Paul A. Luzzi

September 8, 2002

Its been a while since I posted any updates here, but that is because I have been busy. I  have been working with a few new devices lately. I purchase the 802.11b product from LinkSys about a year and a half ago (wap11/wac11) and have  been very happy. But once I started to develop my own video-on-demand system, I wanted to use some wireless to get it down to my tv, and the 802.11b just couldnt cut it. So I got the 802.11a stuff now as well. I picked up the Linksys wpc54 and the base station for the new 5 Ghz products. They work fantastic. I am now able to play a move that was copied from a dvd that was copied to my storage array hanging of my sparc1. Then since the array has a samba share on it, my laptop can see and play it using its dvd player. I just convert that signal to tvout and play it on my big screen now. I built an html form to wrap around all my movie titles (actually a cgi script that just does an ls and parses the data), and now you can imagiine how many movies I have on demand at my fingertips all the time now. But this was also not enough for me. Since the dvd-on-demand was such a hit, I wanted the same for my cd-audio collection of 300+ cd’s. So I bought the new Linksys wireless ethernet bridge (wet11) and an AudioTron from Turtle Beach. I configured these two devices to also see a new share coming off of my sparc1 for music now. This is one of the cooles things I have ever used. I feel like my own dj, because I just pick the songs I want, any song/any
artist, and they play all day. I can even shuffle them. If I dont have the cd’s ripped to mp3’s yet, I can also get them from
Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus, or any other similar idea. This is good stuff.