Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Recently, after months of trying, I finally managed to get the TiVo box I bought during last year’s “Great TiVo Giveaway” set up and working with my home wireless network. It was quite a chore, but the whole time I was trying to work around TiVo’s senseless omission of an ethernet port (Why USB and no ethernet, by the way? It boggles the mind!), I was at least encouraged by visions of all the wonderful television I was going to be enjoying once I got my hands on a landline.

Now that my TiVo is plugging away, though, I’ve been kind of disappointed to find that it hasn’t changed my TV watching habits at all. Sure, I can now see “The Daily Show” or “South Park” or “The Office” pretty much any time I want, but now that I have that ability I never quite seem to be in the mood. In fact, I’ve gotten so blasé toward TiVo that I rarely even check to see what it’s got for me, and it pains me a bit every time I walk past and see it earnestly recording something it thinks I will like but will almost certainly never watch.

Today I realized why I find this scene so oddly poignant: I’ve seen it before, at the end of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. I suppose I should be happy, then: in the event that humanity is wiped out, at least something will remember how much I liked “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

I’ve been pretty satisifed with my current digicam, the inexpensive but highly capable Canon A70. I’ve been so happy, in fact, that I eagerly recommend it every chance I get (see Eric Albert and Mark Pilgrim’s weblogs for example). To me, it’s the “little digicam that could”—it may not be as fancy, or tiny, or as high resolution as its more expensive counterparts, but it has one thing that I personally value above all those things: unlike some digital cameras I’ve owned, it’s very reliable and consistent.

That said, I’m afraid my eye has begun to wander a bit now that Leica has announced the Digilux 2. As the adoring owner of an M6 and two of Leica’s superb M lenses (a 35mm f/2 Summicron ASPH and an older 50mm f/2 Summicron), I’ve wanted to like Leica’s digital cameras for the longest time. Unfortunately, I’ve always been scared off by reviews mentioning a so-called “pointillist” effect on its images and excessive image noise at anything but the lowest ISO—annoyances that made it hard to for me to justify the cameras’ prices (and that’s just the current generation—Leica’s previous iteration of re-badged Fujifilm cameras were really lame).

I’m not sure if the Digilux 2 will fix these flaws, but it’s being marketed with one phrase that, if accurate, may well get me to forgive them: “the ‘analog’ digital camera.” The Digilux 2 appears to be Leica’s attempt to create a digital version of the classic M6—a digicam to please luddite photojournalists and curmudgeonly Leicaphiles everywhere. True to Leica form, the Digilux 2 looks backward and seeks to emulate traditional, all-manual cameras: to focus the lens, you turn a ring; to set the shutter speed, you move a dial; to check the focus distance, you look at markers on the lens. From a distance, you could even be forgiven for mistaking it for an actual M6 (something not everyone appreciates, it would seem…)!

What really seals the deal for me, though, is Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey’s psuedo-endorsement of the camera (as mentioned in Digital Photography Review’s coverage). Harvey is known for being a rather minimalist in his approach to equipment, and he’s definitely representative of the sort of people Leica is targeting, so his nod speaks well of their efforts.

(Update: An anonymous comment poster has pointed me to a Photo.net discussion about the Digilux 2, which illuminates another similarity between it and the Leica M: a very high price tag! I’m not quite ready to dismiss the D2 entirely, since I suspect a lot of its cost is tied up in an excellent lens and I still pine for the camera’s simple, “analog” operation, but I have to admit it would need really outstanding reviews to be competitive with the Canon 10D and the other mid-range digital SLRs it will be going head-to-head with.)

It’s not often that I get to scoop the entire blogosphere, but I think I’ve got a good chance of being the among the first to mention the latest thing from SliMP3 maker Slim Devices: the Squeezebox. Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to hang out with both the brilliant new Wi-Fi music player and its creator, Sean Adams, and I can say without reservation that both are extremely cool.

The Squeezebox, like the SliMP3 before it, is a very clever concept: rather than trying to turn their music player into a TiVo-style set top box, Sean and company have designed a “thin” client that connects to your stereo and merely streams music from your computer. It has a remote control and a little readout that displays song metadata and allows you to browse your library in a way that will be very comfortable to users of the iPod and iTunes. The server-side software has a slick web-based interface, integrates with iTunes, is completely open source (GPL) and mostly written in Perl, and presents some marvelous hacking opportunities.

While the SliMP3 required an Ethernet connection, however, the Squeezebox makes a good thing truly great by incorporating an 802.11b/g wireless interface. I suspect that this little innovation will finally eliminate the major barrier preventing a lot of people from embracing such a device (read: ugly ethernet cables).

One of those classic “Ah ha!” moments came for me when I was browsing Sean’s prodigious music collection through a Squeezebox connected to the stereo in his living room, and was told that all of the music was actually coming from a server in his office in Mountain View. The Squeezebox may be a relatively simple device, but it hints at some amazing possibilities!