Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

I posted the diagram yesterday, so lets go over it hardware wise first, then we’ll go into software in the next post.

Work:

I just got a new computer at work and it makes me happy. Its a Mac Pro, 3.0 ghz Xeon’s with the high end ATI card, which has 512 of RAM. The machine has 8 Gigs of RAM, and 2TB of hard drive storage. Its some serious horsepower. I have this much because a) I wanted it and b) I need to push the limits a lot in terms of what is possible for us as a company. And for next year, it includes a lot of video (as you can imagine).

My data such as documents, my productivity stuff, etc is stored on an external Lacie drive with a fingerprint scanner on it. I know its not TRUE security, but it makes me feel better and it looks cool.

My work setup is soon to be joined by a Macbook Pro whenever Apple gets around to releasing the Core 2 Duo’s. Count on a 15″ one with a lot of RAM being added there.

Home:

Seeing as how we’re still setting up our office, this part is a but in flux, but here is how it ideally will be.

In the last series, I had a dual G5 with two cinema displays. That has since been sold and with the proceeds I bought us the 24″ 2.3ghz iMac and a nice Epson P1800 printer. I wanted to go Intel at home for a while because of Parallels, and us sometimes needing a PC for shit. Virtual PC was messy, so this works well.

Now Home Automation: ever since I was a kid, I wanted my lights to obey me. To break it down: I love conditional statements. I wanted lights, and the house I lived in to be reactive, anticiaptory and “smart” in the sense that it knew what I was up to and could respond to accordingly.

Now you can go get someone to come in and do all that shit for you, but would that be the way I would go? No. Here is what I did:

I bought from FunForGeeks their introductory Indigo/Insteon package (swapping in three dimmers for the other modules).. Indigo is a fantastic piece of software from Perceptive Automation which in version 2 works in a client server mode. Its fully AppleScritptable, easy to get started with and amazingly complex (in a good way) when you get to hacking it.

I also bought a few motion sensors and some other stuff that warrants another post once its all setup. The MacMini may be a remote terminal, or it maybe the server for Insteon. I haven’t decided yet. I’d hate to use a nice machine like that as only a terminal though. We are putting the Mac Mini in a custom enclosure on the wall in the living room, along with a touch-screen.

In the office, you can also see we have a 12″ powerbook which will be our “floater” computer for surfing the web around the house. Its not good for much else. We have an Airport Extreme hooked to a Netgear FVS124G. The Netgear is a great router which is a site-to-site VPN to my work servers. We also have a Cisco ATA for Vonage hooked in there.

Living Room:

The LR is primarily for watching TV and some entryway stuff (hence the MacMini for controlling the house). The stereo system has an Airport Express hooked in through Optical, primarily for DRM’ed music from iTunes (which I now realize I was stupid enough to get, erg). The Sonos handles the rest of the music, including the 3/4 of my library not DRM’ed from iTunes, as well as a Rhapsopdy Unlimited account for playing anything I can randomly think of. Its hooked in through Opitcal as well to a Pioneer VSX-1016TXVK receiver. The TV is hooked into that through HDMI, as is the DVD player. When the iTV comes out, I’m going to have to get a 3-1 switcher for the TV for HDMI.

For my wife, we have a Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote. Seeing as how the LR is still getting setup, we don’t know how well it works. The remote however was the only one I found that controlled the IR543 from X-10. The IR543 is a IR->X10 signal translator. What I can do is have Indigo pick up X-10 signals from it, and translate those into actions. So for instance, I can press “Watch DVD” as an activity on the remote, and the lights will dim only if its night time. And when I pause, they can come back up, if I wanted to.

Mobile:

Currently I’m operating without a laptop because Apple is being lazy and waiting for the holiday season to refresh the Macbook Pro’s. I will be getting a high end 15″ one when they are released. When that happens, I’ll work mostly in the living room, and my wife gets the iMac (see how that works guys)? Right now, the Blackberry 8700C is my mobile device for the most part, although I do lug the 12″ Powerbook along for trips.

Coming up! I’ll go into how the software among all these machines talks.