When the paper no longer arrives, will you miss the sound of it sliding across the porch, coming to an abrupt rest against your front door?

When the bulk mail and government subsidies are no longer enough to keep the mail service alive, will your dog miss the excitement of the mailbox clatter and you, the discussion of the daily weather?

When the bank teller and shoe cobbler and the small appliance repair shop share the same place in our history books, will you miss the opportunity for someone who always remembered your name?

Soon, we will never again purchase music or rent videos from a store. We will increasingly work from our home, learn from our home, even travel from our home through a virtual world.

How, then, do we claim to live a more connected life?

The next generation will not likely know what it means to hold music in their hands nor blow dust from the cover of a book. E-readers will offer instant access to everything, which may improve literacy or reduce appreciation … or both.

Ironic that in a growingly connected world, it seems to me, people are actually more alone despite their always being online. Reaching out through instant feeds and sharing hundreds of snippets of noisy nothing while failing to explore the depth of silence.

In a world of “no more” it seems to me the ideal application will be one which turns off all our gadgets, gizmos, and devices in order to say clearly, “no, more.”

Introduction
Everynowandagain I return to my geek roots. Today was one of those days where instead of doing real work, the stuff I knew was important, I felt I deserved a Saturday to just play. And play I did.

I now have a fully networked, shared file and mixed media distribution system in my home comprised of just 4 components: LinkSys wireless router, Western Digital “MyBook World Edition” NAS box, and 2 Sonos ZonePlayers.

While NAS boxes and Sonos are not new, it’s the WD My Book Linux backend that makes this combination exceptionally powerful. I was able to use the well designed WD web (IP) interface to create a limited access user account with which I am able to use rsync from Linux workstation or laptop for routine backups. It’s slow, but completely command-line compliant and functional.

And with support for FTP, NFS, CIFS, and SSH, the WD product line is very well designed. Marketed as an easy-to-configure home user product (which it is), the behind-the-scenes functions make this an exceptional, powerful, and fully configurable storage solution, complete with a secure, remote access service through WD’s MioNet.

Configuration
While the WD box automatically obtains an IP address from a DSL or Cable router (use the included WD configuration software or monitor the DHCP provision logs to determine your drive’s obtained IP address), it is important to note that the Sonos boxes do NOT use IP routing as a means of talking to NAS boxes. Rather, Sonos uses the Windows based SMB file sharing protocol which requires a path name, as described in this document.

Before you start the setup, you’ll need some information from your NAS. Sonos finds and accesses a NAS drive using a standard network path \\Name\Sharename

Name is the network name of the NAS and Sharename is the top level shared folder on the NAS. You can usually find this information in the NAS drive’s configuration page or in any configuration software that may have been included withyour NAS.

However, the WD web interface did not make this path clear. It was through some experimentation that I determined the path to be the name I had given the drive:

Basic Mode –> Device Name

… followed by the directory in which the music would be stored, “Public” for:

\\ots-nas\public

According to Sonos’ documentation (above), To add this path to Sonos:

1. Open the Sonos Desktop Controller, click on the Music menu, and select Set Up Music Library.
2. Click Add a Share (Add if you’re using a Mac) and select Add music stored in folders that are currently shared on my network.
3. Type the network path for the music folder or click Browse to search for it. If it is not shared anonymously, enter the user name and password of a user with permission to access the folder and click Next.
4. Click OK to confirm.

Satisfaction
In OSX I was then able to use a the WD backup software or any software package that allows for the entry of a path name or IP address to access the drive, and from Linux either Nautilus graphical file manager or command line.

Once fully configured and all my music copied to the Western Digital NAS box, my home theater experience is phenomenal, more than 600 high quality rips available at my finger tips, using the Sonos app for my Apple iPod or Android phone.

Do not read this entire entry. Not just yet. Take a few moments to look beyond the words in front of you and to the framework of your web browser. What do you see?

A button for BACK and FORWARD, RELOAD and HOME. Perhaps another set of signs for OPEN, PRINT, and ATTACH. These signs are universal to those who have used a computer, independent of their native spoken or written language.

The HOME button is not likely to invoke an emotion for you, no matter how many times it is pressed. Use the OPEN button to load a photo of your parents, sibling, child, best friend, or favorite vacation spot and you may experience a rush of emotion, even a warming of the skin on your face, hands, and in the center of your abdomen.

Now take a moment to look beyond your web browser, and around the room in which you reside. What signs do you see? Perhaps ones which direct you to the restroom or exit? There may be others which ask you to refrain from smoking, or to remove your shoes, or to turn off your mobile phone.

