johan's Profile

I think the demographic probably reflects more who are the most frequent airplane travellers; I'd imagine that by far the most sold items in skymall are small neat solutions -- like the pet carrier oleenyc123 bought.

There's no question that if all you want is to play one source in one place, you can find much cheaper solutions. But if you want multiple zones that can play the same or different inputs, sonos is by far the best solution.

Sonos' big value added over itunes, slingbox, or do-it-yourself systems is that it gives you painless setup, centralized control over the whole house, and perfect synchronization between zones.

The last may be the most important. If you have a bigger room, you might have two zones set up in it so that you don't have to blast the music from just one set of speakers. If the zones are out of sync, even just a little, it will sound horrible.

However, sonos have sort of been resting on their laurels, and I'm not sure I'd buy their stock, as much as I like their [current] products. They have no solution for either streaming video, multi-channel audio, or even audio at better than cd quality.

Just out of college, the local bar got one of these. We had plenty of fun carbonating both the well booze and the wine list.

There are several facets interacting here.

1. quality of the digital stream. If you're playing mp3s or aac or some other compressed version, spending money on a DAC won't hurt, but probably won't help.

2. DACs output line-level signals, so you'll need to hook it into an amp before your speakers.

3. Speaking of speakers. If you want to improve the quality of your sound, this is where $600 can really help out. The difference between good speakers and bad speakers is /much/ bigger than between a good DAC and a bad one: just like there is a difference between a good amp and a bad one, but you need everything else to be pretty good before that difference is noticable.

I like the idea of orange, but a muted / pale version. Call it a light terracotta, maybe. Basically, the complement of the lightest green shade.

fox? Aren't they related to fox news?

Yeah, I second what i4got said.

Friends of ours have a kitchen with a commercial fridge, and while it works great, it never stops running. Home appliances are easier on the ears as well as the utility bill.

Personally, I can't stand neighborhood preservation organisations OR developers who build to sell (as opposed to building per the new owner's spec), so I'm happy both parties got shafted here.

http://www.uni-a.com/news_wallpaper.html

Over-reducing a stock is by no means a "start-over" mistake. Just add water to get back to the amount you need. You can do this later as well. Whenever I make stock, I like to reduce it quite a bit, just so that when I store it in the freezer, it doesn't take up so much room.

I don't go all the way to demi-glace, but I do like to reduce it past what you'd want for a soup. I imagine if you completely let it dry out, you might end up scorching it and ruining the flavor, but if you just end up with 1/2 as much as you were hoping for, that's well within what you can just dilute back to whatever amount you need.

You just need to remember that it's pretty reduced, so that you add water to whatever you use it with, unless you want a super-concentrated flavor (I normally do, for pan sauces).

I freeze it in icecube sized chunks (I tend to let it cool enough to congeal, and then just scoop out large tablespoon mounds onto a non-stick mat in the freezer, rather than use an ice-cube tray, but both should work).