My tryst with the Sonos wireless speaker system continues. One of my earlier frustrations involved an extreme edge case. I want to use my Synology NAS as the iTunes library source, instead of my Mac. Luckily the Sonos forums are pretty good.1
Here’s the procedure (for the 3 people that actually care):
Go to the Synology Control Panel and open the Win/Mac/NFS settings.
Turn on Enable Windows file service. You can mess with the detailed settings but here are mine:
The T2 by CalDigit looks like a great Thunderbolt drive. It supports 2 disks as well as SSDs. It’s called a “native” Mac drive which means no special drivers and it’s bootable.
As is popular now, you can sign up for a spot on their waiting list. No price given.
As for Thunderbolt, the speed is nice but it feels like another Apple boondoggle similar to Firewire. February will mark 3 years since it was released and we still have waiting lists for basic Thunderbolt drives.
This is my review of a bag you probably will not buy, The Saddleback Classic Briefcase.1 It’s leather and metal, weighs 8 lbs and is $600.
The Saddleback Leather Company makes rugged and elegant bags, suitcases, and accessories that look as if they came right out of an Indiana Jones fan-fic. Their products incorporate high quality, thick leather and real steel rivets. It’s something that could easily be handed down to the next generation of finicky nerds.
I’ve only had the Air for a few hours. My immediate impression is that it feels tiny. At first glance it looks like an iPad Mini. After waffling between the Mini and the Air, I’m glad I chose the Air. It feels like a Mini but works like a full size iPad.
I’m curious what the Mini will feel like. This iPad Air feels like the perfect version of the iPad.
Federico has an interesting dialog with himself about the ridiculousness of prescribing utility based on screen size of the iPad Mini versus the iPad Air.
Judging the “creation” capabilities of the iPad by its screen size misses the point. The iPad mini is a great device for content creation – in fact, I’d argue that because of its smaller screen, lighter body, and higher portability, the iPad mini can be better than the full-size iPad Air for work and productivity tasks.
The new Retina iPad Mini is much bigger step forward than I anticipated. As Shawn Blanc points out, the Mini is the same technology as the full size iPad Air but with a smaller size and more dense display. Just look at Apple’s comparison
This is how I imagined the devices would eventual coalesce but it happened much sooner than I imagined. That makes picking the right model a bit more difficult.
I like a good pen as much as the next penophile. I bought my first fountain pen in high school with 3 weeks of gas station cleaning. It was a gorgeous silver plated heavy instrument from Yafa and it died a sad death on a busy street.
I’ve become more practical as I’ve gotten older. I typically just want something comfortable to write with that gets a sketch or sentence down on paper.
Finger Print Reader The fingerprint reader built in to the iPhone 5s is not as fast as I expected. It’s not instant as some have suggested but rather requires a slightly longer press than I would typically use. With the screen off, I typically give a quick press to turn it on. This is not sufficient to unlock the phone. I found that to unlock the phone I had to hold my finger on the button until the screen display became active.
I unwrapped my CODE Keyboard today (tenkeyless version). Rather than give a review, because that would be ignorant at this point, I’ll tell you about the initial setup.
It was easy.
The CODE is definitely quieter than my Das Keyboard (previous post), that I used for years. I loved my Das but no one within 10 feet of my workspace did.
The CODE might actually be usable in an open format working environment.
I became involved with my Synology NAS about 9 months ago. We’re still in the honeymoon stages of our relationship, but I can honestly say that my storage has never been better.
But sometimes my eye wanders. I see the USB 3 and Thunderbolt drives and think to myself, briefly, I wonder what the throughput is with one of those beauties. But reason always takes over and I realize what a wonderful thing I have going with my Synology.
