Finished at last (well, almost)

It's finally complete - we're just back from a lovely break in Sant'Angelo at the new house. Not entirely a holiday - there was lots of cleaning to do, and dozens of lights to buy and wire in (more to come later, along with a significant amount of Ikea furniture to be trucked in and assembled - in November we hope). And I spent most mornings working (those pesky deadlines again) proving at least that the EDGE service (no UMTS in the mountains) and a 20 euro for 500Mb web deal from TIM were enough to keep me going.

The garden remains - a couple of 80 year old olives should have gone in this week, and work will start on the rest in the autumn.

Nothing to do now but work as hard as possible to pay the bills!

The new house is coming on nicely

Here's a view of our new venture Casa dei due Mori - the house of the two mulberries - under construction. We're certainly looking forward to spending lots of time there this summer when it should be finished. It's been a long trek to get this far - nearly four years from the thought to the finished article. I think it will be well worth the wait.

Ciao!

Listen to the music

I love listening to music. At work, I use my own laptop like a (rather large) iPod - its a great way to zone out of the open plan hubbub. Currently I'm just about to hit 6000 tracks, which I mostly have on permanent shuffle. We're looking into sound systems for our house in Italy and although I think the Sonos system (described here by Joel Spolsky) looks fab, I also tripped over the Slim Devices Squeezebox and wanted to have a go with that first, as it's a lot cheaper.

Essentially, we've moved our music collection onto a network attached file server (from Qnap, which conveniently comes with the Slimserver software pre-installed on Linux). You can continue to rip CDs using Windows Media Player (just pointing it at the new network directory).

Slimserver indexes the collection (very slowly - what's that all about?) and then you're ready to go.

Setting up the Squeezebox was easy - apart from revealing yet again what a poor wireless network we have. Eventually I convinced myself to replace the ADSL/wireless router, replacing a Belkin which has never been very reliable with a Netgear Rangemax, which was a doddle to set up and so far seems solid as a rock. The Squeezebox is in the living room, plugged into the home cinema's spare input (DVD, Sky+ and now this).

The Squeezebox looks fabulous - sleek and white and not too small (or large). The music reproduction is fine as far as my aging ears nnd cheap home cinema speakers can tell; and I easily can re-rip my CDs at a higher bit rate. However needing a separate remote is a bit of a pain (that now makes FIVE remotes to lose). That's where Sonos wins - they have a beautiful (massively expensive) wireless remote that can control all your Sonos Zone Players using an iPod like panel. The Squeezebox has a complete phonepad of function keys, and the interaction with the display is not entirely intuitive.

Anyway, it all works fine (as long as we balance the Squeezebox on a box of chocolates - it must be in the worst place in the house for wireless, as far as possible from the base station and practically behind the TV). So now I have to work out how to build playlists, and then decide if I want to fork out double or treble for Sonos at the house in Italy.

Choices, choices!