I am a Mac user

Turn the clock back 12 months and there is no way I would have thought I would have been able to say that.

Most people that know my long term affilation as a windows user and avid gamer would be wondering why the hell I would be using a Mac.  Let me quote a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine.

Me:
"Black Ops aye. Well unless they release an OSX version I'll have to give it a miss ;)"
Him:
"I just thew up in my mouth a little bit...."


My previous exposure to the Apple Mac came 16 years ago whilst studying computer science at university.  We had no choice as it was a Mac only lab, so I begrudgingly used the Mac.  My experience at the time was not great as I struggled to bridge the gap between my PC and the Mac.

Fast Forward 16 years and I now am the owner of a nice new shiny 27 inch iMac and feel very much at home on my Mac.

I started to think about why it took me so long to make the move to Mac as I cannot see myself leaving for another platform anytime soon.

It all started early this year with my moving all the data and application I could to the cloud.  This resulted in not being closely coupled to any particular operating system.  I was messing around 6 months ago and loaded Ubuntu on my net book, I was instantly up and running with all my core data and applications.

I had become free of Windows for the first time since I started running windows 3.11 and more importantly I was now operating system agnostic.
I spent the previous 6 months working from Ubuntu and really enjoyed being free to explore various operating systems.

2 months ago decided to was time to upgrade my main PC as it was getting a tad old entering its 5th year.  I started looking around and thought hey Apple hardware is really nice, I could give OSX a go.
I feel very much at home on my Mac and I even cringe a little when I now have to do some work or help someone on a windows PC.  I am now very much a Apple Mac convert and find myself hanging out for the next cool piece of Apple tech.

Hopefully the 11 inch Mac Air is announced tommorow as I need to replace my lenovo laptop!!

Recorded MythTV in XBMC

 

My search for the ultimate home media centre solution recently resulted with an install of Linux, MythTV and XBMC.  I have wanted to give XBMC a go for a long time, however I always hesitated because my home media center solution gets a lot of use with Live TV and Recorded TV. 

I have always known that MythTV is a great solution for TV on a HTPC, but that means Linux and I was always too cautious to leave my Windows Comfort Zone.  Well recently I left Microsoft for good and all my PC's now run Linux (more about that later). So with the ability to experiment with MythTV on my main PC without the headache of dual booting, I got my feet wet with Myth.

After a few weeks of working out the finer details of MythTV, I introduced the XBMC / MythTV combo to my main lounge room.  This is truly a powerful combination as XBMC is no doubt the best for downloaded content and MythTV is now in my opinion the best software solution for Live and Recording TV. 

The best of both worlds

To have the best of both worlds you need to get XBMC and MythTV to work well together.  The last thing you want to be doing is switching back and forth between applications more often that you have to.  XBMC has a built in solution for MythTV  http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=MythTV that allows you to view live channels, view recorded programs and even view the TV guide.  This is a very basic interface to MythTV that has a lot of room for improvement, however it does give you access to TV from XBMC and with a few tweaks you can make it even better. 

Recorded TV in XBMC

The MythTV interface in XBMC provides you access to view your recorded TV with a very basic interface which lists your recordings in a list, however with a couple of tweaks within MythTV you can integrate your recorded TV into your XBMC menu structure along with all your other media.

With the recent release of Myth .23 came the introduction of a new event system.  The event system allows you to run scripts on, you guessed it, events.   http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 

I did some digging around and found a peal script  (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythlink.pl) that creates symbolic links from your recorded MythTV into a specified folder with nice file names that allows a good integration with XBMC.  Initially I attempted to run this Perl script from the Start Recording Event and pass the specific show session details into the script. This proved problematic and I gave up on this method and put it down to some sort of delay within MythTV in starting the writing of the recorded file to disk.  I had immediate success with the on Recording Finish Event and therefore decided I could go with this solution, the only draw back of the finish event as apposed to the start event is that you have to wait until the recording is finished until you can watch your recording via the XBMC Recorded TV folder.

With a folder full of nicely named files and setup correctly within XBMC, the end result is a nice looking Recorded TV folder amongst all your other media folders within XBMC.  Although this is not a make or break tweak to my solution, it is all the little customisations that help make MythTV and XBMC sing together. 