Relatively benign communications which offer information and direction more than motivation or stimulation of emotion. But what if we were to replace those signs that instruct how to abide by the rules of that public place and replace them with signs that hold entirely different, perhaps symbolic meanings?

Cafe 666
Imagine that you visit an internet cafe to enjoy a cup of coffee and to catch up on email. The coffee is fresh. The staff are responsive and polite. You sit back in a large, soft sofa, and with your first sip, your eyes rise from the lip of your mug only to be immediately taken by an odd assortment of images painted on the walls of the cafe. You look twice to make certain you are seeing things correctly. You set down your coffee.

A swastika juxtaposed to a Christian cross. A sickle and hammer. A pink triangle and stiff middle finger erupting from a closed fist. A fist raised high with sleeves rolled back aimed at a human eye. A large, erect phallic pushing up from the center of a flower. The numbers ‘666’ displayed too often, too large for your own comfort.

What kind of establishment have you entered? Suddenly uncomfortable, you ask for the coffee remaining in your mug to be transferred to a take-out cup and you depart. Amazing, isn’t it, how the simple assembly of shapes color can have such control over our emotions, even our sense of comfort and safety.

Power in Symbols
Why do the police across the world spend money to erase gang graffiti as quickly as it is painted on the sides of buildings? Why will a middle finger raised in impolite salute invoke a physical fight? Is it anything more than skin, muscle, and bone moving in a controlled fashion? You did not throw an object, nor touch another person, and yet, the offense of such an act may be treated as harshly as if you had in fact caused bodily harm.

When does a sign become universal? Can a universal sign become symbolic?

The news in the U.S. is often rich with discussion of freedom of speech and of the press, the boundaries within which we are allowed to talk and write sometimes gray. But consider the power of signs were you to walk down the street of any city or town in any country with a poster which portrayed a gun juxtaposed to a photo of the President. How long would it take before you were interrogated by the police?

I do not intend to uphold this action, rather to showcase with clarity the power held by relatively simple shapes arranged in a particular manner as a means of invoking very strong emotion, even physical response by those who behold them.

Some cry at the sign of the Christian cross, so deep does their faith run; others salute the crest which represents a branch of the armed forces, so strong is their tie to their country. Some will kill to defend a word which is sacred or holy. Riots break out and more than 100 die following the satirical depiction of Islam’s profit Muhammad. An artist is heavily criticized for placing a Christian cross in a bottle of urine. An anonymous artist helps to relieve the tension in highly dangerous, gang ridden streets of Rio de Janeiro by painting the sides of buildings and the fronts of steps with massive images of women’s faces. The face of Mother Mary is discovered in a stone or a loaf of bread and people travel from great distances to see this miracle.

The Nike ‘swoosh’, the Apple ‘apple’, the United Nations ‘UN’, and the United States ‘$’ hold international recognition. If I recall correctly, a ban was placed on advertising cigarettes within 2000 feet of a school when it was learned more school-age children in the U.S. recognized the face of Joe Camel than that of the President, Martin Luther King, or Mickey Mouse.

Past, Present, & Future
Humans have for millennia used signs and symbols in art to tell stories, to invite or scare away spirits, to provide directions to travelers. Some sign systems evolved into written language, as with the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Others, as far as we know, told a story without the implicit structure of language, conveyed even in relative simplicity.

The power of the ancient Native Americans draws attention, even fear among the modern peoples of the American Southwest. Why have modern Navajo desecrated the faces, necks, and arms of particular rock art on the Northern boundary of their Nation, along the San Juan river? Why does this act yet invoke a sense of awe, even a chill on a warm, summer day as though a cloud bank had for a moment covered the sun?

Perhaps for the same reason that Hollywood has for decades produced movies which leave us wondering, “Could it be true?” Riddles and clues in the form of cryptic signs and symbols guided Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, Ben Gates in National Treasure; Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, and James Bond.

I am moved by this line of thinking as I have recently begun to read “Man and his Symbols” with opening chapter and edited by Carl Jung; by my travel this year to Kenya, Ghana, Turkey, and England; and with the final effort now being applied to iConji, a language of symbols for digital communication.

Each day I am here in London, even as a native English speaker, I take note of the signs for city bus, Underground, STOP, ‘mind the gap’, NO SMOKING, toilet, ATM, and cafe.

Even with the rise of English as a dominant language in international commerce and travel, as metropolitan areas gain speakers of a greater number of languages, it is universal signs that continue to grow as the simplest, most powerful means of attracting the desired attention.

