{"id":732,"date":"2005-01-30T12:38:43","date_gmt":"2005-01-30T17:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=732"},"modified":"2005-01-30T12:38:43","modified_gmt":"2005-01-30T17:38:43","slug":"tablet-pc-as-media-gizmo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=732","title":{"rendered":"Tablet PC as media gizmo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s discussion about using the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/entry\/1234000057028826\/\">Mac mini as a media center<\/a>: &#8220;the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio\/video recorder, audio\/video playback, audio\/video download, and it even makes a decent audio\/video production unit, as well.&#8221;  The cute li&#8217;l box has processing, storage and network to serve, slurp, and schedule.<br \/>\nBut what I&#8217;m missing isn&#8217;t just processing power &#8212; it&#8217;s interface focus.<br \/>\nRight now, my laptop is a fine media machine if I want to focus on watching video or listening to music. But it&#8217;s useless for background tasks.  Any media &#8211; related task steals 100% of focus and processing power.<br \/>\nWhat I really want is a good-sized, networked, tablet that I can use for social software like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.last.fm\">Last.fm<\/a> for simultaneous playing and browsing.  An iPod UI is fine for selection, but it&#8217;s just too small for the social and topical browsing that&#8217;s key to my media experience. I want it to be portable, not tied to a desktop display.   The storage doesn&#8217;t need to be tied to the display &#8212; a networked storage gizmo would be ideal.<br \/>\nThe mini combines the storage, networking, and processing, and leaves off the display. I want the display and processing, which can be decoupled from the storage.<br \/>\nThis is all possible today with a good-sized budget.  A table is $1600, a network storage gizmo is $800.  In order to make a tablet practical, vendors would need to cost-optimize for a configuration that splits display from storage.<br \/>\nNote to more advanced home media hackers &#8212; what do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s discussion about using the Mac mini as a media center: &#8220;the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio\/video recorder, audio\/video playback, audio\/video download, and it even makes a decent audio\/video production unit, as well.&#8221; The cute li&#8217;l box has &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=732\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Tablet PC as media gizmo&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-bO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}