From Issue #5 , Page #40
A huge fire is coming your way. The police knock on your door and ask you to evacuate within one hour. What do you take with you?
About two years ago, friends of ours faced this exact dilemma. Their 17-year-old son grabbed his laptop, his backup drive, and his skateboard and headed out the door. All of his personal media (music, videos, pictures, games and documents) were backed up and ready to go. Meanwhile, his parents spent the first half-hour deciding which documents and photo albums were important enough to take. They grabbed about five percent of their photo albums and a few important documents, leaving the rest to burn.
This event caused me to really think about my own irreplaceable personal media. I would need a truck to haul all of our photo albums, and I couldn't even find some of our videotapes and slides from 20 years ago. If I faced the choice today, much of my personal media would burn. I believe the answer is to digitize my personal media - to digitize my life.
5 Keys to Media
We all have those old videos and photos that are simply collecting dust. I don't want to convert these items to digital, only to have them collect more cyber-dust. I believe personal media needs to have several key attributes to be useful.
1) It needs to be easily accessible. You should be able to access any of your media as easy as changing the channel on your TV.
2) Your media needs to be entertaining, so that it has playability. The reality is that most of us view our photos and videos immediately after an event, and then put it aside for a long time.
3) Our personal media needs to be protected against disasters. Given today's technology, there is no excuse to lose any of our irreplaceable personal media.
4) It needs to be portable. We need to be able to take it with us wherever we go.
5) Everyone needs easy access. As soon as I upload a new selection of pictures from my digital camera or create a home movie, I want to be able to easily share it with my family and friends, so we can experience the memories together.
Windows Media Center
I needed an easy-to-use platform that would make all of my personal media accessible in our family room by my non-technical wife using a TV remote. I want her to reach for the remote instead of searching for an old photo album when she wants to show someone pictures from an event. During my research, I discovered the new Windows XP Media Center 2005 (WMC), a version of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system designed specifically to handle all of my personal media.
WMC's default menu includes My Videos, My Pictures, My TV, My Music, and Radio. These are all the media that I use on a regular basis. WMC PC hardware includes desktop, living room, and laptop models. Desktops are typical PC tower cases, living room WMC's look like a piece of stereo equipment, and the laptop is a hefty 17-inch widescreen unit that is equipped to handle the requirements of a WMC. In addition, Alienware has a WMC that is built into a 30-inch LCD panel.
Since my WMC is located in the family room, I wanted it to look more like a DVD player than a typical PC tower or laptop. Intel has come up with an A/V (a.k.a. "living room") design that is available to resellers who customize it to the user's requirements. I purchased my WMC from the ZT Group and upgraded to a 300-GB drive with dual TV tuners. The WMC becomes the core of your home entertainment system with all the inputs and outputs you need to plug into any receiver or speaker configuration. With 300 GB, I'll be able to easily record all my TV shows, store my pictures, music and videos. In addition, my wife will be able to surf the Web and catch up on her email.
Wireless & the WMC
My WMC includes a built-in wireless Wi-Fi (802.11g) adapter. This allows me access to all my other computers that are connected to my existing Linksys WRT54G router. With my wireless network in place, I can upload and edit pictures on my office computer and copy them directly to the WMC. While I can do video editing on my WMC, I have a separate machine dedicated to video editing that I like to use. Once my personal videos are created, I can copy them to the WMC machine so that the whole family can enjoy them.
Down in my basement, I have a 100-inch Runco projection system. With a Linksys Media Center Extender, I can stream all of the content on my WMC and project it onto my home theater. The Extender has a built-in wireless-G adapter, so it works with my existing wireless network.
Disaster Recovery
Since the WMC is a standard PC, all of the available Windows-based backup and recovery solutions will work out of the box. For local backup, I have an external Maxtor 250-GB USB 2.0 disk drive. The drive is configured for automatic backup, so it simply wakes up at night and backs up all of the daily changes on my WMC.
Now comes the fun part. I have a home in California as well one in Colorado. So, I'm planning to buy an identical WMC for my California home and keep the two WMCs in synch automatically. That way, if one home is destroyed, all of my personal media will be safe and sound at the other home, even though it's in another state.
To achieve this level of synchronization, I use a Web service from BeInSync. For $9.95 per month, you can keep up to three PCs in sync by using this peer-to-peer program that runs on each PC. Simply load the program and select the folders you want to keep in sync, like all of your personal media, and any changes on one PC will automatically be synchronized to the other PC in real time. This type of program is only possible with a broadband connection available in both locations. Obviously, this is overkill if you only have one home, but you may decide to synchronize PCs between yourself and your aging parents. This method would eliminate the need to keep your parents up to date by emailing pictures or sending discs. They would always be up to date with your digital media. And with a WMC Extender, they could watch your media (and their own) on their TVs even if they're located all the way on the other side of the country.
Stay Tuned!
In future issues, we'll go into the process of converting legacy music, photos, and videos to the WMC. I'll also explain the ins and outs of the TV system (and features like the personal video recorder) built into WMC. In addition, I'll explain how to mobilize your personal media and how to significantly enhance the entertainment value of your media and provide additional tips on disaster recovery solutions. So the next time someone yells "fire," you won't need to panic, because your life is digitized. - Mark Smith
What is Wi-Fi?
Also known as wireless fidelity or 802.11, this technology enables computers, printers and other electronic components to communicate with each other over wireless radio-frequency airwaves.
