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Multi-room audio with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and Volumio

New #blog post! Multi-room audio with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and Volumio

After my kitchen stereo project, I’d been thinking about the next stage in my multi-room, RaspberryPi-based audio setup:

The Living Room!

I had, in a box, unused for probably ten years, an old NAD C272 stereo amplifier. A pair of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers were gathering dust down in the basement that used to belong to Deb’s father. Those drivers had many years of jazz driven through them.…

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HiFiBerry Amp 2, Vintage Koss Speakers and Volumio

I’ve been a Sonos user for probably five years now. Initially, they were something of a marvel of integration and software polish, providing ease of setup and room filling sound for … they are not cheap. Their closed ecosystem was another sour note for me, but I pushed past that in favor of convenience.

The past year or so, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the Sonos platform. Their recent…

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Book 4 Update, June 2018

Hi.

Sorry it’s been awhile. I have some Good News:

NEW PROVIDENCE BOOK 4 IS ALMOST DONE!

No, really. I mean it.

I might even have a catchy title for it.

I’ve been working on this thing for a year now and it’s finally wrapping up. It is still in draft form. I still have to do one final pass and some rework, but it is approaching completion. I can feel it.

This is a big, complicated book, with a…

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L.S.G. Rendezvous in Outer Space

L.S.G. - Rendezvous in Outer Space

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My Favorite Albums of 2017

My Favorite Albums of 2017 #bestof #lists #blog

Hey, it’s still the first week in January. That means there’s still time for me to pontificate on my favorite listens of last year. I’ll include the list at the end, with links to the album or artist’s Bandcamp site where possible. Another unexpected delight this year: I found myself buying more music from that service than just about every other. As always, buy the album if you can. 2017 was a…

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Scrivener 3: Compile Formatting for Ebook and Print

Scrivener 3: Compile Formatting for Ebook and Print on robcee.net

It’s been 2 weeks since the arrival of Scrivener 3, and I am pleased to report that so far, it has been an absolute pleasure to use. No crashes, no real surprises. It is a very solid release, so kudos and thank you to the team. I’ve had an item on my todo list for the past six months or so: Produce paperback editions of my books. That doesn’t sound particularly onerous, but previously, the one…

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Scrivener 3

Scrivener 3 sneak peek and some cautionary words for early adopters.

With much fanfare and a website overhaul, Scrivener 3 was released to the world yesterday, November 20th, 2017. It’s a big update, and you should really read the manual (RTFM!) before committing to it. If you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo and cranking on words, I’d recommend holding off until December. OR, if you’re like me, you can just install it and dive right in. I have a few things to watch…

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Interview: Freefall author Felix R. Savage

Interview with Freefall author Felix R. Savage on my #blog #scifi #writing

Today I have with me science fiction author, Felix R. Savage who generously agreed to sit down with me for a virtual interview. I recently read through Freefall, the first book in your Earth’s Last Gambit Series, and came away with a bunch of questions. I was hoping you’d share some of your secrets with me and my readers. To begin, a couple of words about the book: This is a hard scifi…

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Furtive Announcement

Furtive Announcement, progress report. #scifi #blog #writing

Hello. I’m afraid I don’t know how much time we have, so I must be brief. There’s a new science fiction anthology out, called Explorations: War. It’s a collection of stories set in the same shared universe as the Explorations: First Contact anthology. I think it’s pretty keen, and that’s not just because I’m one of the authors. It’s also on sale for only 99¢ for the next week or so, which is…

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Book 4 Progress Report, Puppo Edition

Book 4 Progress Report, Puppo Edition #blog #amwriting

I have a couple of blog posts percolating, chiefly my next Scrivener Howto, but brain time is presently very precious. I have started work on Book 4, albeit a few days behind. We have a new dog, Zeke, who demands a lot of attention. And that’s is all right by me. We’re learning to cope with teething and people have been great with suggestions. Ice cubes are a favorite. His chicken stuffy is…

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We Just Identified More Than 200 New (Potential) Planets

The Kepler space telescope is our first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars. On Monday, June 19, 2017, scientists from many countries gathered at our Ames Research Center to talk about the latest results from the spacecraft, which include the identification of more than 200 potential new worlds! Here’s what you need to know:

We found 219 new planet candidates.