In the U.S. too, I have noticed an increase in the use of signs and symbols in billboard and poster advertising. One such ad in the Denver International Airport for a university has only signs, no words, to make clear it’s communication. A shop on East McDowell road in Phoenix too has a roadside billboard which uses character representations to communicate the services provided.

As with the IBM logo, open logos force the human mind to close the gap, to complete the story and when accomplished, the image is held with a greater level of intensity and meaning.

We are visual creatures, emotionally moved by what we perceive with our eyes. Since the first time we as a species could manipulate our surroundings, we have left art to visually record our stories, to direct and to caution. As the meaning of signs may change as generations pass, what universal sign do we leave as a warning to those who may discover our buried nuclear waste ten thousand years from now?

I believe our future, as much as our past, will be communicated and recorded with signs while the fundamental nature of being human will continue to give power to symbols. No level of education, no foundation of science will ever completely erase our core need, as a species, to find meaning in symbols.

But if what Jung wrote is true, that a symbol cannot be invented by a single person, then are all symbols intrinsic and eternal? Or can new symbols be incorporated into the human psyche?

Only time will tell …

In a recent exchange with my former high school physics professor and now good friend Dan Heim, we discussed the current and forthcoming technologies applied to solar photovoltaic power generation, as follows:

DAN WRITES
> > The latest and greatest innovation are the bifacial panels by Sanyo.
> > I intend to use them on our (yet to be built) east deck area, mounted
> > horizontally to provide both shade and electricity. They’ll tie into our
> > existing system, which has a 4 KW inverter, and bring us very close
> > to electrical self-sufficiency.
> >
> > They claim up to 30% more power generation than single-sided PV
> > panels, depending on ground reflectivity. So with a nice light
> > color of flagstone for the decking, we’ll get the reflected light
> > needed to make them do just that.

I ASK
> Have you found a website which showcases the % of visible vs infrared
> vs higher frequencies of light utilized by silicon based PV panels?
> If you were to place a mirror beneath the double-sided panels, would
> that work well?

DAN RESPONDS
I couldn’t find an actual spectral diagram, but if you go to The Physics of Photovoltaic Cells and scroll down to Silicon Photovoltaic Cells you get some idea. I happen to know that standard silicon PVs get most of their energy in the 500-700 nm range (blue-green to red). Not unlike plants that photosynthesize, curiously.

Outside that range, efficiency drops, and more of the incident solar energy is transformed into heat. It all comes down to the band-gap the electrons need to jump in order to become “available” for conduction. That’s why even the best silicon PVs are only slightly more than 20% efficient.

But there’s a lot of work being done to increase that wavelength range and improve efficiency using different dopants to get different band-gaps. The available solar energy ranges from infrared to ultraviolet, which normally just becomes heat in a PV cell. The prospect of a “full range” PV cell is something many researchers are working on.

Check out An unexpected discovery could yield a full spectrum solar cell

I’ve also read about some work exploring the use of organic compounds, as well as nanotechnology, to boost performance, but they don’t provide many details.

Regarding mirrors under the bifacial PVs, most definitely that would boost output. How much more you’d get with an actual mirror, compared to say shiny metal or white flagstone is hard to estimate. There’s also the problem that mirrors are more fragile, susceptible to hail damage, and would need to be kept clean. A layer of fine dust would decrease their performance to the point where a mirror might not be much better than shiny metal –Dan

That may not be the most correct English grammar, but what I meant is true.

Following on the words of my prior entry, it is both incredible and wonderful that in any given day, as with today, I have used Skype to maintain a realtime video conference with a friend in London, England, while updating a website hosted in Montreal, Quebec with realtime feedback from a co-Director in South Africa while coordinating with an IBM colleague in Singapore and a former co-worker in Victoria, British Columbia. It is likely too that I will receive email or text messages from Kenya, China, and of course much closer to home, any of a dozen States in the United States.

This interaction combines international standards across three desktop operating systems (Linux, OSX, Windblows) and who knows how many servers which push the data, headers and packet checksums through countless routers, telecommunications server blades (most likely PowerPC running Linux), and eventually to their recipient.

It reminds me of an article I wrote for MacNewsWorld in 2004, A Ghost and the Machine in which I drew a correlation between distant recipients of internet transmissions and the ghosts of times past.

Maybe some day, when the science fiction of Philip Dick becomes science fact, the differentiation between what we do with our computers and what we think is greatly reduced, the ultimate, seamless transmission of our experience in this world, becoming the experience of another.

