About sebflipper

One thing I have been waiting for on the Apple TV is access to the BBC’s iPlayer. I recently discovered Boxee which is an open-source media centre for Mac, Windows and Apple TV based on a fork of XBMC. It has a very nice and easy to use interface which will index all your video, music and photos and show you summary, ratings, trailers etc based around your content. Very handy for finding info about movies I have copied onto the Apple TV!

Today I stumbled across a plugin for Boxee/XBMC which allows you to view content from the BBC iPlayer, it doesn’t come preinstalled with Boxee however instructions can be found on their forums, I found that it works very well on the Apple TV playing content from all their channels and most popular lists with minimal effort.

If you haven’t patched your Apple TV to run SSH already theres a handy patch stick creator that will unlock your Apple TV and install Boxee aptly called atvusb-creator and your ready to go with Boxee. However if have already have SSH and nitoTV installed (like did) you can simply copy the atv-xbmc-launcher installer onto you Apple TV and follow the instructions on their Wiki once the menu item is installed you can press Update and it will download and install Boxee for you.

Once you have Boxee up and running on your Apple TV copy the plugin across and edit the source.xml then should should see a nice BBC iPlayer icon under Video->Internet!

Backing up data is normally something most people usually neglect (unless your on a Mac), and even if you do backup what happens if you get your stuff stolen or lost by hard drive failure or worst case scenario fire?

Enter the cloud, online backup is nothing new the only difference these days is you normally get more storage for your money. Over the last few weeks I have been keeping an eye out for different solutions:

Service	Pros	Cons
Drop Box	Backs up all your documents and photos online incrementally Keeps things synced across machines (and cross platform) Keeps revision history (so you can go back to previous versions of a document) Allows you to make files or folders public and gives a link to download or generates a photo gallery for you Works on Windows, Mac and Linux	Currently in beta (no public signup) 2GB for free account
	Unlimited storage (paid accounts) Social network for sharing with friends/family and tagging Easy to manage and setup galleries	Photos and videos only 100MB upload per month on free accounts Manual backup process
Mozy	Unlimited automatic incremental backups Set it up and forget it	2GB free account Doesn’t support Linux
Self Hosted	Can be used for backup as well as hosting websites, blogs and galleries etc. Backups work with open-source software like rsync Most hosting companies normally provide 100GB+ of storage space	Manual setup Complex to initially setup

Find out which one I chose after the jump.

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SVN is a useful application allows you to keep track of revisions/changes made to files (mainly for web development or even writers!) and keep projects up to date easily (which is what we use at work). It seems to be allot harder to setup on a shared web host.

So after much playing around with it and getting it up and running I thought I would create a how to guide on the Site5 Wiki about setting up Subversion for multiple users, with permissions and desktop setup (this guide should also work on other shared web hosts).

http://wiki.site5.com/SVN/Subversion_(SVN)_Setup_Guide

Last week I decided to use my mobile phone and bluetooth GPS receiver to log a weeks worth of commuting to see which route is the best and what days are the worst. I used a freeware tool called NoniGPSPlot on my mobile and TrailRunner on my Mac, which is geared more towards running, and biking etc but also works well plotting driving routes. It basically shows a line graph of speed allowing you to click on a curtain point and see where you were at the time, it also has nice integration with Google Maps, Live Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Bizarrely with the amount of accuracy with GPS these days you can actually see what lane you were in at the time and even if you were changing lanes. My findings are it takes longer in the mornings to get to work, in the worse case it took 1 hour 9 minutes to get in, where as it only took 41 minutes to get home, almost 30 minute difference! I think the main problem is the school run in the mornings seem to clog the roads quite a bit. Going different ways didn’t seem to save much time unless the motorway was totally jammed.

I can see people like TomTom building this sort thing into their next generation of GPS devices so that they can accurately model and predict what roads and at what time they will be jammed, as well as sending back live data to a central database to which can inform other GPS users to avoid certain roads.

You can also monitor my dodgy parking with the previous route overlays!

I have been along time Firefox user (even since the early days when it was called Firebird) swearing by it and setting it as my families default browser! The Firefox 3 beta’s have been around for some months now and I have been using the beta since January, overall its been very stable and allot faster than previous versions (especially on my Mac). Some of the notable improvements that I have been using are:

• Location bar allows you to search through your history as well as bookmarks and most often visited sites (see screen shot below)
• Improved bookmarks, smart bookmarks and a bookmark manager which supports tagging
• Customised skins based around what ever operating system you are using it on (Windows, Mac, Linux etc)
• Improved download manager
• Faster page rendering and improved memory management

The main feature which is very impressive is the smarter location bar that allows you to quickly access most often visited sites and bookmarks, I don’t think I could go back to Firefox 2 as I would be lost without it!

The only niggles that I have had with it so far is the Home and End buttons on my keyboard seem to be acting as Page Up/Down buttons on my Mac, which is kinda pointless having 2 sets of buttons that do the same thing, but luckily someone has fixed it (if only it would make it into the final version, rather than being a hack!) and the Foxmarks plug-in has only just been upgraded to support Firefox 3 (which synchronizes your bookmarks between computers).

Whats even better for me as a Web/PHP Developer, is that it fully supports ACID2 which insures that Firefox is standards compliant and will hopefully mean that it will be allot easier to make the design of a website look pretty much identical between other ACID2 compliant browsers (such as Opera, Safari and even the IE8 beta). Now all they need to do is make it ACID3 compliant!

On another note I updated WordPress (which powers this blog) to 2.5, which has under gone a revamped admin interface and its surprisingly painless to upgrade as all your custom themes and uploads are stored in a separate folder and I haven’t had to touch my custom template/theme since I installed it a few years back.

