It comes with double sided tape adhered to the bottom so it's easy to keep it from sliding around your garage floor. It's stayed perfectly put on my poured concrete garage floor in the three weeks that I've had it, and the car is easily parked perfectly every time.

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Year Zero is a humorous sci-fi romp in which Earth's first contact with aliens is mired by legal issues due to copyright infringement. If you like humorous science fiction and think copyright law could use an overhaul, then this book is for you.

Year Zero: A Novel

The AudioQuest LP Anti Static Record Cleaner is a good carbon fiber brush to help remove loose dust and static from your LPs before each play. My apartment has been really dry and this has definitely helped with the static problems I've been having. The handle folds closed to protect the bristles. It's well worth it's $25 price.

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What Makes the AT-LP120-USB so great

It's a knockoff of the sadly discontinued Technics 1200. The fit and finish aren't quite up to the famous Technics, but that doesn't mean it's inferior. At over 20 pounds, it's pretty solid. It comes with a built-in phone amp. Which is nice since most modern receivers don't inlcude phono stages. It can be turned off if you do have a phono amp, or you choose to upgrade to one later.

The direct drive and stroboscope mean that the the LP120 will spin your LPs, 45s, or 78s at precisely the right speed, and there's no need to maintain and replace belts.

It comes with an AT95E cartridge, which is a pretty good sounding cartridge with a tracking force of 2 grams. If you want something nicer, it can easily be upgraded to the Shure M97xE. There's also antiskate, adjustable height, a target light, pitch slider, and a reverse feature.

I've already had some fun with the reverse feature listening to the backwards guitar solo in Bluebird by Electric Light Orchestra.

Deciding Against Other Options

I seriously considered the Pro-Ject Debut Carbon and the Kickstarted U-Turn Audio Orbit. I toyed with buying the Orbit until I realized there was no cue lever. So the Orbit definitely did not meet my ease of use requirement.

The main reason I ended up deciding against the Debut Carbon was price. At $450 for the turntable and a cheap phono amp I started to question if it was worth the extra $200. There was also no way I was going to ask my wife to remove the platter and move the belt each and every time she wanted to play a 45, so I was really looking at around $570 since I'd have to buy the Pro-Ject Speedbox as well. On top of that, the belt would have to be replaced from time to time.

So my extra $320 would get me about the same ease of use as the Audio Technica, better sound, and more upgradability. I ultimately decided that I'd rather spend the money on vinyl. The upgradability kind of scares me a bit because I can see myself getting sucked into a neverending money draining quest to achieve marginally better sound quality. I don't trust myself not to slide down that slippery slope.

Why not go cheaper?

The main reason not to go any cheaper is that most everything cheaper than the Audio Technica has a relatively high tracking force and way lower quality parts. There's not point in collecting vinyl if your turntable is going to damage it. Most of the turntables in this price range do not have replacable cartridges. Also, the AT-LP120-USB is one of the only sub $400 turntables that has published wow and flutter specs.

Pros

• Cheap ($233 as of the time of this writing)
• Builtin phono preamp
• Chages speeds to play LPs, 45s, or 78s with the push of a button
• Feels pretty solid (the whole unit weighs over 20 pounds)
• Comes with decent cartridge with low vertical tracking force (2 grams)
• Looks like a Technics 1200
• Maintenance free
• Let's you play records backwards

Cons

• Direct drive means vibrations from the motor are not as isolated from the record
• While it looks a lot like a Technics 1200, it's a lot more plasticy

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The Butteryfly Wallet is 3mm thin and weighs only 0.2 ounces when empty. That makes it lighter than a quarter. Since it's made of ripstop nylon, it is still durable. I used it on my trip and liked it so much that I've been carrying it ever since.

Some Amazon reviewers have complained about cards being too easy to slip out. There is a newer version that has narrower pockets to address this. That being said, I've found that this is only an issue if the wallet is held upside down, and this has not been a problem for me in the entire year I have used the old version. I imagine that it's much less of a problem in the current version.

Pros:

• Ultralight
• Superthin
• Can carry a lot of cash and cards
• Durable, still in great shape after a year of use

Cons:

• Flimsy if there isn't at least one card in each section
• Cards can slip out if the wallet is held upside down

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The Solution
After a bit of searching on the OpenELEC and XBMC forums I came across an odd solution. Changing XBMC to output in 720p instead of 1080p made the sound work. This thread on the OpenELEC forums made it seem like it was an issue with all of the 3.2.x builds of OpenELEC. Not satisfied with the 720p solution, and not wanting to have to downgrade to an early version of XBMC, I decided it was worth trying a nightly build of OpenELEC. It worked, and now I have 1080p and working digital audio to my receiver. It does mean that I have to use Gotham, the next version of XBMC, but thus far stability has not been a problem.

I've used it since it first came out. Back then, if you had a big library, album art pretty much only worked for half of your albums. Metadata, such as Play Count and Last Played, never synced between iTunes and your device. Maybe not so bad for most, but a major pain if you use Smart Playlists. Speaking of which, nested Smart Playlists are still not supported. Thankfully, the album art and the metadata sync typically work pretty well now.

