New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

Keeping Mobile

Ally and I are going to be in Peru for six months next year. We want to be pretty mobile so that means two things: we need to take a minimum of stuff, and what we do take should be as small and light as possible. By “minimum” I mean that we should only take down what we can’t find there easily. Electronics tend to be insanely marked up in foreign countries over what we pay in the US, due to duties and such, so it makes sense to take those with us.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about electronics lately. Backup hardware, backup hard drives, encryption in case anything is stolen, etc. I’ll power or charge everything on USB that I can, because USB bricks are easy to find and not too expensive. I have little retractable cables for charging my iPod, PSP, DS, and phone using USB. We’re also taking my friend Joel’s Wii down because it’s so portable, and using a USB video capture card to use a notebook computer screen in place of the TV. All of this plus three notebook computers (one for her, one for me, one for a backup) and a couple cameras should all fit within a small backpack.

Now, the three computers sure sounds like overkill but I want to get paid while I’m down there! I need to make sure I have a backup computer to work on if anything goes wrong with my old Vaio. And I already have a Band-Aid keeping it together right now. Plus, the third notebook is something I happen to have laying around from years ago that I currently just use for hosting Firefly and Bittorrent.

But anyway, back to Peru. Who can go without music playing while they’re working?? Earphones get tiring after a while and it’s no fun when Wii-boxing! Ally’s computer has better speakers than mine, but they’re still too tiny to sound decent.

The BlackBox Mini

Well, I just got a fantastic toy in the mail today that I want to recommend because I’m a little in love with it. Even caused me to want to write a blog post about it. It’s the GEAR4 BlackBox Mini. I had to import it from the UK using Expansys, which took a while, but it was worth the wait. I forget where I got the recommendation, but I did a bunch of research on Google before settling on this guy.

The BlackBox Mini is a little stereo speaker box that looks like a really big black shiny stick of butter. Each speaker is at one end of the stick, which gives pretty good stereo audio separation. It’s powered by either 4 AA’s or USB, and it runs on either Bluetooth using A2DP or a direct minijack plugin if you want to run it on your iPod or whatever. It gets plenty loud either way you power it.

Getting it to work with Vista was pretty easy. Vista only initially saw it as a mono audio device, claiming it couldn’t find the right drivers for audio. But when I went to the device manager and manually told it to auto-update the drivers for the unknown Bluetooth devices, it magically found them and everything worked. Weird, but whatever.

Now, I don’t want to set it as the default system output device but lots of apps (like Winamp) let you choose a specific output device, which works great. I have to stress that the audio quality is truly excellent for something of this size. An order of magnitude better than our little built-in notebook speakers or any of the battery-powered portable speakers I’ve used in the past. This thing could do pretty well even at house parties. It sounds far bigger than it is.

The BlackBox Mini even comes with a nice little carrying case. It’s a bit stretchy, which is great because you can pack the little minijack cable and the USB cable in there easily. I also tore out the three pages of the manual that I might need one day and stuck it in the case too.

This thing will be great for car camping, staying at a cabin, or renting apartments in Peru. We don’t have any room to bring real speakers with us, and our notebooks have (relative) crap for speakers. But I really like what BlackBox has been making. Lots of power in a small package!

As I write this, I noticed that they just came out with a Micro version for half the price. This looks a little too small for me: no stereo, apparently, although it may have better bass than the Mini. I prefer stereo over bass. Although the price is something I would have definitely considered. The Mini set me back $75 unfortunately, which is pretty high.

But overall, a huge thumbs up. I’m excited to use this thing down there!