Great little boombox from Sony

While a surround sound system is useful for a home theatre system, you often need to have other radios around the house, especially the kitchen, to listen to music while performing your chores.

The old Sanyo Boombox that I had since my college days was starting to behave very strangely, not always responding to button presses or doing the wrong thing on a button press, so I decided that it was time to retire it.

Using my AirMiles points (yes, these do come in handy sometimes), I ordered myself the Sony ZSSAT1 boombox. It comes with AM/FM radio with digital tuning (no more static!), a CD player that recognizes MP3s, a stereo line in jack to plug in my iPod as well as the ability to plug in an external antenna to get satellite radio programming.

While I will probably never use the satellite functionality, this is a very nice little radio with a full sound and all of the options needed to listen to my music any way I like. If you’re looking for a nice little radio, I would definitely recommend this one.

Daniel Bélanger, as good as ever on stage

My wife Andrée and I had the pleasure of seeing Daniel Bélanger on stage at a local college’s theatre this Thursday. After last seeing him on stage about 5 years ago, Bélanger is back on the road to support the release of a new album, L’échec du matériel.

With his laid back appearance (long beard, untamed hair, jeans and a sweater), his presence on stage was very strong and gave us an insight on his personality. The stage itself was also very interesting, with antennas and chimneys to make it look as if the band was playing on the rooftops.

More than half the set list was made up from songs from his latest album, but he still gave some room to his classics with some new musical arrangements. He also did about five songs where he was playing the guitar alone on stage to accompany his lyrics.

All in all, it was a very good show. It was also the first time that we were leaving Gabrielle was babysat at home. At least we felt that they were in good care since it was my sister taking care of them. The only other time when she had not been with us was for two nights at her grand-mother’s in December.

The High Definition format war is almost over, but wait before buying

As you might have heard, there are currently two high-definition DVD formats that are trying to get control of the market: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Both offer high quality 1080p images that look magnificent on a HD Television set and have similar technical specs. However, what has fueled this fued for more than a year is that most of the big Hollywood studio have sided with one side or the other, which meant that buying only one type of player would keep you from being able to see some titled in HD.

It looks like this conflict is going to be coming to an end in the near future since the one studio that was still on the fence, Warner, has sided with the Blu-Ray camp.

Even with this announcement, and the quasi-certitude that Blu-Ray will now get the upper-hand, don’t rush out and buy a Blu-Ray player, especially not a stand-alone one. This is because the Blu-Ray standard is not completely defined at this time. A new revision of the standard is expected in the fall of 2008. People who have invested in first generation stand-alone players will then have to buy a new one to be able to see new discs coming out at the end of this year. If you are considering the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, then you are pretty safe since they can easily do software updates to the video player part of the device.

I am personally waiting until the end of 2008 before investing in a high-definition player.

A new start for Star Trek: The Next Generation

I’ve been a fan of Star Trek on TV and on the big screen for years. However, the only Star Trek books that have been able to catch my attention are the Star Trek: New Frontier series. This series of more than a dozen books has fascinated me since they basically gave free reign to the author, Peter David, to create his own crew and ship to explore the galaxy.

This has recently changed when I picked up a couple of books based on Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled Resistance and Before Dishonor.

This two-part series relaunches a franchise that was torn to pieces after the last movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. With Data dead, and Commander Riker and Counselor Troi off to a different ship, these books introduce a new set of supporting characters around familiar faces (Picard, Crushed, Worf and LaForge). We also go back to meeting one of the most intriguing ennemies in Star Trek lore: the Borg!

I actually started reading the second book by mistake, since it was written by Peter David, and am now going back through the first book. Both are captivating reads that I recommend if you have any interest in the Star Trek universe.

Site Move: Update your bookmarks or RSS readers

As mentioned a few posts ago, I am re-organizing the structure of the web site so that Andrée’s site will be at the root of nayanna.biz. Therefore, I have moved my blog to http://yannickcorner.nayanna.biz and my RSS feed is now at http://yannickcorner.nayanna.biz/feed/rss2. Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers.

There are currently some redirection pages in place so things will still work if you use the old links but this will change in the next couple of weeks.

iPod Touch update strategy not as bad as I thought

After feeling outraged at Apple a few days ago about their update strategy for the iPod Touch, it turns out that the firmware update is free while it is only the new applications that you need to pay for. So if you don’t need E-mail, Notes, Maps, Weather or Stock, you are not forced to buy the core and get fixes to the core functionality of the device. So maybe Apple is not so devilish after all.

Apple charging for a new iPod touch software update

If you own an iPod Touch, you will probably be quite surprised to hear that Apple just announced that their latest update for the device will require you to shell out 20$. Instead of only being a small software update, this new package adds 5 new applications to the Touch, namely Email, Stocks, Notes, Weather and Maps. So, on the one side, I understand a bit that they might want to charge for the update, however, only people who bought the device before this announcement will have to pay for it. If you buy the device from now on, the update will be free.

I don’t know if this is the kind of decision that they could go back on and eventually make the update free. We’ll see in due time. What is also interesting is that this announcement comes at the same time as Apple confirmed that the SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be released in February, thus opening the door for third-party official apps for the devices. Let’s just hope that there is no need to pay again to be able to use these third-party applications.

UnePorte.net closes down

As you probably know if you’ve read my blog over the years, I was writing DVD reviews for a web site called UnePorte.net. After six years of loyal service, the site is closing down. It was starting to be too much or a burden for the editor to carry out all of the tasks asssociated with the site.

While I will definitely miss writing for that site, this will hopefully mean that I will have time to make more regular updates on my blog.

For example, you might be interested to know that my younger daughter, Gabrielle, has already started walking at 10 1/2 months while my older daughter, Evelyne, has been enjoying pre-school since September.

On the work front, things keep very busy but very interesting since we have been acquired by CAE and merged with two other companies to form Presagis. I get to learn a bunch of new technologies and the work environment is very stimulating. Unfortunately, I am still traveling too much at the moment but I hope that this will level out over time.

There will also probably some changes on the site in the near future as the root of the site (nayanna.biz) becomes Andree’s web site for photography while my blog will probably move to another area. Stay tuned!