First, you have to understand how speakers actually work before I get to wireless speakers. Though I am not a technical guy, I do know a thing or two about speakers from all those music classes in college so I’ll give you a rather rudimentary – yet brief -understanding of how speakers work. Obviously, speakers are opposite to a microphone, so a microphone is used to capture audio and a speaker is used to play the audio captured; This audio is called impulses. Our ears cannot hear impulses, so that is where speakers come in. They translate those impulses into vibrations (using awesome technology) that our ears can understand. Therefore, we have music which is pleasing to the ears — sometimes.

That is basically how speakers work. Of course, there are much more details involved, however, I will spare you from boredom. Whether the speakers are wired or wireless, the technology behind playing music through them is generally the same. However, the technology behind making a speaker wireless or wired is, as you might expect, a little different. Wireless speakers must come with a transmitter that sends the audio signal to the wireless speakers. Most transmitters have a standard input connection in the transmitter that allow you to connect any audio device to it. You can connect a CD player, an MP3 player or any thing that has audio output. There are several frequencies at which wireless speakers operate: 900Mhz, 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz and even 1.9Ghz using DECT 6.0 technology. Generally the less congested frequency band has better reception and sound quality based on the environment you are operating the wireless audio speaker. Another type of technology around wireless speakers is bluetooth which is a unique and complex wireless speaker method, but a technology that has flourished and will continue to do so.

Once the sound source is plugged into the transmitter, you should be able to take your wireless speakers any where within the specified range and turn them on, and listen to your audio source. Some transmitters or speakers have a frequency nob that you can adjust to change the channel get the best audio quality and some wireless speakers change the channels automatically.

Do wireless speakers work well?

Yes. Audio quality from your wireless speaker is the most important factor. Advanced technology has limited horrible quality wireless speakers fortunately. Bose is one of my favorite audio companies who have produced hundreds of high quality products for years. Bose wireless speakers come with a small ‘USB key’ that’ll allow you to insert it into you computer to play music from you computer through the speakers anywhere in the home. They have had great reviews. CNET reviewed four nice wireless speaker systems that used a number of technologies and range from $199 to $600. Last year, I was given the opportunity to review a marvelous multi-room wireless speaker system by Sonos and was blown away with the results. There are wireless home theatre systems as well, such as the Sony Bravia systems, or the brilliant Harman Kardon systems that all have good reviews.

There are advantages and disadvantages to owning wireless speakers. To be clear, a wireless speaker system is not truly wireless. In the audio world, it simply means less wires. Still, this in itself can turn out to be a great advantage. I remember when I was younger, my father and I spent countless hours hooking up his new entertainment system. You should have seen the mess of wires we had to fight with and try to conceal so my sister and I would not inadvertently trip over them one day and send his pride and joy crashing down. Today, you have wireless speaker systems and though you have to deal with a few wires, they are pretty easy to maintain and that is what I love about wireless speakers. Mobility is another reason why I love wireless speaker systems. Want to listen to your music outside by the pool? Now you can. Despite the misunderstanding that all wireless speakers don’t have good range – they do, and that is why I love wireless speaker systems.

However, there are some disadvantages such as batteries. Most wireless speakers systems (if not all) come with rechargeable batteries. Therefore, it is important to always make sure you have fully charged or new batteries. The battery on  wireless speakers is very important, and it has a direct impact on the quality of the sound. To me, i feel this is the biggest disadvantage to wireless speaker systems, but something that can improve in the future. These days, all of us are all about getting rid of the clutter so as technology advances and wireless systems become even more prevalent, I think we will see an even more wireless world with better battery technology to back up the demand.

Wireless Speakers Review: Wireless Speaker Systems Right For You? originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on February 4, 2010.

On Bootup: First Impressions

So fellow editor Anthony sends me this VMware image and asks me to write a review about this OS given our shared fascination about it and his lack of time to write one himself (and I humbly accepted ). I fired it up after writing a .vmx configuration file to go with it, logged in using an anonymous Google account and was immediately greeted by this:

Welcome to Chrome OS.

But wait, let’s rewind a second here: before I reached the “omg your security is at risk – run for your life!” Chrome OS greeting page, I had to log in and remotely authenticate to Google using a Google account. So right away, Google receives my IP and subsequent location information upon computer bootup/login.