All of these worlds were found in a patch of sky near the Cygnus constellation in our Milky Way galaxy. Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler searched more than 200,000 stars in the region for orbiting planets. The 219 new planet candidates are part of the more than 4,000 planet candidates and 2,300 confirmed planets Kepler has identified to date.

Ten of these worlds are like our own.

Out of the 219 new planet candidates, 10 are possibly rocky, terrestrial worlds and orbit their star in the habitable zone – the range of distances from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

Small planets come in two sizes.

Kepler has opened up our eyes to the existence of many small worlds. It turns out a lot of these planets are either approximately 1.5 times the size of Earth or just smaller than Neptune. The cool names given to planets of these sizes? Super Earths and mini-Neptunes.

Some of the new planets could be habitable. 

Water is a key ingredient to life as we know it. Many of the new planet candidates are likely to have small rocky cores enveloped by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and some are thought to be ocean worlds. That doesn’t necessarily mean the oceans of these planets are full of water, but we can dream, can’t we?

Other Earths are out there.

Kepler’s survey has made it possible for us to measure the number of Earth-size habitable zone planets in our galaxy. Determining how many planets like our own that exist is the big question we’ll explore next.

The hunt for new planets continues.

Kepler continues to search for planets in different regions of space. With the launch of our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018, we’re going to search for planets nearest the sun and measure the composition of their atmospheres. In the mid-2020s, we have our sights on taking a picture of small planets like Earth with our Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

*All images of planets are artist illustrations.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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Writing with Scrivener Part 1

Writing with Scrivener Part 1, #amwriting on my #blog

Or, how I stopped pantsing and got down with outlining. This week, I’m going to start the first in a series of posts about Scrivener, an invaluable tool for writing fiction. Maybe you’ve wanted to try or have done National Novel Writing Month and wanted to up your game. Maybe you write novels or screenplays and have heard about this great piece of software writerly types talk about. Or, maybe…

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Audirvana 3

Audirvana 3 Review. Replacing iTunes one year later. #audio #computer #software #blog

Last year, around this time, I was about a month into my iTunes replacement experiment with Audirvana+. I still get a lot of hits on those articles, so I thought it was time for a follow-up on how that’s going. That is especially relevant now that Audirvana has reached the shiny 3.0 milestone, with a whole new rendering engine and MQA support. First up, a link to the Audirvana product page for…

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Seedfall Released!

Seedfall Released, blog post edition. #kindle #scifi #ebook

Broadcasting on all channels: Seedfall aka Book 3 is out now, and ready for immediate installation on your preferred reading device. It went live at 11:30 local time last night after spending the day wandering through the data centers. It is priced at $4.99 in the US and Canada, €4.49 in the Eurozone, £3.99 in the UK, $3.99 in Australia/NZ. Free to read with Kindle Unlimited. The current…

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Trajectory Book 1 reaches v3.0!

Today I put the finishing touches on a new set of edits for Trajectory Book 1 and sent it forth into the cloud. This is probably the biggest update since v2.0, which was itself a fairly major milestone in the book’s existence. I can say with total certainty that today it’s a better book than it was when I released it back in November of 2015. The incomparable Scarlett R. Algee did her thing and…

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Book 3 Cover Update

Book 3 Cover Update, #blog #scifi #ebook

(View featured image, Sol 1381 Panorama full size on flickr) Ok, yesterday’s “cover tease” post was pretty light on details. I probably could have added some content but I was in a hurry and wanted to post something. It was time. Anyway, long-time pal and internet funny guy, @dolske guessed that the image was constructed from a series of NASA Opportunity Rover images. Specifically, it was…

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Cover Tease

New #blog post. Cover Tease, New Providence Series Book 3 #scifi #ebook

I have a cover for the New Providence Series Book 3. All the edits are back. It is ready to go. Official release will be on May 18th, 2017. During the run-up, I will have some discounts on Trajectory Book 1 and Trajectory Book 2 and a couple of other items of interest. Watch this space and sign up for my newsletter for the inside scoop!