Ageing (dis)gracefully!
Technical
Facelift-ed
Jan 12th
Well, it seems this very boring blog of mine has been running for 4 years now!
To celebrate this very uninteresting milestone I have changed the theme the blog runs on. I have used the ‘Freshy’ Wordpress theme for years, firstly in it’s 1.0 form and later the much improved 2.0 version ..it was starting to look dated though and with no 3.0 in the pipeline I looked elsewhere. Welcome to ‘Mystique’!
XBMC FTW!
Jan 11th
I have given up on Ubuntu for a bit (again). Just can’t seem to get graphics drivers to work with the latest version (9.10) and have spent SO much time battling to get things running that I have just given up …
Initially, all was running fine, but my onboard Intel graphics in the Media Center were not being used properly. Ubuntu was recognising them, but everything was jerky as hell. In the past (on occasion) Windows struggled with them too, so I made the decision to pick up a cheap PCI-E graphics card. Settled on an Nvidia 210, a low profile card that fits my Media Center case and handles HD decoding etc (my onboard gfx left that to the processer, which was fine most of the time but did occasionally cause jerky video). The new card also has a HDMI slot on it but I was very surprised to find that the picture quality from HDMI to HDMI was worse than the DVI to VGA connection on the back of my TV!
One of the best things to come out of all this wasted time is that I can now happily use XBMC. This is quite simply the best Media Center application I have come across. It’s cross platform and also open source, which means it’s free! I have had it installed for a while, but again, it didn’t get on with my onboard Intel graphics chip.
It’s interface is so much nicer than the Window Media Center app I have been using up until now. Rather than just listing your media, it also scrapes various websites of your choice (such as imdb, tv.com etc) to get full info on each media file. I could, for example, choose to sort all my movies by their IMDB rating and then choose a movie based on it’s acclaim. Quite cool! It also incorporates artwork & fanart which along with it’s slick looking skins makes for such a pleasurable user experience. I can also see what format the video is in, be it 4:3, 16:19, Standard Def, High Def, 2 channel audio, 5 channel audio etc etc.
I was also very pleased to find that XBMC’s BBC iPlayer plugin now works like a dream, it plays great quality video and even plays the HD streams in full HD quality! I can see me using the iPlayer more and more as a result.
All in all, Ubuntu has beaten me again .. but the end result is not so bad at all.
Ubuntu Freezing
Jan 7th
Have been trying off and on all day to get Ubuntu working on my Media Center. It’s not exactly that old a build, the motherboard dates back to 2006 and it’s running a 3.2ghz P4 but it kept freezing on the installation. Nothing I did would rectify the situation.
I was trying to install Ubuntu from a 4gb flash drive, but in the end I remembered that I installed Ubuntu onto another server 6+ months ago. I removed the drive from this server, put it into the Media Center and it booted straight in. Yet after 2 minutes, everything froze again. I rebooted and it happened again, and again….
I googled for ages and pulling info from several different places I found I could have an issue with ACPI. I looked into updating my motherboards BIOS, but (quite unbelievably) there has never been a BIOS update for it!
In the end, I fixed the problem by doing the following:
- Powered the machine on
- Pressed ‘ESC’ when ‘GRUB Loader’ prompt appeared
- Highlighted the installation and pressed ‘e’ to edit – a list of commands is displayed
- Highlighted the kernel boot command and added the following text to the end – ‘acpi=ht‘
- Pressed enter and returned to the boot editor, pressed ‘b’ to boot.
- The system then loaded with ACPI disabled and no further freezing!
This was only a temporary measure and needed to be done on every boot, so an edit of the actual boot file was required.
To do this …
- I opened a terminal session
- Typed the following command: ‘sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst‘
- Pressed enter
- Scrolled down to same boot options the GRUB screen
- Added ‘acpi=ht‘ to end
- Gave CTRL+O to write the file
- Rebooted
- Sorted!