Fun with scammers

 A mate of mine is selling his car and got an interesting offer.  Read below.  Very Funny.

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 8:12 PM, Okell wrote:

Thanks for the prompt response.. I am ready to buying it now for birthday gift for brother in-law and i am at sea at the moment as i am a marine engineer and due to the nature of my work, phone calls making and visiting of website are restricted but i squeezed out time to check this advert and send you an email regarding it. I really want it to be a surprise for brother in-law so i wont let him know anything about it until it gets delivered to him, i am sure he will be more than happy with it. I insisted on paypal because i don't have access to my bank account online as i don't have internet banking, but i can pay from my paypal account, as i have my bank a/c attached to it, i will need you to give me your paypal email address and the price so i can make the payments asap for it and pls if you don't have paypal account yet, it is very easy to set up, go to www.paypal.com.au and get it set up, after you have set it up i will only need the e-mail address you use for registration with paypal so as to put the money through. I have a pick up agent that will come and pick it up after i have made the payments... Thanks ------------- Good morning Okell, (I assume that's your name), Wow mate thanks for your prompt response, I see that you are ready to buying it so I had best be ready to selling it. Before I give you my details I hoped to ask you some questions. You are going to buy this car for your brother in law as a birthday gift? Holy Crap! can I be your brother in law? I wish my brother in law would buy me a car... especially one valued at $16000.... I have a very wealthy brother in law who is a doctor and all I usually get is a JB hi-fi voucher. But wow man you must earn a whole heap of cash if you are willing to buy him a car. I think I need to change professions from being a detective in the fraud squad of the Victorian Police force and try becoming a marine engineer, is there much to it? I guess it means time spend in small rooms with lots of sweaty men..  but I guess whatever floats your boat! (pun intended) So the car is going to be a surprise gift for him? let me guess - a couple of your best mates will come and take the car out of my hands and assure me its going to a good home, wrap it in a big pink bow that has a card attached saying to my bestest, bestest brother in law HAPPY BIRTHDAY! - Can I take photos? I would love to see the look on his face when he receives his amazing birthday gift. But I will feel safe in knowing that a marine engineer like yourself will have deposited (via pay-pal) the asking price for my car.. I forgot to mention in my add that if paying by pay-pal, I needed 7 things from you -  1) A copy of your drivers license  2) A copy of you birth certificate or passport 3) A copy of a recent bill - But seeing as you are at sea a letter from the captain will do. (BTW - that got me thinking is your captain like captain Stubing from the love boat? or is he more like Jack Sparrow? - Ahh the open seas are so romantic) but I digress... 4) A reference from your grade 10 school report - I assume you didn't do well in English? (just a guess) 5) Photocopy of your video store card 6) A letter from your sister (or in some cases brother) showing that you do actually have a brother in law? 7) A printout of all your last 50 pay-pal transactions - to ensure you wont withdraw your payment after making it? I trust you will not have issues with providing me this information? - I just want to make sure my little car makes it to a good home. I am curious - I have always dreamed of life on the open ocean and wondered if  it was it was all cracked up to be, you know.... Pirates, sea monsters and mermaids? I imagine that spending so much time on the ocean these are things that you would see every other day? It must be hard when you have limited internet access that you found my little old add for your brother in law and decided that sight unseen you want to buy my car. You must have a good eye for detail. Its worth every cent. Which reminds me - I prefer cash and would accept $10000 cash but I see you like fantasy, and so do I - I have always imagines swimming in a pool of $1 coins so I would happily take payment in the form of $1 coins. I am sure it could be done and look the hassle of getting the coins would be offset by SAVING $6000 - I think (in my humble opinion) that - THAT my friend is the Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale of the Centurrrry!!) Look if you don't have the cash on hand - or your mates are worried about exchanging my car for $10000 in $1 coins then I will give you my pay-pal email (as you requested) - it is: gowfukyrslf@random.email.com Serious. That's my email... Go check it out! Deposit moneys in there....! It will work - I promise! I really look forward to hearing from you again. Please please please email me again. Kind regards, The owner of a nice car. .A

Instant Dropbox Uploads

In the past I have written about how I find Dropbox very useful.  If you were following this blog you would also know that I decided to store all my mp3's in my Dropbox folder/cloud.

