April 2007 Archives

• I mentioned the mock driving test on Wednesday, which I had yesterday, and it was, unfortunately, a fail - failing to stop at a zebra crossing when someone was waiting, which I realised just as I was driving over the crossing. Had I stopped, I would have only made 8 minor errors, so it would have been a comfortable pass, and I could have had fewer than that had I not made a couple of mistakes which made me lose my cool for a bit. I also did what was probably my best ever parallel park, which made me quite happy. Next mock test is this coming Thursday.
• On Tuesday, to celebrate my dissertation being handed in Hari, took me out for food and a film, the film being Sunshine (3rd on the list of films I am intending to see this year). I would thoroughly recommend the film, although it does play with your mind and is quite scary in parts.
• I've been elected the social secretary of the university's hiking club, so from September I'll be planning the club socials. We're going hiking around Haworth on Sunday, which should be nice, especially as the weather looks sunny this weekend.

I'm going to turn my Mac Mini into a media centre computer. This may come as something of a surprise, considering I only bought it less than 2 years ago and upgraded its memory as recently as December last year, but lately it's been used less and less. This isn't likely to change when Hari and I move in together this summer - I prefer using my MacBook as it's more powerful and versatile (thanks to its Intel processor) and Hari's computer is now hugely improved, so she'll be using that. Consequently, I'll essentially have a spare computer, so I might as well do something with it and this seemed like a good idea.

It's also a great thing to blog about, so I'll be devoting a few entries over the next few weeks to it.

Here's what I need to do to turn my Mac Mini from a normal computer into a computer that can also act as a media centre:

• Install media centre software Most new Macs come with Front Row, however mine was bought before this was standard so I'll need some proper software. I've bought MediaCentral (it came with the TubeStick, see below) so I'll be reviewing this in a later entry.
• Add a TV tuner A media centre is a bit useless if you can't watch TV with it. Sure, it'll be plugged into a TV which has a TV tuner, but this is Britain in 2007 so it must be a DVB-T tuner capable of receiving Freeview. It also must be able to take input from an external aerial through a coaxial cable since I live in Bradford where the TV reception is lousy and a decent roof-mounted aerial is a must. For this, I've bought the TubeStick from Equinux, which I'll be reviewing soon.
• Add a TV output adaptor My Mac outputs DVI, and optionally VGA with an adaptor. New TVs support DVI, either natively or with an HDMI adaptor, but the TV I'll probably be using just has a SCART socket, so I'll need some way of converting the DVI signal to SCART. Apple sell a DVI to composite video adaptor which gets me halfway there - a composite to SCART adaptor is all I'll hopefully need to complete the link.
• Add a remote control My Mac also doesn't have the Apple Remote (and even if it did I'd like more than 5 buttons preferably) so I'll need a remote, and some way of allowing the Mac to receive its signals. Infra-red would be the obvious one here but the Mac is also Bluetooth equipped.

That's the basic stuff. I may go further and add a Griffin FireWave, thus providing surround sound - I already have a currently redundant Creative system which got given to me by a former housemate - and I'll need at least one extra USB 2 hub since the Mac only has 2 built-in. I'll let you know how I progress, and review the two parts that I already have in the next couple of weeks or so.

Also, if you have any questions to ask, post them here and I'll answer them soon. I already have an answer to 'Why didn't you just buy an Apple TV?' and a couple of other related ones but please post away :) .

• No, I'm not dead, I just haven't felt the need to blog for almost two weeks. I know that's slacking but it's my blog and I'll slack if I want to.
• The big news is that my dissertation has been finished and handed in, so I'm basically finished now. For real this time. All I need to do is get a proper job...
• Booked my graduation ceremony, and once again baulked at the ridiculous prices being charged for gown hire and official photography. My gown, which I have to wear to the ceremony, cost £40, and the photography was another £30 on top (and that was the cheap package). Admittedly my dad is a good photographer and has a good camera but my grandma will probably moan if I don't have the official photo for her.
• At the weekend I went to what was essentially an organised piss-up in a brewery. The brewery in question was the Black Sheep Brewery, a real-ale brewery in Masham, north of Harrogate, where we had a tour and then spent the rest of the day drinking there and at other fine establishments in the town, before making our merry way back to Bradford.
• It's now just over 2 weeks until my driving test. My lesson last week wasn't the best, mainly because the car I've been learning in during the past few months was undergoing repairs so I was in a different car. It was still a Vauxhall Corsa, but with one big difference - it was a diesel. And had a very different gearbox which meant that I stalled a lot, especially at lower speeds as its second gear isn't as flexible as the petrol version. But, I drove in it again yesterday and having got used to its differences I did pretty well. I have a mock test tomorrow, to track my progress.

