When I started this blog six months ago talking about chips, Birmingham and recently purchased books, I was really excited about everything I was going to post about. In May I had so many ideas for blog posts I filled a month and a half of my Google calendar with them, if I posted one every day. But like so many blogs, it’s gone quiet, and I could have done with some tumbleweed.

The year has flown by, and sitting here in that week between Christmas and New Years I’ve been thinking about 2008 and some new years resolutions. Here’s a few, and I’ll come back in a years time and see how I’m doing.

• Learn more about Photoshop. I really like Photoshop and use it almost every day. However, I know there’s so much I’ve not yet discovered. Two sites I plan to spend more time on are Radiant Vista and PSDTuts. The level of quality and professionalism in the video tutorials at Radiant Vista is phenomenal, and PSDTuts has been a great site for experimenting with Photoshop in downtime.
• Audit everything. I’m not Robert Scoble, and sure don’t need to be subscribed to as many feeds as he is. Last night I cleaned out my GMail inbox so I’m now down to 1 unread email (next on the list is starred and drafts). I probably don’t need three operating systems on the laptop (especially as I use XP and Ubuntu for only 2-3% of the time). Do I need so many accounts all over the place? Can I bring my to-do lists (in Tadalist) and planning (in GoPlan) and contact management (in Outlook) together, online? I haven’t updated Twitter in 123 days… do I need to use it? Does it need to be on the side of this blog?
• Do more learning. I’d really like to get into Ruby on Rails, and perhaps build a tiny project with it. It’d be nice to find time to read more of the paper, watch more decent programmes on Television and listen to more World Service and NPR.

A less serious resolution is to finally build a HTPC. Oh, and stop procrastinating over a portable music player. (That’s actually a good post for tomorrow). I’ve been playing with 43 Things (a site where you can list goals, have a public profile and set yourself reminders via email). Time to start adding to that list…

Outfit Mode has a really nice use of music on their site, playing Wonderwoman by Leaf - currently number ten in the Dutch Top 40. It’s a really nice design, which the song sort of compliments.

Last week Aldi had a £50 internet radio and media player on offer. I’ve been looking at a Squeezebox for a while, but that still requires an amplifier of some sort, and it’d be redundant if and when I sorted out a media centre in the main room. Plus it’d be nice to wake up to stations all over the country, even world.

I’ve bought a Tevion product before - a digital radio in July. I keep meaning to finish the review of that, but it’s been brilliant so far. This internet radio uses the same design, and the software is similar. The main difference is the lack of a battery compartment, and it only does FM radio - not DAB. That’s a shame, but it’s easy to see why. I’ll cover the hardware, the Reciva service, listening to stations (and on demand, which is brilliant), adding streams and podcasts and playing your music collection.

The Hardware

On the way out of the store I had a peek in the box - it looked like it had been opened before. Getting home confirmed that, but it was a dream to set up. It feels heavy and well built, and I assume the antenna is for FM radio rather than wifi. There’s not a lot going on in the box - just the radio, the power adaptor, the manual and packing material.

There’s some little rubber feet, and it feels sturdy when you use it. Earlier in the year I looked at a few internet radios and they shot across the surface when you tried to press a button. Not so with this Tevion model. The buttons are a little clunky and you don’t always get a response.

The speakers / overall sound is very average, but no different from my clock radio which this is replacing. Fine for kitchen/bedroom environments.

Switching on the first time

On turning it on there’s an FM radio, which is simple enough. It defaulted to 108.00FM, and going down a few steps to Durham FM confirmed it was working fine.

On pressing the IR button, it’ll switch to internet radio, search for networks and come back with a list. I confirmed the network, then put in the WEP key. After a little while it changed to ‘Network OK’. On pressing select you can go down the stations menu, at which time it connects to the Reciva service to download a list of stations.

This was suprisingly quick. You can then browse by Genre or Country. The selection is impressive, and I’ve not yet not been able to find a station I listen to missing.

Reciva

What’s been really interesting is the Reciva service. Reciva supplies the database of stations, an area for users to login and add streams, favourite stations and podcasts and the actual brains of the radio to the manufacturer. I signed up to Reciva last night and set up some stations and podcasts, and then followed the manual to get the registration code and serial number from the radio.

Add this to the members area on the Reciva site, power off the radio at the wall and back on (to force the radio to download a list of stations again) and the information is automatically pulled down. Once this was done I played a few stations and streams with no problem, and was especially impressed with the podcasts feature. I download a lot of daily news podcasts and never listen to them - this could be really good to go to bed to, especially as you don’t need to download them locally first - the radio picks them up from Reciva and just starts playing them.

Listening to Stations

Tuning into stations is really easy to do. Just press select, choose Genre or Country and keep going until you find a station. Connection is almost instantaneous on some stations, but buffering for 10-15 seconds isn’t uncommon. I listened for a few hours today and didn’t have any stations buffering once the stream started.

On the BBC stations you get an option of Real, WMA and On Demand. Selecting On Demand comes back with a list of programmes available for listen again, and even more impressive is that you can pause them with the play/pause/stop/forward/back buttons. When you select a programme you can even specify the start time, which is a nice touch. These programmes sound about the same as anything else through the speakers.

Listening to a Music Library

The documentation for setting this up is pretty decent. I had some troubles to start with owing to an old LAN configuration, but passed that and through UPnP I was listening to all sorts of music I forgot I had on various hard drives.

Conclusion

This is a brilliant bit of kit. It’s really excited me about what radio can be with the internet, partly for the convenience of listening to podcasts almost as easily as Radio 4 live. I’ve not really found a breakfast show on local DAB or FM that I like waking up to, so am thinking of tuning into a random station every night and letting the radio wake me up at 6am with the internet radio option.

What would really make it brilliant is the ability to set up alarms with a station (say, weekdays, choose Original 106 at 7am, Saturday choose BBC Radio 2 at 6am and Sunday choose Einslive at 8am). I find the internet radio slow to start at times - I understand other models with the Reciva software are much quicker. Overall, I think it’s well worth the £50.

I’ve been using the radio for about a week now, and am still impressed. For a few days it wouldn’t connect to the Wireless network on its own, but this seems to have cleared and it’s now great. Some stations buffer a fair bit, which is annoying, but some not at all. The main drawback is still the slow startup time, but I’d consider a Reciva radio again in the future.