Over the past 2 weeks I have discovered something quite unexpected with Dropbox.  When uploading files to your Dropbox that others have already uploaded to their own dropboxes , Dropbox recognises this and your files are instantly uploaded.

I first discovered this when the Gorillaz released their new album Plastic Beach.   As soon as this album was available I downloaded it and placed it in my Dropbox.  I had to look twice when instead of chugging away at 50k~ per second for the next hour the files uploaded in the blink of an eye.  Originally I thought this was a one off, a glitch,  a freak of nature, however the same thing happened last week with another new album release and this time it was not even a main stream album.

So it would seem that Dropbox checks all files that you select to upload to their servers and if they already have them they simply do a server side copy.  This is a pretty smart and clever use of resources.  Given the team at Dropbox are clever at using the resources available to them I think it would be safe to assume they do not copy the files on the server, but instead just simply reference them in a database which in addition to saving bandwidth from the upload also saves space on the servers.

So this got me thinking about the rumoured cloud service that Apple are working on for ITunes.  A music file cloud service lends itself to this technique perfectly.  After a short amount of time hundreds of thousands of users will upload their entire library to the ITunes cloud.  By the time I get around to it, I should be able to upload my 40gig~ of mp3's in less than an hour :)

I look forward to the day where I can upload my 25gig Blu Ray Rips.... Automagically.!!

Dude, Where's my laptop?

Dude, Where's My Laptop?  NFI, I hardly use it any more. 

Over the past 6 months I have pushed all my data into the cloud and migrated to as many cloud based applications as possible.  When I started this cloud computing based approach, one of the results I did not foresee was that I would no longer heavily rely on my laptop. 

For the last 10 years I have carried my laptop with me everywhere.  To work, back home, on holidays, to the coffee shop, parties, everywhere. I had just come to accept this laptop as a part of my life. I didn't mind taking my laptop everywhere and the main reason is travelled with me is so that I always would have access to the data and applications I need to do my job at any time and anywhere.   

Over the last 4 weeks I have done a fair bit of travelling and as per usual I have taken my laptop with me.  On returning from one of these trips I rushed home and didn't go through my usual arrive home ritual of unpacking and quickly setting up my laptop.  When I eventually turned my attention back to my computer related activities I  jumped on my home PC and started working away.  A couple of days later I thought, Dude where's my laptop? 

Today I find that I am using my laptop less and less.  If I am home or in the office I use a desktop PC, if I am out on business for the day I will work from my Android, if I am at a friends place I will work from any PC I have access to, and if I am sitting in the lounge room watching TV or relaxing with a drink I will use my wife's net book.   

My laptop still has its place in my life, however I am no longer reliant on it. It is not critical if its stolen, blows up or I just forget where I put it. It is no longer the most important item I own, its just a computer like any other.

Google Buzz: How will we use it?

I have been a user (or is that addicted) of social computer applications since I was old enough to care. In the early 90's I enjoyed participating in closed BBS applications since. In 1994 I discovered a couple of computer nerds who seemed to be spending large amounts of time in the computer science lab writing and reading lots of information in Notepad. They of course were using one of the very first versions of MIRC and participating in whatever teenage computer nerds discussed back then.  I of course joined the nerds and would spend a lot of my free time exploring the many and varied channels of IRC. 

Since then I have always been quick to adopt new social Internet applications.  Not long after IRC I started using ICQ, my ICQ number is #866536 which makes me one of the very first users of ICQ and I still have this account today.   I went onto use MSN, Yahoo Chat, Skype, various blogs and of course MySpace , Facebook and Twitter. 

It was with great interest when I woke up on Wednesday and started reading my morning RSS feeds to discover Google Buzz.

It was a very smart move for Google to convert their 100 Million Gmail users into a social network, basically overnight.   

When I am introduced to a new social Internet application the first thing I think about is, how am I going to use it?

Throughout the last 15 years of using social applications to communicate on the Internet I have noticed one constant always remain true.  The social circles I participate in, do not cross over from one platform to the next, because most people connect with only one or two at most. Of course there are exceptions and some of my friends, family or work colleagues join me on more than one, however as a general rule I find my audience to be different on each platform.  Interestingly I do not get to choose my audience on these platforms either, although of course I can adjust my audience on each platform by removing and inviting users. 

