We got the wife the Droid Incredible 4G which for us was the best balance of price, performance, and most of all size.  If you want a phone that isn’t an iPhone 4 or isn’t giant, this is probably the best one out there.  She seems to like it so far, and although it’s a little different than the Motorola Droid (Android 4.0 and HTC Sense will do that) the learning curve is relatively small.

And although they wouldn’t let me keep the 150MB data plan on it after all, they were able to extend my current contract on the device, which meant I didn’t have to change my unlimited data plan (which I checked I still had before leaving the store).  So I will have that for at least as long as I choose to keep my phone, which will be at least another 15 months or so.  Hopefully by then they’ll have an unlimited data family share plan.

So we’re happy.

Should be fun.

I have a grandfathered unlimited data plan on my Galaxy Nexus. I had downgraded my wife to a legacy 150MB plan to save $15 a month. I’m bummed about losing unlimited data but I don’t want to pay $500 for a phone just to keep it.

Here’s the thing: I can upgrade her phone, and go to a 4GB Share Everything plan, and pay about what I’m paying now (it will depend on the discounts). I never have used more than about 2GB, and my wife never uses more than 100MB. So in reality this is a lot more data that I ever use now. So it should be no problem. Except I have unlimited data now, and I like it.

I just need to get over myself. And I will.

• I’m still using my original Squeezebox 2. It works great. I’ve upgraded my server to 7.8.0 beta. It works pretty well most of the time. Sometimes some stuff with Perl plugins, but usually it just keeps trucking. I’m sure the VFD has faded over time, but I have no way of knowing that.
• Still rocking the Denon AVR-3805, and we’ve since renovated the family room and now have professionally installed speaker cables to my Klipsch Quintet speakers. Which still sound great. My KSW-10 subwoofer has had two new sub amps installed, the last one a BASH subwoofer amp that has performed admirably. I think the old amps failed because the driver would occasionally get stuck, but I’ve found manually manipulating the cone seems to free it up.
• We now have a nice Samsung D-series TV, which isn’t part of the music system per se, but with Logitech Media Server now having a DLNA server, I can play music through the TV if I really want. But there’s really no point in doing that.
• I spent a lot of time looking for a wireless streaming solution to my Android phones; I played for a while with Subsonic and it worked well enough but I didn’t end up paying for it; I tried even to get DLNA support working through a VPN or SSH tunnel and was not successful. Luckily, eventually SqueezePlayer came out and works perfectly, especially paired with SqueezeCommander to control it. So that’s what I use most of the time to listen to music when on the move. The only disadvantage is the lack of a clean handoff between 3G/4G and WiFi. Usually I just turn of WiFi and it’s fine.
• I can also use my DirecTV HR24 receivers to listen via the LMS DLNA support. I don’t do it very often because it can be quite slow to load up the menus.

So, that’s the short version. My 500GB drive is almost full of music; I have 3TB drives I bought just before the Thailand floods but haven’t installed because I was busy with grad school; and I’m still on the fence about if I’m putting them in my now 5 year old server or if I’m buying a new low power (probably a dual-core Atom) server to upgrade to. I’m torn because I wouldn’t mind building an HTPC box to use with my new TV, but I don’t want the hard drives in the family room making noise. The server isn’t too slow but it would be nice to get some dual-core excitement.

So my next projects will be upgrading the server and/or hard drives and continuing to explore with DLNA stuff. I’ll update when I can.

Power consumption is a little higher than before but still pretty low. I haven’t fully taken advantage of the throttling the CPU can do yet–I haven’t had the time to investigate what the stock kernel does versus the various mods that VIA makes for the kernel and what they do.

I decided I needed more power to run SlimServer comfortably, as well as rip and encode CDs when I get them. I also might want a second Squeezebox someday, and I couldn’t easily run two at once on the Kuro Box or Thecus, especially if transcoding was involved. I also want some headroom for home automation or other projects.

So I got a motherboard, case, and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813995002. The case was bigger than I expected but I figured I should be able to cool passively (lots of vents) and keep noise and power consumption down. If I can’t there some case fans which are actually very quiet. And this thing will live down in the basement anyway. The power supply is very efficient and usually fanless.

I’m reusing the hard drives I got for the Thecus, as well as my old CD-ROM drive, scavenged from the external USB case to mount inside the box as an IDE device–taking one more power supply out of the equation and its phantom power and efficiency losses.