For info, the specs of the Media Center are as follows:
- CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3ghz
- RAM: 2gb DDR 400
- MOBO: FIC P4M-915GDI-LF
- GFX: Onboard gfx
- HDD: 1 x 400gb IDE
- Display: 32″ Samsung High Definition TV
iTunes Skipping
Nov 10th
I have recently had a problem with music skipping when played through iTunes on Windows. I’d play a tune and it would stop, skip etc and make the music virtually unlistenable!
After a bit of troubleshooting and a bit of googling I resolved the problem, but thought i’d blog it incase anyone else has the same issue.
- Close iTunes
- Goto Start>Control Panel>Quicktime
- Select the ‘Audio’ tab
- Amend ‘Play Audio Using’ to ‘Safe mode (waveOut only).
According to the various threads and pages I trawled through from google, this should solve the problem, however it didn’t for me. If it doesn’t for you, try the following in the same ‘Audio’ tab of Quicktime:
- Adjust ‘Audio Output Device Latency (msec)’ to a 66.000 (Default is 33.0000)
This was in Windows 7, but I have had the same problem in XP and Vista in the past. Figured if I blogged it at least I could come back and get the solution if I ever forgot (like I did today and ended up googling for ages!).
Runkeeper
Aug 5th
I’ve been trying out a pretty cool iPhone app called Runkeeper over the last few months. Essentially, it is a GPS tracking app, but is designed for use in physical exercise. It uses it’s GPS to plot exactly where you are, even drawing a nice little map (see below). It also gives a load of stats on your chosen activity, such as speed, length of time, calories burned, elevation (uphill, downhill), average pace etc etc. When you are done, you upload your activity details to the runkeeper website (it does it automatically if you set it up to do so). You then have a statistical history of your activities, including maps!
It also has the option of speaking to you as you go. E.g. every 5 mins a voice comes out of the iPhone to tell you the vital stats and to give you a hurry up if it thinks you are not going quickly enough. Easily disabled, but if you wanted to use this app in an fitness regime it would be ideal!
The below walk was from this morning. We do this ‘loop’ almost every day as it is a perfect length to get Amelia to settle.
More stats from this walk are here: http://bit.ly/2dlpbu
It’s a great app. Almost makes me want to go jogging!
F1 App For The iPhone
Jun 21st
I was pleased to discover an F1 app for the iPhone the other day .. infact, I got so excited I got the camcorder out and did a brief video for youtube!
Great little app, only £4.99 too. It wasn’t until yesterday I actually found out that there is a charge to use it for every race! Only £2.99, but it’s not the point! It’s downright greedy and not really following the precedent of other iPhone apps where you make a one time payment and get upgrades etc free. You can buy a season pass for £15, which works out cheaper again, but it still takes the absolute piss! I won’t be paying anymore.
Still, great little application!
A Few Thoughts on the iPhone 3G
May 13th
I’ve been wanting an iPhone for quite a while, was even tempted to get one when I last upgraded my phone at the beginning of 2008 but went for the supposed ‘iPhone Killer’ of the LG Viewty. Probably a mistake as aside from the first few months I really hated that phone.
The upgrade point on my o2 contract kicked in over the weekend and i’d already decided that this time around I wanted to get the real thing, and that I did.
I thought i’d do a review of sorts (spurred on by my mate Greg, who suggested I blogged about it in more detail) and here are some thoughts after a few days of use.
As a phone, it does exactly what you might expect. To me though, I didn’t buy it just because it’s a phone, I bought it because it’s capable of so much more.
Interface
It’s intuitive, I have yet to think ‘how do I do this?!’ You have a home screen with a preset of apps, some of which I immediately removed (eg stocks ..I don’t really need to know how the FTSE is doing). Essentially all you do is tap the app/function you need and it appears straight away. No faffing about.
Texting is a different affair. You have ‘conversations’ and every text between you and another person is broken down into coloured speech bubbles. You can clear these conversations down whenever you please but so far I have found it very handy to keep track of texts I have sent to other people and then their subsequent replies. I no longer have to go into sent items to see what I have sent and when I have sent it..and then into my inbox to see the reply (my memory is not great!). This is a really good feature.
