I’m still not enamored with flickr; their persistent inability to supply an RSS feed of photo sets is appalling. They finally show a map on the photo page, but not on the set page. You can’t see an overall map. Really, only one of my presentation issues has been addressed. Still, of the options out there now, they suck the least.

The first problem is organizational. You have an epub bookshelf and a pdf bookshelf. I would prefer a unified bookshelf. It would make things easier to find when there are large numbers of documents and one doesn’t remember what the document type is.

The more important problem is that pdf support doesn’t have a way to crop margins that I can see. You can unpinch to zoom in but that’s a bit fiddly and to make matters worse, it zooms back to full page view when you change pages. I was hoping I could use ibooks as the One True ebook reader but it’s not there yet.

This means I can finally stop keeping two itunes libraries, one with apple lossless for the home theater system and another at 128k bps for the iphone. I’m willing to trade the increase in sync time (because of the need to convert the files prior to sending them to the phone) for simpler file management. It only took three years of submitting this through itunes feedback for it to happen. Perhaps there is hope for my requests for flac support and for being able to have better support for multiple artists, composers and genres on a track.

An electronic book is the obvious choice, but it’s hard to beat books at the optimal technology for reading. E-readers have been expensive and clunky and had a lack of content. At least until recently. Now there seem to be three major players, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. I’ve read about each though I’ve only touch Amazon’s Kindle in person.

Kindle and B&N’s nook have the same price point and similar features. The nook seems to have software that isn’t quite there in terms of quality and performance but uses more open standards than Kindle.

I’d probably get a Kindle in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one thing. The Kindle’s DRM locks me into Amazon. I don’t want to buy books that lock me into a single hardware vendor. The Kindle has some great features but the DRM implementation is onerous and I don’t trust any single company to keep my best interests at heart. If we must have DRM then let’s have interoperable DRM and the EPUB standard seems the best bet for this. Unless Amazon switches to an open standard, I’m not very likely to buy a Kindle even though it’s arguably the best reader on the market with the largest library of material of likely interest to me.

The nook has the advantage of supporting EPUB but the performance is so sluggish that I’m not sure I could live with it. Hopefully that will improve. Yesterdays firmware update (v1.1) seems to help some, but it’s yet to be proven that the hardware platform is up to the task. I’m pretty sure that nook2 will be much improved but will this nook ever live up to it’s hype?

Sony’s readers look nice. They support EPUB. The UI looks good. The touchscreen models suffer from glare from the video’s I’ve seen and the low-end,  non-touchscreen model uses a screen that’s just too small.

Because B&N uses a DRM model that is different than Sony, the advantage of EPUB for interoperability is largely gone. A nook can read Sony’s DRM but, at least for now, a Sony can’t read nook’s DRM. That may change, but for now EPUB isn’t living up to it’s promise.

So, I sit back and wait and my bookshelves continue to overflow.

This interface has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a two year old Alesis IO/26 firewire multichannel audio interface. I had 8 analog and 16 digital inputs and can run up to 192khx at 24 bits.

Included are the unit, power supply, firewire cable, driver cd, manual and original box.

It is in working order and in great shape. Works with both Mac and PC and would make a great addition to any audio enthusiast looking to record multichannel audio.

The monitor has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a 19″ 4×3 monitor that runs at a native resolution of 1280×1024.

It has DVI and VGA inputs and is in working order.

Included are the monitor, power supply, DVI and VGA cables and original box. I do not have the original manual.

Asking $60.

This is an 11 year old Roland A-90EX midi keyboard. It is a full-size 88-key keyboard with piano key action.

The unit is in good shape except for the two lowest black keys which have fallen off the mechanism that holds them up and therefore they can’t be played. This should be fixable though I’m not certain what would be involved. Other than that, the keyboard is in working order.

It includes the manual and and foot pedal and a stand. A bench will be included at no extra cost if you want it.

Though I have the original box, it’s not in good shape for shipping. I am willing to meet within a three hour drive of Washington, DC to deliver the keyboard.

Please contact me if interested. Asking: $200. The keyboard sold for $900 when new.

The GPS has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a used Garmin StreetPilot 2730 GPS. It includes the GPS, the XM radio reciver (and extension cable), remote control, 12V power adapter for the car, AC power adapter (for the computer), USB cable and dashboard mount.

It also includes a bean bag mount that did not come with the unit but can be used if you prefer not to use the adhesive disk on the original mount.

The included map data is Garmin’s City Navigator NT 8 which came with the unit when new. These maps can be updated on Garmin’s website if you choose to update them.

The firmware is up to date and the unit is in excellent condition.

Asking $75. Please contact me if interested.

I created a trial membership to see and the jury is mixed. It does provide an RSS feed of albums (or galleries in smugmugese) but the feed contains almost no info. Unlike Picasa Web Albums, the album doesn’t have a geotag or a date (other than the modification date for the album) associated with it. That makes it tough to automatically order albums chronologically. The album description also isn’t in the feed making it not terribly descriptive.

The image display on the site is interesting. There’s a fair amount of customization possible, but you can’t get a display of image, EXIF and map all in one view as you can with PWA. Overall, I’d give it a mixed review. It’s more expensive than either flickr or PWA but only gives me moderately more desired functionality compared to flickr and less than PWA. Of course, Google hasn’t responded to the multiple pleas for help regarding the name tagging problem many of us are experiencing on PWA so who knows if that will ever be fixed. It’s a problem that some have experienced for at least a month.

But, I digress, the question of the moment is could smugmug satisfy my needs. My initial reaction is no, but it’s a cool product and it’s worth considering if you’re in the market for a photo sharing site and want more options for display than either flickr or PWA offer.

I’m going to post my last couple of albums from 2009 on PWA then put that aside and look at ways of solving the lack of the flickr photoset rss problem. Perhaps it’s time to write  a small standalone program that polls flickr and generates the desired rss.