Since all the Mac geeks are falling over themselves to comment on the announcement that Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) is going to be delayed, I thought I'd throw my thoughts in the arena too.

Good.

By October I might just have enough money to afford it. Until then, I'm quite happy sticking with 10.4.

Those of you who have commented on this blog recently may have experienced timeouts when posting - i.e. you get a blank page rather than one saying thank you. This probably means that Movable Type is trying to do lots of stuff, and gets its processes killed by the server before it has chance to return something. It happens on the back-end a lot too.

So I'm trying out Six Apart's RebuildQueue plugin, which means that page rebuilds don't necessarily happen straight-away, but may be delayed for a few seconds. Though much of this site is dynamically generated, some parts are not and so hopefully this plugin will sort those aspects out.

Update: Scratch that - now the pages don't seem to rebuild at all. Back to normal now.

I also installed Subversion on my MacBook today, from source. It took a while, but seems to work.

Here's one for you networking geeks. I'm currently sat in front of two computers - my MacBook, running OS X 10.4.9, and my parents' desktop, running Windows XP SP2. They're connected to each other by a 100 Mbps switch, which then connects to the main house router.

If I were to copy a file from my MacBook to the desktop using SMB, it will happen relatively quickly - several megabytes will take several seconds. The inverse, however takes much longer - copying a file from the desktop to the MacBook will take several minutes. A 45 MB file going one way will take a mere 90 seconds; the other way, it'll take over 20 minutes.

So what's going on? Any ideas?

• I went down to see Hari yesterday at her parents' house in the West Midlands. She's okay - I'm going back home to my parents' house again today but we're both back in Bradford this week as term starts again a week today. The university now only give 2 weeks off at Easter rather than the original 4.
• Both my parents and Hari got my the exact same easter egg - Green and Black's Maya Gold. Either great minds think alike or I'm too predictable.
• This is old news for those who know me well but I finally have a date for my practical driving test - May 10th. It now means that I've got a date to work for, and I'm reasonably confident that I'll pass first time.
• My latest toy is a program called Lighthouse, which essentially brings UPnP (and NAT/PMP) to your Mac, and allows you to dynamically open ports on your router when you run certain programs that require them. For example, when you run Adium, it'll open the relevant ports for AIM Direct Connect and file transfers, or when you run Bittorrent it'll open a port to allow remote connections. The program is $13 to buy, although I picked it up for $9 when it was on MacZOT! last week.

Did you know that, in Britain, it is illegal to 'adulterate' tea, by contaminating it with other substances to reduce the manufacturing costs or to deceive people? The law is called the 'Adulteration of Tea Act' and was passed in 1776.

Says an awful lot about us Brits, doesn't it?

(Incidentally a similar but older act banning the adulteration of coffee was passed in 1718)

Here's a tip I gleamed from today's Windows Secrets newsletter. You may well be familiar with the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon which appears in your notification area (or 'system tray' if you must) when you plug in a removable hard drive or camera (or whatever). You may also notice that the icon sometimes isn't there - and this is a problem which my parents' computer randomly suffers from - which means it's difficult to safely disconnect removable devices. The answer: a desktop shortcut.

Right-click on the desktop, select 'New' and then 'Shortcut'. For the item location, copy and paste the following:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll

Then click 'Next'. Call the shortcut 'Safely Remove Hardware', and you should be done. If you want to make it look snazzier, right-click the icon, choose 'Properties' and then the 'Shortcut' tab, click on 'Change Icon' and in the 'Look for icons' box type:

%windir%\system32\HotPlug.dll

The first icon in this file matches the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon so you'll be able to recognise it more easily.

Now, if the normal notification icon doesn't appear, all you need do is double-click your new desktop icon to safely remove any disks before unplugging them.

1. Hot Fuzz - no, I haven't see it yet.
2. 28 Weeks Later... - the sequel to 28 Days Later.
3. Sunshine - another Danny Boyle film which Gia has been involved in.
4. Spiderman 3 - coming out this summer, at last.
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - which is out around my birthday.
6. Shrek the Third - enjoyed the first two and has some interesting cameo voices.
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - because it's Harry Potter. No David Tennant this time though.
8. The Simpsons Movie - Not the biggest fan of The Simpsons (prefer Futurama/Family Guy) but should be good.

And next year we have The Chronic-what-cles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which hopefully will be as good as the first one.

Side note: My British English spelling dictionary in Firefox does not recognise the word 'movie'.