The Car of the Future

I read an article in Network World about the car of the future and the networking technology that will improve things like navigation and mobile entertainment. What bothered me is that nowhere was there any mention of terrestrial FM or AM radio. In this particular article, satellite radio provides the delivery of mobile data and content services, while WiFi is used to download even more data from the Internet at wireless hotspots or from household networks. It seems the source of information for this article has not heard about the new digital terrestrial radio services that are coming online all around the country and the new data streams this technology will enable. In any case, the radio industry is going to have to get the word out about digital radio soon or we may be left out of the future of mobile entertainment.

Network Testing

I found some information and free software for network testing at http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/. The Iperf program is also available for handheld computers running Familiar Linux. Gives me an idea for testing network bandwidth and other parameters, especially important since more and more stuff is getting transported over IP these days.

Surround sound on radio

While researching ways to create surround content, I came across a very useful program called BeSweet which allows you to encode multiple sound files into a variety of multichannel formats. I can't wait to tinker with it. Combine multichannel audio files with a technology like Axia Livewire and you can send discrete uncompressed multichannel sound all over the place.

Free test audio files available here