A quick run down of my audience with these applications for me as of today is as follows: 

Facebook : 90% Family and or close friends audience.  

Yahoo Chat: 90% Business communication.

Xfire: 100% gaming communication.

Twitter: A mixed bag of audience which I think of as just "public". Oh and of course to rub shoulders with famous people.

MSN: Friends from all parts of life.

ICQ: Does anyone apart from Russian girls with web cams use this anymore?

GTalk: Friends and past work colleagues. 

Blogger: Anyone that cares to read.

LinkedIn: 100% business

What does it matter who my audience are within these applications?  Well for me the audience decides how I use a social application. Lets look at some quick examples of how and where I would publish the content: 

Sharing my travel status and personal thoughts : I would use Facebook for this as sharing this type of message with my family and close Friends is the objective.  I don't want to tell my gaming buddies or random twitter users my travel plans and personal thoughts. 

Sharing my work status, what I am working on or how busy I am. 

For this I use Yahoo Chat and LinkedIn. It would not be appropriate to use Facebook for this type of content. 

Sharing many interesting technical or humour articles I find on the web.

I currently share these via Google Reader and or Twitter. I daintily don't want to be sharing all this content with my family or business networks. 

One thing is for sure, if I published everything to everyone, most people would block me because of the amount of content I share, with only a small amount of it being relevant to each person.

So with all these existing social applications and networks how and where is Buzz going to fit in?

One of the things Google Buzz achieves through its integration with the full Google suite of products is the ability to organise your contacts into groups.  You can create an audience group for any type of content that you want to publish in Buzz and before you make your post you can choose who your audience will be. 

How do you achieve this functionality in Twitter?  You run multiple accounts.  I guess you could do that same in Facebook and most of the other applications. This is not a workable solution for me.

I don't think a lot of work or thought has gone into this grouping contacts and choosing who to publish to as yet. Maybe its just there because it came with the integration with other applications? 

I personally believe this functionality is a master stroke, if I could ever manage to get 100% of all my online network within Google Buzz, I could drop most of the other applications and Google Buzz would become the one central place for all my social Internet activities. 

How am I going to use Google Buzz?  I am going to start publishing all my content through Buzz and as my network builds I will define my target audience to suit.  Who knows, with functionality like this,  Google just might become the online social application leader. 

Things you should not use on a domestic Qantas flight

I travel around Australia a lot for work and I fly with Virgin when I can.  This week the only direct flight home  that was available was with Qantas, therefore I had the pleasure [dis] of flying with the big Q.

Now I usually keep myself well occupied on flights, reading a paper or magazine until I can start using my laptop or phone.  The problem is, that I always tend to find when we begin our decent and the seat belt sign goes back on, I am bored with nothing to do after I turn off my electronic devices.

So this week I was getting desperate and ended up reading the safety instruction card where I found the following diagram which of course justified turning my phone back on to take this picture.

I was happily learning the things I should and should not do whilst on a Qantas 737.  I was pretty sure I had it worked out.

• No mobile phone from the pre 2000 era.  Check
• No stop watches. Check
• No music players that resemble microwaves. Check
• No walkie talkies. Check

But the last one had me stumped.  I decided to ask the gentleman sitting beside me for some help in understanding the last item that I must not bring on Qantas flight.  He put his glasses on and was quick to inform me that we are not to bring any wild animals onto a Qantas flight.  Now this makes sense but what on earth is the freak of a creature they decided to use in the diagram, should have they not gone for some brand recognition with a kangaroo? 

Creating a great home network

I recently had to find and move into a new house.  One of the most important things on my list of things to look for in a new house was what broadband was available. I even went as far as to locate the local phone exchange and measure the distance between the prospective property to ensure I was not going to have a degraded ADSL service.  With the NBN roll out  fast approaching and the prospect of fibre to the home this will become less of an issue in the future.

Once we had chosen our new house the next thing I was determined to do was to ensure I had good network connectivity throughout the entire house.  At my last house I never got around to ensuring a had a good network across the house and in the end I kept thinking, don't worry your moving soon. This was PITA and in hindsight I should have just fixed it.

