The camera in the iPhone is very nice for a cell phone camera. I may even consider it usable in a pinch.

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In Greek mythology, Pandora was name of the first mortal woman. Entrusted with a mysterious box, she was commanded not to open it. Unbeknownst to her, it contained all of the ills that could plague mankind. Being a mortal, her curiosity got the best of her and she opened the box, inadvertently releasing all the evils contained inside.

I’m going to assume that Pandora named their company after the literal meaning of the Greek word, which is “All gifts”. That makes at least some sense to me. The mythology thing? Not so much.

For the life of me, I’m unable to come up with a definitive origin for the word SONOS. What’s probably a completely inaccurate origin is an obscure Frank Zappa reference that I found relating to Sardinian music. What’s more likely is that it’s an informal reference to, or a take-off of the word sonogram. That’s at least a reference to sound waves of some sort. Even without a well-known meaning, it’s still a cool name. As I mentioned before, it’s not only a palindrome, but it reads the same upside-down as rightside-up.

The reason I’m writing about this is because the two companies with the above mentioned names have produced something cool and new. I was able to review this with an preview of their new software update. Soon SONOS will roll out the updated software (V2.2 for those to whom it matters) to everyone. The update includes native support for music from Pandora.

To be honest, I’ve ignored the hype about Pandora up until now. That’s not to say that it’s been ignored by everyone; to date they have 6.5 million registered users. They must be be onto something.

Upon receiving the new software update to my SONOS system, I noticed a new option under Music Services for Pandora. Pandora when used through SONOS is not a free service but they offer a free 30-day trial. Should you wish to continue using Pandora past the end of the trial period, it costs a very reasonable $36/year.

What is Pandora exactly? It’s a music service that’s based on their own research known as The Music Genome Project. Follow the link for a more detailed description, but to sum up their research: they analyzed music and defined what qualities about songs people liked and then classified all music by these classifications. So in theory, if you said that you liked the song Straight Up by Paula Abdul, they should be able to suggest other songs with similar qualities that in theory you would also like.

To use Pandora, you create a channel (you can have up to 100) by entering the name of a favorite song or artist. Based on that information they will create a custom playlist and play a continuing stream of music that you should like based on the song or artist you entered for that channel.

In practice, it seems to work about 70% of the time (meaning that 30% a song is played that I don’t like). Up until now, you’ve only been able to use Pandora via their website; meaning that you have to be within earshot of your computer. Their web-based interface is like a simplified version of TiVo’s thumbs-up and thumbs-down system. For each song that is played, you have the option of rating it with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or not rating it at all. I haven’t been able to find technical details of their technology, but I assume that somewhere there is a heuristics engine that uses your rating information in conjunction with other users’ information to determine patterns in peoples musical likes and dislikes. This is the information used to generate your stream of music.

When using Pandora through SONOS, channels are created via an onscreen keyboard (as well as displaying the channels you’ve created via the web). The onscreen keyboard is utilized by highlighting to desired letter with the scroll wheel. It’s not an optimal input system, but it works. The easiest solution is the create channels via Pandora.com or through the SONOS controller software. After a channel has been created, you’re ready to listen to music using it. Instead of the thumbs-up and thumbs-down rating metaphors that are used on Pandora.com, from the SONOS controller you use the options I like this song and I don’t like this song.

The sound quality is not great, but more than adequate for whole-house audio. To my ears, it’s on par with an MP3 encoded at 96 or 128 Kbps.

To sum up, this added capability is a cool addition to the SONOS system. One of the things that’s great about SONOS is their continued support of the platform through software updates. It certainly makes the system even more usable than before.

I recently received my Joost invite and immediately downloaded and installed the native application from their site.

What is Joost you ask? Joost is another company founded by the creators of Skype which was bought by eBay for big money a while ago. Here’s how they describe their product:

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

They also go on to say:

You get great internet features too, such as search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program – so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. And with no schedules to worry about, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you like – as often as you want. Joost is completely free, and works with most modern PCs and Intel Mac-based computers with a broadband connection.

So in a nutshell, it’s an application that allows you to watch streaming video on demand. The timing of my invite is interesting since I just posted about convergence yesterday.

The interface is pleasant looking. It’s a very simple design with “My Channels” (that’s so Windows 95) on the left side of the screen, the transport controls at the bottom and something named “My Joost” on the right. The My Joost area is a screen containing “Widgets”; how original. The included widgets are Channel Chat (essentially a chat room), system notices, a Widget to send invitations (don’t ask because I don’t have any to give), a news ticker, instant messaging (in case you enjoy multi-tasking I guess), and the always required clock.

The Interface. (Click to Enlarge)

The first drawback I see is that it doesn’t seem to work with a remote control, but I’ll confirm this at home this weekend. The absence of this functionality would be a deal breaker for me as I refuse to use the keyboard or mouse connected to the media center PC in our family room. If it can’t be operated from the couch with a remote, it doesn’t belong in the room. As I’ve also ranted about previously, I don’t like to sit in front of the computer monitor in order to watch TV.

The second and third problems which are immediately obvious are the poor picture quality (especially on fast moving objects) and the fact that the video occasionally pauses for up to 10 seconds while it buffers. We have a five megabit synchronous connection here at the office, which should be sufficient, so it’s possible Joost needs to increase their capacity.

Picture Quality Example. (Click to Enlarge)

This music video appears to be encoded at a higher bit-rate than the Indy Car stuff. It’s possible that it’s the same rate but it just looks better because it’s slower moving and easier to compress (due to much of the background being the same)

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Below is a full-size crop taken out of a 1600×1200 full screen image. Outside of motion artifacts, the pure lack of resolution is obvious.

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To sum up, I think I’ll wait and see if Joost gets better before I use it much.

An old friend of mine, Jack (hi!), found my blog and sent me this old photo that was probably from the Summer of 1990. In the center, doing the gay pose (I’m going to get hate mail for calling it that) is me. On my right (your left) is Jack and on your right (my left) is my friend Jerry, whose sister I posted about last year.

Jack asked why I’ve never posted about my Geo Storm. The reason is because the Geo brand became the butt of jokes almost from the time it was conceived. So yes, I had a Geo Storm. I had a loud exhaust on it with a custom built header (I was ahead of the curve on the import thing), tinted windows, and I Iiked it. So what. Move along.

If you needed proof that early adopters come from all walks of life, here are some very exclusive pictures. I don’t think anyone other than me has ever seen them. These early adopters have languished in anonymity for long enough. The pictures were taken with my Casio QV-100 digital camera (0.3 Megapixels) ten years ago. How did it come to pass that I was in a position to take candid photos of these young men in their urban neighborhood? Well, it didn’t actually come to pass.

I really wanted one of these new-fangled digital cameras, and the only one that Computer City (bought out by CompUSA) had in stock was an “open box”. At the sales counter, I took it out and looked it over. It looked fine. When I got home and connected it to the computer though, I noticed that someone had beat me to the punch and there were some photos stored in its memory. I can only surmise that the pictures that were on it are the previous owners of my camera. So without further adieu, here are some real, old school early adopters.

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