... is a headless home server. Something I could pack away in a closet and keep runnning 24/7, which would serve music, video, and other media at LAN speeds without me having to wake up a desktop or some other machine (with a display) that would suck up considerably more kWh. I even posted on this a few days before the Power Mac G4 Cube came out, almost three years ago:
And now that Apple has created many applications that make such a home server a very tasty addition to any power computer user's repertoire, including iTunes streaming and such video capabilities as I once also wished for (and have since received), like the one I link immediately below, such a device makes even more sense now than it did three years ago:
One thing that I haven't heard about anyone working on (and which I also want very much) is a Wi-Fi enabled car stereo player. Yes, you read that right. The ideal would be a car stereo player with a simple friggin' 1/8" stereo input jack on the front so I can plug my iPod into it, but all of the car stereo makers seem intent on making me buy their own substandard gear instead, so lacking that simplest of options I want to instead be able to park in my driveway and then manage the content on my car's car stereo from a computer inside the house. That's right, let it run off the huge battery under the hood and let me download music to it at 54 Mbps (or better yet FireWireless when that finally makes it to market).
One other piece of the puzzle that is coming later this year, I suspect, would be an iPod cradle that plugs right into the stereo, and which could also act as a node on a wireless network. And yes, I wished for that more than two years ago, too ("iStereo", here):
And something similar to item 3 from that flap, in a development that I musta missed somehow, was developed in 1985 by a certain individual named ... Wozniak. A reference on his home page to the CL-9 company he founded points here:
Interesting. Which isn't to say that it couldn't be done again today, this time using Rendezvous and 802.11 a/b/g rather than the usual infrared. I described some other applications for such a device here:
And another thing, I still want the Wi-Fi speakers I referred to in my previous post here. Preferably self-powered, because it'd hardly be worth it to put Wi-Fi into a pair of cheap unpowered speakers, thereby at least doubling their price. Because I want to be able to listen to my music from anywhere in the house.
But I'm really here to talk about the server that would make all of this go 24/7, most specifically because I've gotten quite interested in old notebooks lately, which can be used with a Wi-Fi PC Card for such purposes as text editing anywhere in the house, and which could also be used as MP3 players and for other web-capable purposes in a pinch (within limits, since they can be pretty slow in loading modern web pages, even with a broadband data pipe). And I just wanna be able to drop one of the documents I create or edit onto a server, from bed if necessary. 'Cause I get a lot of ideas in bed, and would love to be able to drop them into a common e-mail (or more problematically, a file) system whenever and from wherever I want. And I can't do that without a server.
So, here's what I want. First of all, I want it to be cheap. It doesn't have to be fast, either. Maybe a 600 MHz G3 would suffice, with a big enough disk to get me started, and the capability for more (external) disk space to be added later, perhaps via FireWire. It should be very power-efficient, in large part because I don't want it running up my energy bill. And as such it shouldn't need a fan, just the same convective cooling used by the G3 iMac I'm typing on right now. Gimme one of these babies, with Wi-Fi installed, for $400 without the Wi-Fi card (about 60% of the current price for an 80 GB Snap Server 1100), or $500 with the Wi-Fi card, and I would buy one in a heartbeat.
Go wild, Apple, and make the whole constellation. Because sooner or later, someone else is going to do it first.
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