Part of the problem is that Apple has not done a very good job about explaining what iTunes Match does. This compounded by the fact the some of the streaming behavior has changed multiple times. At some points it has streamed at lower bitrates when not of wifi. And originally it downloaded the track to your phone as it was played. Meaning once your iPhone got filled up with music you'd have to delete all of the music from your device and start over. Eventually, they changed this so that it only ever streams, with no option to download as you stream.

It also doesn't always match songs correctly. A particularly annoying example of this it that I have all of the Beatles Remastered Mono mixes imported into iTunes from the Mono Box Set and while the albums name still reflect that they are mono, they are most definitely the stereo mixes. Which is incredibly frustrating. Granted, the mono versions are not for sale in iTunes and I imagine that iTunes Match is probably just matching to the versions that are. Still, it should realize by the title and the file that they are not the same and upload my version.

The proverbial final straw for me, was that my wife recently signed up for iTunes match. We share the same Mac, but use different user accounts. When my wife signed up for iTunes Match under her user account with her iTunes account, mine stopped working. Apparently, you can only have one iTunes Match account linked to a device at a time. Furthermore, you can only change this once every 90 days. Which means that even though we both paid the $25, currently only my wife can use iTunes Match on our Mac. It still works on my iPhone, but it's kind of worthless if I can't use it on the Mac.

American Tobacco Campus in Durham for Google's first stop on a tour around the country to demo Project Glass. After a 45 minute wait, I, along with 9 others, was led to a table of Chromebook Pixels where I filled out a photo release form. I was pretty surprised by how laid back and how few people were inside. If they wanted it to feel relaxed, they did a pretty good job.

Two Google Employees gave an informal demo to our group. One of the employees was demonstrating Glass and the other employee held an Android tablet. The Glass display was being screencast to the Android tablet. Unfortunately, the wifi didn't seem up to the task of providing internet to all of the Glass devices, so they weren't able to demo much.  They tried to demo telling Glass that they were hungry (OK, Glass, Google I'm Hungry), telling us how it would find nearby places to eat, but the internet connection wasn't even good enough for the speech recognition to work. The third time they tried it "I'm Hungry" appeared on the screen, but it couldn't fetch any results. From that point, on they just focused on showing off the camera and video capabilities and described how the rest of the features worked.

We were then led over to a one of several stations to try Glass out for ourselves. Two more Googlers distributed the devices to us and helped anyone that was having issues fitting them and angling the screen. In the 7 minutes I had with the device, I couldn't get any internet based features to work.  There seems to be built in voice recognition to say "Google", "Take a picture", "Get directions to", but once it prompts you for the what or where it seemed to be stuck trying to upload the request to Google voice recognition servers. I was able to look through the feed which had a few CNN articles, but the articles wouldn't load either. That being said, another person in my group told me that one of their searches actually worked enough for them to be able to see some results.

I was very impressed with the quality of the display, and the laid back atmosphere, but it was pretty disappointing that wifi issues prevented me from being able to properly demo Glass. I have no idea if this was an issue all day, but it was the whole time I was there.

The Flirc I ordered came in today. You can order one for yourself from Amazon (affiliate link). Which is good, because I think my wife was getting pretty tired of using her iPhone to control the TV. I have an extra Apple Remote, which is what we've controlled XBMC with since 2008 when I bought my first Mac Mini. I was hoping that I could set it up to work the same way it did with XBMC on the jailbroken AppleTV and the Mac Mini.

I opened it up, and plugged it into front of my Intel NUC. Flirc has a plugin for XBMC that you can use to learn your remote. Conveniently, there is an Flirc repository so all I had to do was add http://xbmc.flirc.tv as a source in XBMC and then it was simply a matter of navigating to the addons section and installing it. The plugin was pretty straight forward and had me press the up, down, left, right, select, and back buttons. And it worked. I could control XBMC. However, long key presses weren't working at all. And the controls during playback did not work the same as with the Apple TV and Mac.

To make long presses work, I had to get the beta firmware, which meant installing the software on my Mac. I plugged in the Flirc and opened the application. It automatically prompted me to update the firmware which only took about 30 seconds. Once it was done I plugged it back into the Intel NUC in my living room.  I did not have to relearn the remote. Now I could hold down the buttons and easily scroll through all of my content. Unfortunately, a long keypress and a short keypress are still mapped to the same keyboard key so it wasn't going to work exactly like it did on the Apple TV.

Since Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) is always an issue in the sorts of things, I wanted to make it as close as possible. She only needs to pick something to watch, play/pause, and stop playback so not being able to pull up the context menu isn't really an issue. The best solution I could come up with was to edit the keymap.xml in XBMC. I kept the default keys that Flirc mapped (the arrow keys, enter, and escape) and changed their actions in the FullscreenVideo context. All you need to do is download this file and save it in your XBMC userdata directory as keyboard.xml. You'll have to restart XBMC after making any changes to the keymap for them to go into effect.

I'm probably going to change the escape key to Stop so that anybody in the house doesn't get confused by the OSD. I can always bring it up with another remote or my iPhone. You can see the two lines I changed below.

