Digital

The first conversion to digital was CD to MP3. It would be about 8 years ago now that I converted 600 odd CDs to MP3, prompted by the arrival of my first iPod. Since then the purchasing of CDs has slowly dried up to nothing. The last CD I purchased would have been Paul Kelly’s Stolen Apples, and that was in 2007.

It wasn’t long after MP3 that I began to torrent television shows from overseas (starting with Lost and Life on Mars). Initially I’d download the show and convert them to DVDs to watch. Then we bought a DVD player with DivX capabilities so we’d download and convert to DivX, which saved a bundle on discs (this was before we had a DVD RW burner). A couple of years ago a PC came free and, using Windows Media Centre, I turned it in to a media PC. It is now networked and has two TV tuners and it’s how we watch our television and movies. We have 115 movies on it at the moment and years worth of television series. It’s also my project over the next year or so to upgrade the PC and the amp to allow for surround sound when watching telly.

Now I’ve made the next move to digital entertainment,, I”ve bought a Kindle. I’ve only had it for a week but I can see it will be the same seismic shift. It’s so easy to use, and so convenient. I’m reading Alice In Wonderland to Bert from it and it’s great to pick it up and start exactly from where we left off. Ren bought one at the same time as me and she’s already toting over 250 books around with her. And the books are cheap, massively cheaper than the paperback versions, even when buying from Book Depository. I’m sure there will be some books I continue to buy, it’s really only suited to text books and anything with images just wouldn’t work, but for a straight forward read of a novel it’s superb.

So music, movies and now books. If they could just figure out a way to digitise caffeine I’d be in heaven.