The major issue for good WiFi connectivity across the house is the location of the wireless router with respect to physical distance and the physical mass between the router and your device

My new house is multi story with my home office downstairs and main living area upstairs. My initial thought was that I would connect myBillion BiPAC 7404VNPX ADSL modem / router Wifi to the phone line in my office and work from there, however as I was setting up I noticed that the phone socket in the office was fed from a make shift extension cable which was probably 10 meters long if not longer.  This forced me to change my plans. To ensure for a very good internet connection you need to have your ADSL modem as close to the main phone socket in the house.

After a quick change of plans I setup my ADSL Router behind my lounge room TV which is the dead center of the upstairs area of the house.  This location proved to be great with an internet connection which runs at 90% capacity 100% of the time. It also provided a surprisingly great wireless coverage throughout the entire house. I did not expect to achieve excellent wireless coverage in my office from the upstairs router and in fact I had initially planned to run a separate wireless device down stairs to ensure this was not a problem.

With a good wireless network in place the last challenge was to ensure a fast connection between my gigabit network upstairs and my gigabit network downstairs where I store my NAS, PC,s and anything else I am working with. The prospect of getting in the roof and running a Cat5 cable down the walls was not very enticing and I didn't want to pay someone or wait for them to do it , therefore I decided to look into an EoP (Ethernet of Power) solution.  I have always been a skeptic of this technology, however it was not going away, so I decided it was finally time to give it a chance.

After some quick research I decided to go with the Netcomm NP201AV which provides two plugs both with an Ethernet socket. There was no setup required with these plugs, I simply plugged them in and attached a Cat5 cable to each end.  Once connected to the gigabit hub downstairs I had a great connection to the network upstairs, simple as that. I then tested the plugs running from my power boards in an attempt to free up two precious power sockets.  For some reason when I had both plugs running through a powerboard I experienced dropouts and connectivity problems, this is most likely due to the internal filtering of the powerboards.  I tinkered around and ended up achieving perfect connectivity whilst having 1 plug through a power board which I was satisfied with.

The Netcomm Home Plug devices provide a theoretical bandwidth of 200MBPS however it is generally far slower than that.  I am yet to give it a good test to see the true bandwidth of this solution, however it seems fast enough and streams 1080p blue ray movies from my Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ to my WDTV Live without missing a beat so am happy with the solution. It is also yet to drop out or have any connection problems what so ever.

I am now very happy with my home network and internet connection and have learnt that I should have taken the time to do this in the past as it has stopped me having to work around connectivity black spots and problems, saving time and providing extra functionality.  Below is a quick and nasty network diagram I threw together to share my final result.

I play Tetris

Time for something a little different.

I grew up in the first generation of computer gamers and I will always play games.  It is an source of entertainment that I enjoy and I always make time for it.

For some strange reason the game that I have played the most in the past 6 months is Tetris!!

Originally designed and released by Alexey Pajitnov in Russia way back in 1985, this little game is so deep that it seems to get better with age and  becomes more enjoyable the more you play it.

6 Months ago I started playing Tetris on the Nintendo DS just because it was there.  I played it for an hour here and there, but I just kept coming back to it.  I completed all available modes and kept finding ways to improve my game and new challenges to take on. I then decided to give the PSP version a go and found that it was a much more serious implementation with a much better feel and provided me with a bunch of stats that allowed me to measure my progress.

After taking my game as far as I could on these 2 platforms I decided to explore what else the world of Tetris had to offer me.  I started out exploring Tetris on facebook which then led me to find Tetrisfriends.com .

Tetris adapts really well to a multiplayer game and there are quite a number of variants that have been well developed for competitive play.  I soon found my competitive juices flowing as I worked my way through the ranks on Tetrisfriends.  Playing Tetris this way allowed me to find new goals and again forced me to improve my game.

After a month or so on Tetrisfriends I once again started looking for more avenues to find top Tetris competition. I discovered 2 very interesting sources where the best Tetris players in the world go to ply their trade.

