I’ve spent the last few years working towards this target personally and am finally at a stage where any of my media is accessible, anywhere, on any device; it’s all fast and compatible.

So, I thought that I would write about how to achieve this; or at least how I have, and how someone could go about replicating a completely digitally connected home.

This article will be the first of many in this ’series’, so bear with me; I may even seperate these out on to a different domain for reference if they prove popular.

Okay, so by media I mean audio, video and pictures. But that’s not all that’s required; universal accesibility of files is also important and then so is maintaining a secure network. Harder than it sounds sometimes!

So firstly, this really requires an N-spec wireless router (or hardwired cables if they’re built in to the walls etc..) and I would recommend connecting any devices that just won’t support N (except for portables) to the network with cabling. I designed my physical network topology around that; ensuring that the devices that didn’t support N were easily cable-able from the router.

Although this is not necessarily ‘required’, I went down the server route; this is a relatively inexpensive box running a cheap C2D with 2GB of RAM. The key is lots of hard disk space; 2TB of hard discs make both backing up networked computers and sharing media possible, although obviously less is okay if you have less to store/ backup/ share! This is connected via Gigabit cabling to a Gigabit router. This is mainly for future’s-sake as most of the rest of the network is either 100Mbit or N-spec wireless but it seemed pointless not to go for Gigabit given the choice; any 100Mbit router you have lying around should be fine, or use one of the ports on the back of the wireless router.

This server is running Windows Home Server. This is a fantastic server operating system that doesn’t require you to have a keyboard, mouse or screen on the server but rather use their client software to remotely access it. The software is intuitive and easy to use to set up media sharing and backup of any windows machines. This also allows you to create a VPN or Remote Desktop tunnel through to your Windows machines from the outside world, whilst maintaining security, along with sharing your files with you wherever you may be.

This server is also running both iTunes Media sharing and Windows Media Connect allowing Macs, Windows Machines and the XBOX360s access to the media. On top of that, the file directories are available over the network volumes anyway.

So I live in an appartment with one other guy. Also a Computer Scientist. We have technology all over the place. He’s a Windows guy, I’m somewhere in between Windows and Mac.

We’re both 360 users and as it turns out; the 360 is the best device to have under your TV-set by far. It easily grabs and plays all of the media from our server. We have one centralised store of music, video and audio which we both update with our music as we purchase it.

So; I have no music on my computer. No video. No pictures. And… as a plus, only I can access my pictures on the server thanks to folder protection in Windows Home server and thanks to Wireless-N, it’s as fast as if they were on my machine. (Although I do copy files locally to work on them in photoshop etc…).

So what about outside the house? Orb. Orb is fantastic. It’s a media server that can be used via a web interface, or any platform with a client. I can be at my girlfriend’s house and her, her family and I can watch a movie from my server on her TV (via a laptop).

My iPod Touch / iPhone using Wifi can play 100s of GB of music even when I’m on the other side of the world.

No need to carry a USB Thumb drive, as any computer I go to, I just log in to my home machine, or else download them to the machine right there. Added bonus… no need to update them when I get home; the new files are just there on my home screen.

Part two coming soon…

Chris

The search engine space hasn’t had many new large entrants in the past few years (if you exclude Microsoft’s no-brainer of Live Search) but now there seems to be a slew of new contenders. Mahalo (one of Jason Calacanis’ projects that I’ve posted about a few times),  and now Powerset; an interesting project that claims to use natural language semantics to interpret your search question and provide fast and accurate results.

Currently this is limited by its source material (wikipedia), and so the searches may only be factual in nature, so let’s take a look and figure out how well this thing does against Google (and for novelty), Mahalo.

So… some search questions. Seeing as Powerset requires factual based questions, to be fair, all will be factual in nature.

Aims:

1. How long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

3. How many different types of Swallow are there?

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

I think that these represent a pretty good spread of questions over various topics. Now… to see how they all sum up!

1. How Long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

Google: Varying the search text, between the first and third results contain the answer in the summary text. :)

Powerset: The very first result contains the answer (also highlighted). :)

Mahalo: Typing ‘Queen Victoria’ returns a page with the answer in the nice Guide Note box in the corner. Another win: all three seem pretty good with history!

Image Collage

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result contains the answer highlighted.

Mahalo: Not indexed on Mahalo… does give Google results though so see above.

Image Collage

3. How many different types of swallow are there?

Google: Fourth result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result does contain the answer, although not obviously and it does not appear in the summary text.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic, however again, the Google results yielded the same as above.

Image Collage

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: I couldn’t actually find the answer at all. I’m sure that it was in one of the pages somewhere, but not in any summary text on the first few pages of results, or ‘obviously’ within any of the first results.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic but gave good Google results.

Image Collage

Okay, so how did Powersets do? Not bad at all.

I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had set out to show that it was not even as good as Google, but it seemed to pretty much equal it most of the time. With the added plus that you can type the search in natural language. Its natural language support seems limited to simple sentences with no logic (e.g. and, not…) (at least from what I could tell), but it could seem easier for a novice.

However, despite offering a useful service; I don’t see where it would fit in to my (or anyone’s?) life. It’s not a complete search engine… I couldn’t use this as my home page. I couldn’t rely on it for day to day searching. AND… honestly, if I’m looking for encyclopaedic content, why not just go to Wikipedia.org?

The only way I can imagine using this is if they say made a Sidebar gadget or widget out of it, that I could just type my search in and away I go, rather than remember another search site when Google works just as well.

What I did end up learning here though, is that Mahalo is *actually* pretty good. It seems to crash my Firefox instantly :(, I don’t know if that’s the fault of FF3B5 or the site, or (quite likely) Flash Player (don’t know if they use any flash), but it has crippled my system of late, so you’ll notice the Mahalo pics are in IE, but I really like it.

Mahalo seems to have gotten it right… I will seriously consider swapping over to using Mahalo as a home page because it accepts the fact that their own data is limited. Mahalo seems to focus more on creating its own articles in the areas of popular culture, trivia, how tos etc… This is really useful content that doesn’t really exist in a consolidated manner anywhere else. But it then provides you with outside links for things that it doesn’t have. So essentially you get added value, and don’t lose anything from what you had before.

Okay, this is getting long, but… Powersets? Does it work? Yes. Is it new? I hope not; I really thought we were at this stage a few years ago (http://www.lexxe.com http://www.msdewey.com)

Chris