(refer to another article here, which criticizes Chrome OS for being too big brother-ish)

Of course, if you wanted to badly enough, you could root the system yourself by mounting it’s disk elsewhere and forcing all networking to go through a proxy system such as Tor for the ultimate privacy, but that would also make the system slow as hell and is too difficult for most users. You win, Google: here’s my location and the typical time of day that I boot up/log in to my computer running Chrome OS.

Chrome OS Settings

Moving past the “holy shit” tabs, I proceeded to open my own and start using the OS:

Well, go on, start being amazed already!

I found the menus to appear kind of Windows 98-ish what with the gray color next to all the shiny chromeyness and all, but whatever, it’s still an alpha testing build and probably can be skinned to hell and back at the OS level too.

Note where that menu is, too: there are three little menu buttons (which are hard to click when the mouse moves way too fast) in the corner that allow a window into the OS settings. They allow you to turn on/off your NICs, view your battery life, and the typical help/about pages etc.

But one thing that it lacks: an off/shutdown button. Once you are booted up, there IS no turning off the computer without holding down the power button or pulling the battery out (both of which are bad for the filesystem). I guess this is considered a “feature” of Chrome OS. How revolutionary!

Incognito Browsing = Porn Time!

In the screenshot above, you may notice the “New Incognito window” button underneath the usual “New tab” and “New window” selections. So what does this do?

It opens up a new chrome browser window, only completely sandboxed from the browser history and cookie storage for an “off-the-map” browsing experience:

Incognito browsing welcome page. Note how specific it is about the smiley thing.

The first thing that came to my mind: “they’re actually catering to porn watchers.” Yes, that’s right: take your netbook running Chrome OS into the bathroom, fire up an incognito window, and when you come out two minutes later (or longer, depending on chrome’s speed) there will be no trace of your activities. Just be sure to close the incognito window, of course!

But in order to accomplish this, one needs plugins installed for Flash or Java to view videos on the Web:

Chrome OS Plugins: Flash and Java

In my tests, the builtin Flash plugin didn’t work due to excessive crashing:

Note the “flash crashed” and Linux path notice under the toolbar, and the incognito icon in the corner ( )

But, it worked fine in YouTube (a Google-owned subsidiary):

Spaghetti beats cheerleaders any day of the month.

So Google got in bed with Adobe for out-of-the-box Flash integration pretty early, it seems. But Java? No. Silverlight? Don’t even joke like that. Stand-alone (.mp4/.mpg/.ogv etc.) videos? Forget it: even Google video removes the downloads for videos in these file formats upon detecting the Chrome OS user agent.

The Chrome OS useragent, by the way, is the same as Chrome’s only with “CrOS” thrown in there to shown that it’s the operating system and not just the browser. Adjust your shitty browser sniffers accordingly.

Where’s the Applications Menu?

I find references to an “applications menu” and “desktop” all over, but can’t find one:

The WHAT?

If I can’t find the applications menu as an experienced user/programmer having looked all over the place, then how can they expect netbook-using housewife users to locate it? Or maybe it just isn’t implemented yet since this is still technically an Alpha release.

And closing all browser tabs, instead of dropping down to a “desktop”, simply turns the screen blue under the cursor for a few seconds before launching a new Chrome window, restoring the last URL you closed.

Builtin Advertisements

Ironically, I discovered this while trying to install the Adsweep plugin for Chrome OS to remove ads from pages since they were slowing down my 300MB RAM virtual machine. The DNS resolution (over NAT) was so slow that the download page timed out and I saw this:

Note the first link: paid-for ad?

They suggest another site for you, based on their top search results for the URL’s terms. And if the top result happens to be ad-funded, then guess what? So even WITH my Adsweep installed, if a page times out due to Chrome/Linux’s apparent shitty DNS resolution, I am suggested a paid link. Great.

Other Miscellaneous tid-bits

Other than these issues, I overall enjoy the OS as a whole, even though I’m no Google fan (too big-brother-ish for me). I have always thought the idea of the web as a platform and a computer that could boot straight into a browser seemed like a great idea with the great proliferation of web apps in recent years, and Google delivered.