1. TOJ or Tetris online Japan is a fantastic implemtation of multi and single player Tetris.  The main issue for us English only speakers is that the website is Japanese only.  There are however a few guides around that help you work out how to create and account and get into game.  Once in game its still the same Tetris. 
2. Tetris Live which is currently in Beta on Tetrisfriends.com seems to be where a lot of the best English speaking Tetris players are gaming at the moment.  Although its still in Beta it is a great implementation and personally I have not  had any problems with it, apart from a bit of lag here and there.  I am really enjoying the competition and can see I still have a lot of improving to do to be able to compete at the highest levels of Tetris competition. I could not see Tetris Live advertised anywhere, however if you goto THIS link you can sign up and join in the fun.

Am I crazy for playing such a simple game when there are a world of great games out there?  Possibly, but for whatever reason Tetris is entertaining me at the moment.

I lied, not all of my data is in the cloud

So a slight oversight on my part, in my last post I explained how all of my data now lives in the cloud.  Well then what the hell do I have on my 2TB Nas?

Late last year I decided to get a NAS.  I had always toyed with the idea, however I could never justify buying one.   After doing a good bit of research I decided to get a ReadyNAS from Netgear. Netgear purchased ReadyNas a couple of years ago and from the outside looking in, it seems they have let ReadyNas continue to run as a separate entity.

The model I chose was the ReadyNas NV+ . It has 4 hot swappable SATA drive slots and supports most big hard drives available on the market today.  I got myself 2 x 2TB drives to start with and set them up in the default config.

All in all my experince with the ReadyNas NV+ has been great, I had some minor dramas getting the media streaming services to work, however some quick trouble shooting soon resolved that for me.

Enough about the ReadyNAS.

Why do I need a NAS?

Well I cannot see myself sending 2 terabytes of data to the cloud anytime soon and even if I did, the bandwidth access to the data would not be sufficient.

What data do I store on it?

The trigger point for me to invest in a nas came when I started converting all my DVD's into MKV using Make MKV and storing them onto hard drive to avoid my kids destroying the discs. This trend continued as I then moved all my Wii games to disk and then onto making images of all the kids PC games. This has resulted in a large amount of data which is semi important and needs to be always available on my network.

The end solution has been fantastic, the kids can easily choose what they want to watch or play and I never have to cringe when I see them open a DVD drive or throw a CD around the room.

All of my data in the Cloud

When I say, "all of my data in the cloud" I really do mean this.The main way I achieve this is via Dropbox.

Dropbox serves as a sink that catches all of my data, so even if the data does not yet live natively in the cloud, with the use of Dropbox I can ensure "All" of my data is stored in the cloud an available from all of my computers with the exception of my Android (WTB Android client for Dropbox!!).   This allows me to use traditional desktop applications whilst still ensuring all my data is always available and in sync, even if I am using a public access terminal.

An interesting trend that I am seeing as I continue on this journey into the cloud is that more and more of my data is leaving my Dropbox folder as I take on further services and functionality becomes available in the cloud. First I moved all of my email archives from the past 10 years away from Outlook PST's and into Gmail, then it was my documents into Google Apps, then my photo's into Picasa and I was recently reading that Apple are working on a cloud service for iTunes that will result in all my MP3's heading that way (Apples Secret Cloud Strategy).

As it stands today, I am using around 80% of my 50gigs of Dropbox storage, refer picture below.  The way things are going I will not be surprised to see this under 5gig and maybe one day I will uninstall Dropbox? A concerning thought for Dropbox shareholders no doubt (Dropbox raises 7.5 Million).

Now that Google has enabled any file type to be uploaded to Google Apps, will this see an even quicker demise of Dropbox?

 I personally find the Dropbox service to be fantastic and it can see it will be a part of my toolkit for sometime to come as I delve deeper into the cloud.

Living in the Cloud

In December of 2009 I started following a thread of information that made me change the way I work.  I decided to make the move to store all of my data in the cloud and use cloud services to work with that data.  It has been an interesting journey to say the least and I am reaping the benefits on many fronts.

I'm yet to open Microsoft Office this year, which is a huge change for me give the amount of time I have spent in this suite of application over the last decade.

I am really enjoying the mobility and access to my data and services wherever I go. The peace of mind that comes from knowing that my data is safe and secure and I don't care if my laptop is stolen or my hard drive crashes is great.

There have been many benefits both expected and not from this venture and I will list them as I blog my experience throughout the year.