<FullscreenVideo>  
    ...
    <enter>Pause</enter>
    <escape>OSD<escape>
    ...
</FullscreenVideo>  

First Contact: Or, It’s Later Than You Think by Evan Mandery

Combine humor and style of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Woody Allen, and Monty Python and you’ve got this book. Aliens make contact with Earth and the President of the United States, who happens to be not entirely unlike George W. Bush, manages to bungle things quite a bit. In the process, forever changing the life of his attaché. Go ahead and pick up a copy. Remember, it’s later than you think.

In the bestselling and rightfully cult-inspiring tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams comes First Contact—an hysterically funny satire about Presidential politics and intergalactic misunderstanding. This smart and biting novel by Evan Mandery—an author equally well-versed in the lives of the U.S. presidents, existential philosophy, and the Simpsons—offers much food for intellectual thought along with an all-you-can-eat buffet of laughs, as it chronicles the first close encounters between earthlings and a vastly superior extraterrestrial race from Rigel-Rigel. As the subtitle of First Contact so presciently informs us, “It’s Later than You Think.”

First Contact: Or, It’s Later Than You Think by Evan Mandery

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

There’s a reviewer on Goodreads that described this book as “a giant one man show where every character is played by Zaphod Beeblebrox”, and I think that sums The Sheriff of Yrnameer up nicely. This one starts out a bit slow, but bear with it and you’ll be reading with a smile on your face. You’ll like this book if you enjoyed reading Zaphod Plays it Safe, and you were sad when Firefly cancelled.

In the spirit of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, The Sheriff of Yrnameer is sci-fi comedy at its best—mordant, raucously funny, and a thrilling page-turner. Meet Cole: hapless space rogue and part-time smuggler. His sidekick just stole his girlfriend. The galaxy’s most hideous and feared bounty hunter wants to lay eggs in his brain. And the luxury space yacht Cole just hijacked turns out to be filled with interstellar do-gooders, one especially loathsome stowaway, and a cargo of freeze-dried orphans. Cole gathers a misfit crew for a desperate journey to the far reaches of the galaxy: the mysterious world of Yrnameer, the very last of the “your-name-heres”—planets without corporate sponsors. But little does Cole suspect that this legendary utopia is home to a band of outlaws bent on destroying the planet’s tiny, peaceful community.

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

If you know any other books in the same vein as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy please let me know about them in the comments.

• Intel NUC (Celeron, i3, i5)
• Memory
• USB drive or mSATA SSD
• USB drive for OpenELEC installer
• USB keyboard for setup
• Wireless card (optional)
• Mickey Mouse Cable

Installing the Hardware

To open up the NUC flip it upside down and remove the four screws. Then lift off the bottom. Since I’m using a USB thumb drive for storage, the only thing I need to install is the RAM. If you are installing a wireless card it goes in the PCI Express slot closest to the board. If you have an mSATA SSD, it goes in the other PCI Express slot. I installed on 4GB stick of RAM and then screwed the bottom back onto the case.

Setting up the Software

First you need to make the OpenELEC installer. Download the latest OpenELEC Stable – Intel x86_64 from here.

To make the installer from Windows, insert the USB drive you want to use for the OpenELEC installer. Unzip the file you just downloaded and run create_livestick.bat or create_livestick.exe. Enter the USB drive letter. You may be prompted to allow the program to make changes to your computer. Once it finishes safely room the USB drive.

To make the installer from Mac OS, insert the USB drive you want to use for the OpenELEC installer. Unzip the file you just downloaded and open Terminal. Run the following commands and follow the on screen instructions.

cd ~/Downloads/OpenELEC*  
sudo ./create_livestick_osx  

To make the installer from Linux, insert the USB drive you want to use for the OpenELEC installer, run the following commands, and then follow the onscreen instructions.

# find your USB device
sudo fdisk -l

cd ~/Downloads/OpenELEC*

# replace device with your USB device
sudo ./create_livestick [device]  

Installing

Hook the NUC up to your television. Connect your USB OpenELEC installer drive. If your NUC doesn’t have an mSATA SSD connect the USB drive that will be running OpenELEC. You’ll need a keyboard plugged in during setup. Now press the power button. The installer should start automatically. If it doesn’t start on it’s own the power cycle the NUC, and press F10 as soon as you see the BIOS screen. This will let you tell the computer to boot from the OpenELEC installer drive. Choose Quick Install and then select the drive you want to install OpenELEC on. It may take a few minutes. When it’s done, you will get kicked back to the menu. Choose reboot and then remove your installer USB drive.

Intel Inside

Intel didn’t see fit to include the needed mickey mouse power cable, but they did decide to make a box that play the Intel Inside sound when you slide it open. You’ll see the sensor if you look at the bottom right corner of the picture below.

Connectivity

The Intel NUC DCCP847DYE has one USB 2.0 port on the front and two more on the back.

In addition to the USB ports, the back of the NUC has a Kensington security slot, gigabit ethernet port, and two HDMI 1.4a ports.

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