Welcome to my blog "My Digital Life"

Hello and welcome to my blog My Digital Life!

The purpose of this blog is primarily to share my own experiences with various gadgets and describe how I have organized "My Digital Life" in a smart and simple way, while it meets the needs here in our home, in terms of subjects like images, media center, "Intelligent Home", sports activity and general lifestyle. The target audience for this blog is everyone who wants to know more about how you can arrange your life in an EASY, SIMPLE, SMART and AUTOMATIC way using digital means - without necessarily compromising on quality... 

The content will be presented in an easy way, so if you are completely new to the digital lifestyle, feel free to read along. Hopefully you will get some tips on how to get started without the need of more advance IT skills. Hopefully you will expand your horizon and learn a bit about how you can (read: how we have) embraced the digital lifestyle.

The motivation for this blog is that I often have found myself searching the internet to find help for a specific piece of software, or find a review of a gadget, or something like that. Now I will give back the experience I have made (and future experiences) to the online community. I am not in any way affiliated with the companies mentioned on this blog - I have chosen to describe these things because they help me to organize my digital life and meet the wishes and preferences we have in our household.

Well, who am I then? And what preferences do I have to My Digital Life? I am a 27-year old educated engineer, and while many may think that we eat binary numbers for breakfast, differentiate for fun and only speaks C +, I do prefer a simple setup with a straightforward and user friendly interface. One of the success criteria for how I arrange my digital life is that my girlfriend can (and - equally important – are willing) to take advantage of the many benefits of embracing the digital age in full.

What then is the goal of my digital life? I will make a comparison with a car. Today's cars have become so sophisticated and have multiple support systems (like ABS, ESP, GPS, power steering, etc.). Y ou do not notice all these underlying systems in everyday life, but they are key aspect in helping the driver to accomplish what really is the most important, namely to drive the car. Similarly, I have tried to use technology to help us focus on the content rather than the underlying and surrounding systems. And if an accident occurs, today's cars are also extremely safe (e.g. including Airbacks) and designed to minimize the consequences of accidents. Similarly, in our household we also have underlying systems that constantly ensures that our digital life are synchronized and backed up, in order to minimize the effects of accidents and prevent data loss. The idea here is that one should not pay attention to these systems, they should just work automatically so that you can focus on what is important for you, while knowing you knowing that your data is safe. The idea behind the digital life is that everyone should be able to utililize the benefits as easily as they would get behind the wheel of a car and drive away. Stated briefly: the goal of my digital life is to increase the quality of life by using technology, so we can focus on the things that have the most value to us.

Throughout this blog I will be talking about the following subjects (among others):

* Sonos: a wireless high quality music system throughout the home (more info can be found on Sonos's own website).

* EAC: How can we digitize our CD's and automatically saves the song title and artist into the song's metadata?

* Mp3tag (and other) programs that I use to tag my music and manage the metadata of my music library in order to ensure that I have the correct metadata and cover art embedded into the song-file.

* Synology NAS: Large digital network attached (NAS) storage for all your devices throughout the household.

* Cloud Solutions: How do I use programs like Dropbox and Evernote.

* Technology & sports: How to "track" our route when we are hiking-/biking-/rowing?

* Garmin Forerunner 910XT: GPS & Heart Rate wristwatch for triathletes.

* How capture our vacation with photos?

* Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT4: Underwater Camera with Quad Indicator (GPS, compass, altimeter and pressure gauge).

* GeoSetter: Wonderful program to (automatically) to geotag your (vacation) pictures. Can also be used to view / set the direction in 3which a picture is taken.

* Facetag pictures: Picasa vs. Windows Live Gallery.

* Withings scale: Bathroom scale with built-in WiFi that automatically logs your weight progress.

* Digitization of VHS tapes: For all of us who want to perpetuate our old memories.

* Media Center: I will talk about my thoughts on this topic.

* iPad: How we used it to control media center (and the rest of the digital home).

* Backup & environmental care: less "exciting" topics, but at least equally important.

And last but not least, how do we get all of this to act together in an EASY, SIMPLE, SMART and AUTOMATIC way so that our digital active lifestyle are up-to-date, synchronized and ready to take on the world?