And those experiences, if digitally stored in the richness of a three dimensional, tangible memory could themselves become ghosts if they were to escape the confines of their database cell, roaming the planet’s networks seeking their long-since deceased creator.

Bye-Bye Ma Bell
The days of the Bell spin-offs are, as we know them, numbered. Over one hundred years of telephony services and the line between voice, data, and entertainment is just a few years from being completely washed away.

There is no need for me to reiterate the history of the telephone nor the transition from analog to digital telephony services as there are a number of in-depth Wikipedia entries.

But what is important to note is this — you have not, for many years, been hearing the voice of your business associate, family member, nor friend who is speaking to you from across the nation, nor even likely from across town. Rather, you are hearing a digital recreation of the voice.

The transition from analog to digital enabled a far greater number of phone conversations to be maintained over any given set of copper lines than with analog, while at the same time improving quality and allowing for the transmission of data (fax, email, web, music, video, etc.).

VOIP
What is coming next is the movement of voice data over a much broader spectrum, using the internet cloud as an indirect yet far less expensive means of moving a digital representation of your voice from your phone to whomever is listening, anywhere in the world.

This is called Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP. Originally made possible from computer-to-computer using open-source software such as Asterix, Skype introduced VOIP communications which enable computer-to-computer, computer-to-phone, and with the rental of a number, phone-to-computer calls for free or very low cost.

In the U.S., Vonage offers a no-brainer means by which you may tell Qwest, AT&T, or Southern Bell to go hell, and conduct all your phone calls using DSL, cable, or wireless broadband. Yes, you will need to pay for the broadband service, but you can remove the phone services and use VOIP instead.

The future of telephony services is the same as that of residential internet and home entertainment–service providers will compete for the highest bandwidth data pipe bundled with the lowest cost mix of services.

Mobility
A friend Jeff Moe (super hacker extraordinaire) had years ago rented phone numbers (not services, just numbers) in a number of countries where he configured Asterix servers which allowed his friends in those countries to dial local numbers which auto-routed to wherever he was residing. He could be holding out in Argentina and answer a call placed in Southeast Asia and no one incurred long-distance charges.

That is possible now for those of us who do not harbor Jeff’s ubergeek abilities. While Skype offers physical phones which receive your local number no matter where you are in the world (as long as you are within the reach of an adequate wi-fi network) the Vonage VOIP adapter which may be connected to any internet connection, anywhere in the world, allowing standard handsets to receive and make calls at very low rates.

Skype and Vonage (along with TruPhone and others) also offer free iPhone apps which allows similar functionality for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you don’t want to pay AT&T ridiculous prices to use the iPhone, use an iPod Touch as your phone instead. It’s simple:

1) Purchase a headset with microphone.

2) Then download Skype or Vonage VOIP apps from the iTunes Store.

3) And within seconds you will be making your first call.

While you cannot receive calls to your iPod Touch using Vonage, you can if you subscribe to Skype’s caller ID service which will give your Skype call the appearance of a call from your phone. And what’s more, Skype provides for auto-forwarding to any number, even when your Skype application (nor your laptop) are on. It really works!

And true to Jeff’s hand-built network, Skype account holders can have a number in any country in world, meaning someone local to that country can call the number for free, and it will auto dial their Skype account, even auto-forward to their local number. Charges do apply, but what a great way to remain connected, even build an international company without ever leaving the office.

What comes next?
The strong-hold that AT&T and Apple hold on the PDA market is going to unravel as Google’s Android is now being embraced by several major phone manufactures, including Acer, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and Sony as an open-source operating system for mobile phones.

What gets really exciting is when you use an Android phone to connect to a 3G (or forthcoming 4G) service and then route that connection through the built-in 802.11 transceiver to create a local wi-fi network for home and mobile office use.

Whether at home, in the office, camping on the fringes of civilization, or moving at 75MPH down the Interstate, you may use your mobile connection to build a local wi-fi network.

So why do you need DSL or cable at home? Maybe you don’t. But whether you use a physical set of wires or wireless to bring a data connection into your home, the “internet” is not free. The internet requires an infrastructure which in the U.S. was in large part paid for by tax payers and built by the Ma Bell spin-offs. Some things are going to shake-down, finding a new balance between the locked-in sky-high prices and the apparently free VOIP services. Some things will likely remain the same, the traditional service providers continuing to charge the maximum amount possible until forced to reduce their prices through threat of suit or competitive market demand.

For now, you may reduce your phone bill with Vonage or Skype while adding the ability to call 60+ countries at no additional charge Smaller world. Smaller bill.