Ageing (dis)gracefully!
Archive for January, 2010
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
Music Of 2009
Jan 3rd
2009 was a mixed bag for me musically speaking. Here’s a rundown…
Album of the year: Porcupine Tree – ‘The Incident’
I initally despised this album. My hatred for it was so strong that I even got angry when thinking about it….yet a few weeks later I had completely reversed my opinion. Saw the band live in Bristol in October and they played this album in it’s entirety. As usual I had to pick my jaw up off the floor several times. Superb!
Other notably good albums this year have been (in no particular order!):
- dredg – The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion
- Muse – The Resistance
- The Wishing Tree – Ostara
- Devin Townsend – Ki
- Alice In Chains – Black Gives Way To Blue
- Abigail’s Ghost – D_Letion
- Creed – Full Circle
- Gazpacho – Tick Tock
- Transatlantic – The Whirlwind
- Riverside – Anno Domino High Definition
- Tilt – Million Dollar Wound
Biggest letdown of the year: Marillion – Less Is More
Ok, this wasn’t really a letdown as I thought it would be crap before i’d even heard it. An acoustic reworking of a select few songs from the Marillion back catalogue with added (yet silent) sound effects of an empty barrel being scraped. It’s not that any of the tracks are bad per se, it’s just that they all sound better in their original full electric form. The album was described as ‘reworkings’ of the originals too, yet to my ears too much of the content sounds very much like it’s original countepart. There is one big tell tale sign that I don’t care for this album very much, I have had it since October, and it’s still in it’s shrinkwrap! (The band made it available digitally on release date aswell as sending the CD’s out). For me not to open a Marillion album is like an alcoholic not having a drink!
Discoveries of 2009: Due to the magic that is last.fm and the insight of some like minded friends, I have discovered the following artists this year:
- Joe Bonamassa
- Pendragon
- IQ
- Demians
- Nosound
- Switchfoot
Re-discoveries of 2009: On occasion, I found myself listening to the odd album I hadn’t touched in years. Highlights include:
And finally, my Top 10 most listened to albums of 2009 (as logged by last.fm):
- Alter Bridge – Blackbird
- Porcupine Tree – The Incident
- Marillion – Essence (Happiness Is The Road Vol.1)
- The Wishing Tree – Ostara
- Radiohead – In Rainbows
- Alter Bridge - One Day Remains
- Sine Star Project – Building Humans
- Marillion - The Hard Shoulder (Happiness Is The Road Vol.2)
- Manic Street Preachers – Forever Delayed
- Oceansize – Everyone Into Position
