxon did have pretty decent sound.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Backing up your blog

Just because I was reading a story about some blogs getting deleted from a hosting service, and it's just a good idea to make backups. You can make a backup by looking at the instructions on how to make backups from Google.
 
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