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!

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.

As I have already have a hosting plan with Site5 who provide 110GB of storage it only really made sense to make the most of my hosting package.

The process:

1. Create a public/private key to connect over SSH
2. Write a bash script to perform the backup
3. Setup a con job to run it automatically
4. Sit back and let rsync do its job, once the initial backup has succeeded it will then start doing incremental backups (e.g. only uploading changed files/folders)

This process works on Mac and Linux out of the box, but if you are using Windows you will need to tinker around with Cygwin to run bash scripts, rsync and cron jobs etc or you could always use SyncBack in FTP mode.

Step 1: SSH into your web host and enter the following commands:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

When prompted for a path and password just press enter twice. Then:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Next download ~/.ssh/id_rsa into your document folder and rename to your-site.pk this will be used in the bash script below

Step 2: Write a bash script to backup your data, this step involves playing around with rsync to upload/backup your data. You will need to change values in the config section to match your setup. (Extra bonus if you are using a Mac with growlnotify installed (in the Growl Extras folder) as you will get a notifcation when it starts and finishes backing up)

backup.sh

#! /bin/bash
 
# rsync backup
# Sebastian Flippence
# http://sebflipper.co.uk
# You are free to modify and distribute this code,
# so long as you keep my name and URL in it.
 
# Must be run with sudo (e.g. sudo ./backup.sh)
 
# For some reason rsync doesn't like tilde (home directory) being used in a passed in path variable
# Please use full paths for source and private key
 
# Config
SOURCE="/Users/Seb/" # Your home directory
TARGET="~/backup/Sebs-Mac-Mini" # Where should we save on the remote server
USER="ssh username"
HOST="domain or ip"
PRIVKEY="/Users/Seb/Documents/your-site.pk"
# Uncomment to exclude your Downloads folder
#EXCLUDE="Downloads"
 
# Log Files
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y-%m`
LOG="/var/log/sf-"$TIMESTAMP"-rsync-backup.log"
 
if [ `id -u` != '0' ] ; then
    echo "You must use sudo to run this command"
    exit 1
fi
 
GROWL=$(which growlnotify)
 
if [ $GROWL ]
then
	$GROWL -st 'rsync' -m 'Backup process has started'
fi
 
if [ -z "$EXCLUDE" ]
then
	rsync -rltDzh --log-file=$LOG --chmod=a+r --delete $SOURCE -e "ssh -p 22 -i $PRIVKEY" $USER@$HOST:$TARGET
else
	rsync -rltDzh --log-file=$LOG --chmod=a+r --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=$EXCLUDE $SOURCE -e "ssh -p 22 -i $PRIVKEY" $USER@$HOST:$TARGET
fi
 
if [ $GROWL ]
then
	$GROWL -st 'rsync' -m 'Backup process has finished'
fi

Step 3: On your machine enter the following command:

sudo crontab -e

Then paste the following:

0 20 * * * /Users/your-username/Documents/backup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

This will now run at 8pm everyday backing up your precious data.

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

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!

• 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.

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.

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.

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 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>

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.