Sonos now playing in my living room

Sonos Controller

After several months of thinking, researching and warming up with the D-Link DNS-323 NAS disk, I finally bought a Sonos player on Friday. It is probably one of the most expensive ways of playing MP3s on the stereo, but probably also the most convenient. You can read all about the features on the Sonos website, but in brief all my CDs are available alongside any web radio station--conveniently remote-controlled.

But nothing is perfect: although the new remote IS awesome, it would be sooo nice if it had an IR interface so it could control my normal stereo... I'm used to controlling my whole stereo from a single remote, but now I have to use two... Shame.

Another thing is that I am having problems accessing my music through anything but a normal file share. Which works fine, but is not so fine considering that my network disk has both an iTunes Server and UPnP support--both of which the Sonos should be able to connect to, but for some reason does not. So currently I am investigating how to make these features work. For those familiar with Linux, there is a nice Wiki with lots of hacks and stuff for the D-Link DNS-323, but I hope that I won't have to dive in there...

More cool stuff

In the spirit of good old weblogs I add another link to a cool website:

• Ajax13

Ajax13 is a collection of simple web-applications--that is, applications that runs on a remote server through your web browser. Maybe not all that revolutionary (both GMail, Yahoo Mail, Blogger and Flickr demonstrate similar functionality), but still a cool indicator on what we will see more and more of in the future (while home computers become smaller and smaller with faster and faster online connections...).

Skiing with Bente from Stryken to Oslo

The title says it all, and the pictures document a wonderful day with Bente in fresh snow. Enjoy!

The coolest websites!

Looking for examples on cool online stuff, I came across a list of seven cool ones at TIME.com of which two caught my interest:

• Zunafish.com
• Pandora.com

Of the two, Pandora really stands out as the most amazing site I've ever seen! With Pandora you don't need a radio channel anymore--just enter a song or artist name, and Pandora keeps playing similar music. Wonderful!



Update:
Only US citizens can register on Pandora, because Pandora don't have an international license for distributing music. Yet...

Another update:
Looks like most of the cool web pages only works for US citizens. Hmpf.

Cultural and gastronomic pleasure

Gastronomic pleasure

After the wonderful experience of snowboarding in Hemsedal a couple of weeks ago, I repeated the success last weekend.

This weekend made for a change, and on Tom's invitation today I joined him on a visit to the Astrup Fearnley museum of modern art and their exhibition of Richard Prince's paintings--maybe one of the best art exhibitions I've seen so far, with delicately humorous and somewhat controversial statements on huge canvases. Lovely!

Topping the event, we stopped by Stockflet's café for a double espresso and an exquisite piece of Valrhona chocolate. Wonderful!