Know Your Stuff – inventory your home

For years I’ve used the home inventory feature of Microsoft Money to track important items in the house, along with purchase dates, replacement amounts, serial numbers, etc. Even when, starting with Money 2005, it was no longer a supported piece of the application, I continued to use it just because I had so much information in there (and there was no easy way to get it out).

This week I came across a post on Lifehacker pointing to the Insurance Information Institute’s free Know Your Stuff home inventory application and decided to give it a shot. I liked what I saw, so I began the laborious process of manually re-entering all of my home inventory information into Know Your Stuff, copy/pasting from MS Money … but I think it was worth it.

KYS organizes your items by rooms: first you create the rooms of your house, then create the items in those rooms. You enter basic information like the item name, location (room), category, purchase date and price, serial number, descriptive information, etc. You can also attach a photo and/or receipt. Once you’ve done all the data entry, you can generate reports, or even export the data to Excel (in CSV format). If you want a secure, offsite backup solution for your inventory data, KYS integrates with Vault24.

Overall, I like the organization aspect of KYS. It has the flexibility to let me create my own rooms, and even asset types. I like how you can attach multiple photos of a room, but am a little frustrated you can only attach a single picture to an item. Also, for the receipt field, only images are allowed (no PDFs, which would seem to make more sense, especially for multi-page documents). The search function is a bit limited too, allowing you only to search on the item name (instead of say, Make or Model). As for secure backup, I’ll just put a copy of my inventory file in my Amazon S3 account for a lot cheaper than the $15/year fee for storing a single inventory file on Vault24. 😛

At least now I’ve got all of that information out of MS Money and into a separate application where I can do better reporting and easier updating.

I love my iPod. I #$%@ HATE iTunes!

I love my 30gb iPod Video … I really do. The interface is simple and elegant; the hardware is a marvel; its changed how I listen to music, and what I listen to: I don’t listen to radio at all anymore, I listen to podcasts (or when the podcasts run out, music!).

So why, why, WHY does Apple ruin such a perfect device with the millstone-around-the-neck that is iTunes? Where do I start?

  • iTunes is slow: my main desktop that I use for iTunes is a 3.0GHz P4 with 2gb of RAM running Vista Home Premium. Ok, yes, it’s a few years old and doesn’t have dual cores, but it’s not exactly slow. And yet iTunes runs like molasses: switching between views in the library is slow, typing into the search box is slow, right-clicking on my iPod under Devices to get to the context menu is slow. The entire thing is just sloooooow.
  • iTunes is bloated: why do I have a Apple TV tab in my iTunes preferences when I don’t have an Apple TV? Why does it install the Apple Mobile Device Support service and the Syncing tab under Preferences when I don’t have an iPhone?
  • iTunes is broken: this drives me nuts … I update the tags on my MP3s, add album art, etc. Then I’ll notice, while a track is playing on my iPod, that the cover art is gone. I check iTunes, and sure enough, the art has been removed. Sometimes it even seems to update the Album Artist tag for me. I’ve spent a lot of time tagging everything the way I want it … don’t mess with my tags! (And before you ask, yes, I have “automatically download missing album artwork” turned off).
  • iTunes is sneaky: remember a few months ago when Apple tried to slip in their Safari browser through their Windows updater? Well, if you’ve upgraded to iTunes 7.7 recently, you’ll find a new MobileMe icon in your control panel! Yep, they did it again. I’m not going to use MobileMe, don’t mess around and put icons for stuff I don’t want on my PC (for steps on how to remove it, see here).

There are a few things I like about iTunes: the podcatcher functionality, Smart Playlists, the ability to organize my music library hierarchy on my PC, etc. I only use it, though, because I have to. I stopped buying tracks from the iTunes Music Store once Amazon launched their DRM-free music store so I don’t need it for that. If you know of a good iTunes replacement that will work with my iPod, please let me know!

A new music player for TiVo: Harmonium

I’ve been using Galleon for a long time (since its JavaHMO roots) to play my music library on my TiVos. Now there’s nothing wrong with it, but development has pretty much come to a complete halt.

Enter a new HME music application: Harmonium by Charles Perry. It’s still in early beta (only up to version 0.3.1) but shows promise. It has a sharp, high-definition interface, allows creation of playlists on-the-fly, is easy to use, and its free.

For now, I’ve shut off my Galleon music applications and am checking out Harmonium. I’ve run into a few snags and one thing it’s missing is the ability to parse my iTunes library directly (which means not having to export playlists into separate files) but like I said, it’s still an early beta. Now that it’s up and running my next mini-project will be to get it to run through Galleon so I don’t have two separate java processes hogging resources on my Ubuntu server (they both use the java service wrapper, so this should be possible). Stay tuned.

WarGames 25th Anniversary

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie “WarGames” it’s showing in select theaters tonight at 7:30pm! You can use the event locator to see if it’s playing near you.

Unfortunately I just found out about this today and have prior plans so I can’t go … but I totally would if I could. As I mentioned two weeks ago when I was reunited with my old Atari 800XL, “WarGames” was the movie that really piqued my interest in computers and got me started down the technology path.

This is also a promotional event since the new sequel, “WarGames: The Dead Code” is being released on DVD next week.

Blast from the (computing) past

When I was up in Ohio on vacation last week, my mom presented me with a cardboard box she found while cleaning out the basement. Score!

The Atari 800XL was my first computer, given to me by my parents as a Christmas present in the early 80s. That, combined with seeing the movie “WarGames“, is what steered me into computers and eventually, my career. This particular 800XL isn’t my original unit. I sold that one and “upgraded” to this one, which had the RAMBO XL memory upgrade to a whopping 256k (from the original 64k). So technically it’s my second computer. 😉

The cardboard box also contained my two 1050 floppy drives, a KoalaPad (no stylus), and an ICD P:R: Connection. I also had a 256k ICD MIO but sadly that was missing. I used to run a BBS on all of this hardware and with the 256k internally on the computer and the 256k external RAMDisk I was able to load the entire thing into memory to minimize floppy disk access. The 1050s were not the quietest drives and since the whole setup was in my bedroom, I could get woken up in the middle of the night when someone on the BBS saved a message board post and the disk drive would grind to life.

I managed to get the Atari hooked up to a Sony LCD HDTV in my home office:

Seeing and using the Atari again, compared to my Eee, really drives home how far computing has come in the past 25 years. Wow.

Now if my mom could only find the other box filled with game cartridges and disks …