I’d like to introduce my new sidekick: L’il Stiny.
L’il Stiny is actually a Linksys NSLU2, a tiny network file server for USB2.0 hard drives. I first found out about this nifty device sometime last year when Jim Buzbee published an article on Tom’s Hardware entitled “Hacking the NSLU2″. The idea was intriguing but only took root the other week when I realized a serious need for additional storage.
Out of the box, the NSLU2 is ridiculously small (less than 6″ tall) and acts a file server on your network using up to two USB drives. It runs Linux on an ARM processor, serving files via Samba. Not long after Jim’s articles exposed the unit’s internals, a small community arose dedicated to opening up this little processor for other uses.
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I’ve spent the last few weeks importing my CD collection into iTunes. This is a big shift for me, and not just because of the size of my CD library (over 300 at last count). I’ve always insisted on the fidelity of CD audio versus MP3’s and resisted doing this for a long time. After all, why bother listening to an MP3 when you could just pop in the original CD?
But that’s the problem right there: as easy as it sounds, changing CD’s is a lot of effort (not to mention a big distraction) especially when trying to select out of such a large catalog. Since the switch, I now have a constant stream of music playing — my own personalized radio station — and I listen to a lot of stuff that just used to collect dust. I’ve kept the sampling rate fairly high but I still notice the difference on tracks with big dynamic ranges.
iTunes is a pretty slick piece of software. I like the smart playlists and the way “Party Shuffle” queues up tracks both before and after. Now I just have to rate the 2900 tracks imported so far to play favourite tracks more often and obscure stuff only every other month…