And Chrome couldn’t be a better browser to put on top of it all, using Webkit for pristine rendering:

Chrome OS passes the Acid 3 test 100%

Overall I was pleased, and look forward to future builds when the project continues to improve and gets better nearing release. With that said, I leave you with a final screenshot to demonstrate Chrome’s window manager’s appearance:

Chrome OS “About” screen

You can find the image floating around the web, if you wish to try it yourself

Google Chrome OS Review: The Housewife’s OS originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 21, 2009.

First: I’m A Zelda Fanbody

I started off with the third title, A Link To The Past, and fell in love with it. Ocarina of Time came out, and was one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life, with Majora’s Mask falling right along those same lines.

So I’m no stranger to the series, and I can honestly say that I love those games more than chocolate.

Now, when Wind Waker came out, I felt a little betrayed by the cel-shaded animation as opposed to the traditional 3D graphics used by OoT and MM, but never-the-less I gave it a try…

…And was horrified.

“The Wind Waker syndrome”

As if the gay cel-shaded animation was bad enough on the eyes, they had me riding around in a boat hunting down pieces of triforce. Stupidest thing I’ve ever had to do in a Zelda game, and believe me – I played every single one of those Majora’s Mask side-quests.

I never even finished Wind Waker. I felt betrayed, and felt it did no justice to the series whatsoever. Then, as if all my complaints to Nintendo finally meant something, Twilight Princess came out.

Twilight Princess

I hated the title because I had to recite it in Block Buster to rent the game (doesn’t sound very masculine), but I had to try it. It was great – it brought back the old OoT feel, and even acted like it had a place within the Zelda storyline in respect to the other titles.

I loved it. It wasn’t any OoT or anything, but it was a relief from the stupid-ass cel-shading and cartoon bullshit.

Phantom Hourglass

Words don’t even describe how pissed I was when they turned around from Twilight Princess to return to the horrendous cel-shading crap. I didn’t even waste my time.

Spirit Tracks

And now, as if they are just begging me disown my beloved series, they pull this yet again. Only this time, they ditched the boat and went with a steam train.

Nintendo, what the hell are you smoking.

As if riding around in a boat and collecting stupid miscellaneous items wasn’t tedious and retarded enough, some genius at Nintendo decided to:

1. Make it a train this time
2. Make it a FUCKING TRAIN this time
3. Make you once again hunt for stupid items…
4. …In something that clearly doesn’t fit in the Zelda universe

I mean, it’s a train. Come on. And a steam train, too – how did they invent this when Robert Fulton didn’t event the steamboat until the mid-1800’s? (that’s not a cue to make another steamboat game, nintendo)

Let me get this straight – here you have cel-shaded Link, running around in a TUNIC, trying to save a princess (just a wild guess), and he’s going to do it in his steam train while living in a tree.

Makes perfect sense, if you’re on crack. Maybe that’s just it – somewhere between Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker Link found a crackpipe, and started puffin’ up on that Kokiri rock so get over the loss of Navi, hence the cel-shaded-ness of Wind Waker et al.

Oh, he came off the pipe just long enough to make Twilight Princess, where he found that while he was away sailing around stoned – all hell breaks loose in Hyrule. But now he’s back on the pipe again, following the loss of Minda. So it goes.

Nintendo DS + Train = Goodbye RPG

So you’re on a train, right? Trains run on tracks. Funny thing about tracks, is that they only go where the track-layer wants them to go.

That’s right, goodbye traditional “Let’s go explore here now” Zelda gameplay – you’re going only where the tracks are gonna take you. Oh, the DS lets you realistically draw tracks on the touchscreen as a dungeon bonus – but that’s about it.

And that’s on your unrealistic steam train, while you’re in your tunic, shooting stuff out of cartoon canons (god forbid the kids see any actual violence like they see on MTV). All this in your trippy, cel-shaded universe.

Conclusion

Zelda is dead to me. I’ll sit here in refuge, with my SNES and N64, playing the Zelda I’ve always known and loved. You can have that cel-shaded crap – I’m done with it.

Nintendo is killing the best series to ever hit the gaming industry, and it saddens me. I’m sure that I’m not the only one whom thinks so, either. But I’ll at least be the only one to say it – Fuck Nintendo, and the death they’re bringing to the Zelda series.

(see also: the commercial failure Azurik: Rise of Perathia, which also had you going around collecting fragments in a terrible attempt to be considered a “game”. The Wikipedia article on it has obviously been edited by the game creators.)

Dear Nintendo: Stop Killing Zelda, Please originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 7, 2009.