A long time ago, I bought myself an internet radio.
For most of its life it was a toy, a curiosity, but since we moved to the rural north east of Victoria, it became a rather more serious device.
Being rural, there is of course no DAB, Radio National is on crackly AM, and ABC Newsradio is nowhere to be found, So the Internet radio came into its own to give us access to a wider range of stations that the local FM stations.
And then a couple of weeks ago it died. Gently. I noticed that the standby display was getting progressively dimmer, and then it died.
I suspect something like a blown capacitor, but there it was - from useful device to piece of junk in forty minutes.
So I bought us another one.
Which was more difficult than you would think. Most of the local big box stores claim to have them, but they don't, they're inevitably on back order. And while they may be rebadged as something else most of them seem to be the same as Ocean digital internet radios from Hong Kong - so, as they have an online store I bought direct.
It took about 10 days to arrive, but plugged in and configured it just worked. A little quieter than the old Asus, but with a very similar menu system - in fact the only major change to the software I can see is that it honours ntp, the internet time protocol which the old one didn't - otherwise the user experience is much the same.
Physically, it's wifi only - no wired socket, which makes sense given that most people have wifi everywhere at home - we're just odd in having a bit of physical ethernet between our internet router and a little unmanaged switch in the lounge room - it's how the old one was connected and how our internet tv service is connected, but the wifi is fast enough so we don't really have a problem.
And as for a range of stations?
Ocean claim more than 23,000 - we've tried exactly three, all ABC, but doubtless we'll expand in time to add a few decent jazz and classical music stations ....
For most of its life it was a toy, a curiosity, but since we moved to the rural north east of Victoria, it became a rather more serious device.
Being rural, there is of course no DAB, Radio National is on crackly AM, and ABC Newsradio is nowhere to be found, So the Internet radio came into its own to give us access to a wider range of stations that the local FM stations.
And then a couple of weeks ago it died. Gently. I noticed that the standby display was getting progressively dimmer, and then it died.
I suspect something like a blown capacitor, but there it was - from useful device to piece of junk in forty minutes.
So I bought us another one.
Which was more difficult than you would think. Most of the local big box stores claim to have them, but they don't, they're inevitably on back order. And while they may be rebadged as something else most of them seem to be the same as Ocean digital internet radios from Hong Kong - so, as they have an online store I bought direct.
It took about 10 days to arrive, but plugged in and configured it just worked. A little quieter than the old Asus, but with a very similar menu system - in fact the only major change to the software I can see is that it honours ntp, the internet time protocol which the old one didn't - otherwise the user experience is much the same.
Physically, it's wifi only - no wired socket, which makes sense given that most people have wifi everywhere at home - we're just odd in having a bit of physical ethernet between our internet router and a little unmanaged switch in the lounge room - it's how the old one was connected and how our internet tv service is connected, but the wifi is fast enough so we don't really have a problem.
And as for a range of stations?
Ocean claim more than 23,000 - we've tried exactly three, all ABC, but doubtless we'll expand in time to add a few decent jazz and classical music stations ....
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