Roku SoundBridge

My dad and I got my mom a Roku SoundBridge for her birthday. I hooked it up today, and was really impressed with it. Once connected to your home network (via wired Ethernet or WiFi), the SoundBridge finds all machines with iTunes sharing enabled and makes their music libraries available to be played on your stereo. You can browse your library using the remote, and when you find a song, you can either play it immediately or queue it. Everything just worked, even a software update (the SoundBridge unit downloads and installs updates seamlessly). It will be nice to have the SoundBridge when I go home for Christmas, because as soon as I connect my G5 to the network, my entire music library will be accessible in our living room.

If you are looking for a way to play your iTunes library on your home stereo, I highly recommend the SoundBridge.

Steve Jobs is Wrong

... about online music subscription services . Yes, many people would prefer to buy their music, rather than renting it. But if I want to own my music, I'm not going to purchase it from the iTunes Music Store, I'm going to buy the CD. That way I'll have all of the liner notes, and won't have to worry about "authorizing" computers to play the music. The online music subscription services are neat precisely because they break the traditional music buying mold, and give you incredible breadth, which you can leverage to find new bands and "try before you buy". I'd gladly pay $10 a month for a subscription to everything in the iTunes Music Store, but as it is, I spend about $0.50/month at iTMS. C'mon Apple, you're leaving money on the table.

Update: News.com recently posted an article with projections that subscription based services will soon overtake a la carte downloads.

Quantrix Modeler

Last night, while reading some comments on Slashdot, someone mentioned that Lotus Improv for NeXTSTEP kicked ass. Intrigued, I read the Wikipedia article on Improv. The article linked to me to a modern day ancestor of Improv named Quantrix Modeler . The idea behind Improv and Quantrix is to create a better spreadsheet paradigm - one which allows you to easily work with multiple representations of the same data.

Check out the Flash demo of Quantrix. I was pretty impressed.

Quote of the Day

"This is finance between consenting adults." --Prof. Deeds

Sideways

I saw Sideways this evening at the Cedar Lee Theatre . It's the best movie I've seen in quite awhile. Paul Giamatti does an amazing job, just as he did in American Splendor. It's one of those very subtle movies that builds on you over time, and ventures between comedy and contemplation and bravado and despair, without overdoing any of them. Highly recommended.

The Bootstrapper's Bible

This is cool: Seth Godin is making his entire book The Bootstrapper's Bible available online for 2 weeks only. Download the 103 page PDF .

Running a Mac Software Business

Niall Kennedy has posted an MP3 of the discussion from the "How to Run Your Own Software Business" panel at O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference. Lots of interesting discussion about pricing, expenses, legal issues, payment systems, and more.