I put everything together and it didn’t work. It powered on but it didn’t POST. I later determined that the RAM wasn’t seated correctly, and it takes some pushing to get it in right. I’ve booted it but without a loadable OS on it (funny, it can’t boot the ARM Linux kernel off the hard drives) it is less than useful.

I’m thinking I’ll install OpenSUSE on it. I’ve enjoyed Debian and Gentoo but since I have an x86 CPU I might as well avail myself of all the options. While the thing has a video adapter I do plan on running it headless most of the time. It has a sound card as well, and I may try to run squeezeslave on it and use it to play music downstairs.

Fun stuff.

I decided to buy an open box Thecus N2100 from Newegg, with upgraded RAM, a quieter fan, and dual 500GB hard drives in a RAID 1. Nice. The whole solution still cost me less than the original Kuro Box. The Thecus has a 600MHz processor, so I expected it to be quite a bit faster.

I skipped the stock firmware and went straight to installing Debian on the thing. It went smoothly, configured my RAID, everything was great. I was apt-getting all over the place. I tried to install the .tar.gz of SlimServer but was having horrible problems. I then found the Debian package nightly build and got it going, painlessly. It’s nice to have a real install going, running as a dedicated user, with files in real places.

I then got abcde running, feeding in my notification patches. Got it working but noticed that flac was taking a very very long time to encode files–several times longer than real-time. I determined this was due to miserable floating point performance due to emulation. Running flac at -2 made the encoding time acceptable, although it’s probably costing me a few percent of disc space.

I then realized if flac was bad, mp3 encoding was probably worse. I use mp3 transcoding when I’m remote to save bandwidth. So I tested it, sure enough, it was taking many times more than real time. At one point this weekend I was researching VIA processors and nano-ITX mainboards to see if I needed to go that route to get the performance I wanted.

A lot of looking around got me to this. The short answer is not only does the floating point emulation suck, but the CPU has to drop an exception every time a floating point instruction is called, which means a context switch, and then one to go back to the regular execution. Something like flac or lame encodes will go slowly since they’re basically all floating point calculations. The good news is that the ARM EABI stuff will actually improve floating point performance to the point of being usable, the bad news is it won’t be official until the next Debian release. I may try and get it going but it seems to be hard to upgrade a running system cleanly at this point, which it seems they intend to resolve by the time the next Debian release is out. Until then, FLAC is running okay, and I can either hold back on transcoding or run SlimServer on the Kuro Box, with the Thecus sharing out the music files to it.

So at this point I’m once again at a “stable” point. I actually still have to put my now returned, refurbished, 400GB drive back in the Kuro and reinstall Gentoo (although I will probably dd the existing root partition from the 80GB drive to the 400GB drive.)

Which is fine by me. My gentoo image was a little old, and I was having trouble updating packages without conflicts and dependencies that would be tricky to untangle, so I’m using a new overlay and starting from that.

I’m also taking the time to install u-boot, which allows me to boot straight into a 2.6 kernel, instead of booting a 2.4 kernel in the firmware and then chaining a 2.6. Should be fun.

I’m using an old 80GB hard drive I have for now–my 400 GB is off to Seagate for a factory refurbished replacement. I didn’t take the amazing offer where for $100 they’d upgrade me to a refurbished 500GB hard drive.

It’s boring yet fun work, watching it all get put together again.

I tried rebooting again (since I haven’t done the serial port mod on my Kuro, I can’t tell what’s happening on boot) and it was probably hanging on boot. But it’s also likely that it was doing an fsck itself on bootup and would eventually boot up, provided things weren’t too swiss-cheesed.

But I decided to take a closer look. I opened the Kuro Box (BTW, opening it allowed me to also spray some WD-40 in the case fan which makes it run much quieter now), removed the drive, and put it into the USB carrier my backup drive is in. Of course I didn’t get the IDE cable in firmly at first and couldn’t read the disk, which of course sent me into a panic.

But I fixed that, and my computer recognized it, and automounted both the root and /datafiles file systems. Mostly intact. So the good news is that once I run the fscks I should be able to boot again. And at least I haven’t lost everything if I have to rebuild the Kuro.

Of course, I was thinking of upgrading anyway. So maybe this is my big opportunity. . .

So if you use last.fm go ahead and friend me and watch my music stream by.