Apartment of the future

Momus and his blog readers put together an amusing tongue-in-cheek look at a new year in Technology with his article "Touring the Home of the Future" over at Wired.

But how about touring the apartment of the now? I've been mulling this over for a while, and considering this age of 'convenient entertainment' that we live in, we can have most of that entertainment- for free (or cheap) and completely contained on a hard drive.

Of course, as a person that cherishes analog media, I would never get rid of my cassette tapes or battered paperbacks (or unique hard-covers). But that has a lot to do with how I was raised, and my own personal experiences.

If I were more bent on saving space (and really, I should be) then I would opt to have all of my media paperless, plastic-less, and all contained on a single storage medium.

Currently, with Flash memory at its finest, you can fit about 10 gigabytes into something smaller than the size of a deck of cards. Movies and videos are watchable even at a smallish resolution (YouTube has proven that). You can store a whole album's worth of songs in about 50 megabytes, and the average Microsoft Reader version of a novel takes up about half a megabyte (nevermind how mind-boggling small plain-text would be).

So let's speculate that I don't go too crazy, and I just get a couple of 500 Gigabyte external hard drives to store things on. I just recently signed up to iTunes, so I can eliminate all physical versions of future cd purchases. If I lived in the US, I could make use of a service like Movielink to buy or rent movies online, and just download them (legally). If I have more obscure tastes, there is always Google Video, YouTube, and public domain content, which totally free. There are many, many podcasts out there to listen to as well, which are usually free.

For books, there are often eBook versions of popular titles available, and many, MANY classics are legally available for free on the internet from sites like freebooks5000.com. I could spend a couple of lifetimes reading all of the best works of literature, without even filling out a library card.

There are also subscriptions to streaming content of popular video and audio through sites like SaltWaterChimp or Streamwired.com. For about $5 to $10 a month, I can watch as many hours as I can plow through of my favourite TV shows, all on Winamp, without taking up a single bit of hard drive space.

I've got my pda and cellphone for on-the-go computing, and note-taking, and who needs paper when I've got windows notepad? I can ditch that pesky landline phone too, and just have myself a headset, and a Vonage subscription.

So my apartment 'of the future' could feasibly just (aside from appliances), contain one or two large hard drives (which would take up significantly less space than my bookcases), my desk, my PC, a really kickass monitor and some nice speakers, and perhaps a large screen tv. There are many online and cd-rom versions of classic board games, and if I scan all pertinent correspondance, I can get rid of that pesky pile of old mail in the corner.