If your like me and have far too much music you will have probably transferred it all to an external hard drive, which is great as it frees up some space on your computer, but not so great if you forget to turn it on and you start up iTunes.

iTunes has the habit of marking all the files all the files it can’t find with an exclamation and then not syncing with iPods etc, which is why I wrote a an Automator script for my Mac to detect if my hard drive is connected:

tell application "Finder"
	if exists folder "LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:" then
		launch application "iTunes"
		tell application "iTunes"
			launch
		end tell
	else
		display dialog "Please turn on LaCie 500GB Mini Hub" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	end if
end tell

To use, open up Automator paste the code in and change “LaCie 500GB Mini Hub:Music:” to the name of your drive and location of your music collection, then save as an application, then just drag it on your dock and remove the original iTunes icon (you can even give it the same icon as iTunes by following this guide). If it detects your drive it will automatically load iTunes otherwise it display a message.

After sorting though some 300 photos from last week, 25 of them made the grade:

Norway

I took a few panoramas as well, 3 of them came out quite well:

Cross-country skiing  is pretty good fun, but does involve allot of up hilling e.g. climbing a mountain for 2 hours for a 10 minute ski down! Though you do get the reward of conquering the mountain, next time I will have to try down-hilling and let the ski lift do all the hard work.

Today I spent a fair chunk of time trying to find a solution to the never ending problem of syncing PIM, e.g. syncing Thunderbird email, calendar and contacts with Google Mail/Google Calendar and a mobile phone. Email is fine, as that just uses Gmail’s IMAP which works pretty much anywhere and with the aid of 2 extensions for Thunderbird and 1 application for my phone:

• Provider for Google Calendar
  
• SyncSW (for contacts only, as the calendar sync doesn’t work that well)
• Funambol (for my mobile phone, which handles contacts and calendar)

I have now got everything talking with each other via ScheduleWorld, the only downside is that contacts aren’t synced with Gmail, but they will sync with Thunderbird (which isn’t all that bad as Gmail tends to add any email address you use to its address book). Handy if my phone goes walkies as I will have all the data backed up.

Well its been awhile since my last post (2 years almost!) and allot has changed since then. Its quite easy just to forget about it as my site will automatically just remove the link to my blog (if there hasn’t been any new posts for 6 months) as it assumes I am dead or something!

Since my last post I’ve finished my work placement year, finished my dissertation and graduated from uni, moved out of London back to the country (in farmers accent), I have settled down in a full time job as a PHP Developer (welcome to work for the rest of my life!) and I have switched from PC to Mac (didn’t much like the sound of Vista). That’s 2 years of life summed up in a paragraph!

Seems odd that I didn’t just stay in London, but after working in Oxford Circus for a year I was put off by the hustle and bustle of getting crammed onto a train/tube twice a day, so I opted for the country way of life! And just when I thought I had gotten away from London I have been working on the London Green500 website for the last few months, that’s a bit of irony for you.

The website is based on OO-PHP5 and the Zend Framework, traditionally I have been brought up PHP4 and its quite a change, but when you get your head around it, it makes allot of sense. As it eventually makes it allot faster to code things (or slower in some cases!) as modules and functions get pushed into a thing called the “Framework” which you can reuse in any project you like.

I suspect my posts will get more techie as time goes on, but that’s for another day.

I recently bought a new Hi-Fi to replace my 10 year old one which I have had since I was a kid! After looking around I settled on the Yamaha M170 which was a brand I respected until now, for good sound and features.

I got it home set it up and it sounded superb, really crisp and sharp even when playing pretty loud, at one stage it even got the neighbours around twice! All was fine until I setup the clock/timer, switching it over to DAB digital radio automatically set the clock which is pretty cool I thought and I set the timer to wake me up at 7am for work.

As with all new alarm clocks I am pretty wary and I some how managed to wake up at 6:59am and was expecting my alarm clock to go off, but at 7:05am I thought it should be blaring off at me by now? Turn it on to find out why and the clock had lost an hour over night. I thought it must just have got the wrong time. But the next day it did the same thing even when I manually set the clock!

And what’s even stranger: at 8pm on the dot the clock just resets to 00:00?! Bizarre, so I emailed Yamaha who said it was most likely due to a fault in the system and said to take it back, so I took it back and got it replaced. Got my brand new 2^nd Yamaha M170 back today:

• Plugged it in
• Switched the source to Radio
• Changed the band to DAB
• Changed the station to Radio 1
• Switched to AUX1
• At 20:00 on the dot, it reset to 00:00, again on a brand new system!

I think tomorrow I will be taking it back and buying Denon instead!

</RANT>

2005 came and went in a blink, time seems to be moving much faster these days, soon it will be back to university in October and then Christmas all over again! Seems that last year my computer spent 4627 hours, 34 mins and 9 seconds switched on and downloaded 379.99GBs, ok I thinks I need to get out more.

On Thursday I saw Alegría at the Royal Albert Hall with some mates from uni which was pretty amazing, some people are just too flexible for their own good, check out this video and you will see what I mean (I bet she will have arthritis when she’s older!). Well worth going to, even if you not into plays and performances.

My PC game of the last 3 months has to be Darwinia just because the sale managers theory is never advertise just use PR and word of mouth for advertising (the “Build it, and they will come” theory), plus it’s a great game. At first glance it looks like an old retro game, but in fact its bang up to date and can even handle my 1440×900 widescreen display. Game play is similar to Command and Conquer, eg moving you squaddies and killing the enemy, only gripe with this game is that it wasn’t very long and could probably be completed within 7 hours of play, but what do expect for a tenner.

Also watch out for space profanity and crop circles on Google Earth.