Camera
The only negative with this device. A 2.0 megapixel camera really doesn’t cut it. You can tell that the iPhone 3G was developed over 2 years ago, as nowadays the minimum you would expect from a phone is 5.0 megapixel and the norm for a top end phone is 8.0 megapixel. Still, it’s a competent camera for capturing those candid little moments. Ideal for documenting my mate Leigh spewing his guts up after a night out or passed out on my living room floor.
iPod
The iPhone is also a fully featured iPod. Not much to say really, my only gripe is that the storage on the iPhone is so low at 8gb/16gb that I can’t even hope to fit 20% of my music collection onto it. For this reason alone, I will be hanging onto my 80gb iPod classic and am not totally sure i’ll make full use of the iPod for more than podcasts or video.
Speaking of video, thats where the iPhone really excels over the iPod. The screen is twice the size for a start and it makes it a much more enjoyable experience to watch. I have so far watched 7 or 8 episodes of LOST on it and am very impressed. A cool feature is that the device automatically registers if you are holding it horizontal or vertical and adjusts the picture accordingly ..even mid play. You can turn it upsidedown and it turns the picture back the right way. Not exactly something vital, but the geek inside me really likes little touches like that.
The ability to login to iTunes and purchase music is also there, although I doubt I will use it. My preferred legal download source is Play.com or HMV (whichever is cheaper) ..although I guess it could be handy to use iTunes if i REALLY need to grab a specific tune whilst on the move. Can’t see that ever being on the cards though.
Apps
One of the great things I had seen and heard about the iPhone was it’s huge development community. Apple had opened the doors to allow anyone to develop applications for it, and there are staggering amounts of apps out there! They range from free …to, well… not free! and so far it seems that a lot of the free stuff is demo versions of full apps that you can buy. There are some good free apps though and I have spent hours installing and playing around.
A good example of two great apps:
‘Facebook for iPhone’ is pretty much a match for the original website and made especially for the iPhone. I no longer have to load up Opera Mini, browse to my bookmarks, find and select Facebook, load it, occasionally have to enter login details … and then put up with a pretty slow and feature lacking interface. Now I just tap the facebook logo on my home screen, Facebook immediately loads .. it remembers the last page I was on and auto refreshes it. Also, you can manually refresh with the flick of a wrist! (seriously, the iPhone has movement sensors in it!).
Example 2 is last.fm. I can stream any of my own custom radio stations (or anyone elses for that matter) straight to my phone. Again, just tapping the last.fm logo, selecting the stream and I am listening. Superb for tuning into my own last.fm musical library … eg always getting a track I will like! Sound quality is also top notch for portable audio.
WiFi
WiFi is something I really like on this phone. I have set it up to auto connect to my home network whenever I am in range, negating the need to logon and use the 3G network everytime I want to check my emails or view Facebook or whatever. 3G is fast for mobile internet, but using my home internet connection via broadband is so much faster …it’s so fast that you can even use the BBC iPlayer to watch BBC content in superb quality (iPlayer only works on WiFi, probably due to the amount of data it needs to transfer to you).
GPS
Google maps is one of the apps already preloadedonto the iPhone. I loaded it up quickly just to see if it was any better than the version I had on my old phone and was amazed to find that it pinpointed my location! It knew where I was! A little spooky/big brother-ish but the prospect of GPS on my phone really excites me. So much so that I hopped in the car, perched the iPhone on the dash and drove down the road. The dot on the map followed my every move in real time! Once back home I immediately searched for Sat Nav apps but sadly there aren’t any out there yet, at least not through the official channels. I’m not ready to jailbreak my iPhone yet, so will just bide my time. Apparently, Tom Tom have got their sat nav software working on the iPhone, so it will be awesome if they ever release this to the general public.
There is probably a lot more I could touch upon, but these are my initial thoughts.
My first impressions of the iPhone were probably influenced by the fact I REALLY wanted to like it. That said, several days later my impressions haven’t changed. I know it should take a few weeks of use for me to build up a proper opinion, but I genuinely do like this phone and am very pleased with it.
