From the bedroom

Sorry its not that exciting!!

Finally fitted my Samsung TV to the wall, although still needs some adjusting. I was laid on the bed listening to music from my Xbox and had an idea. Why not connect up my Mac Mini to the tv. The Mac Mini has been sat in the kitchen unused since moving my main computer into the Dining room.

So I'm sat in front of the TV typing this post using my Mac Mini and using the Samsung as a 37" monitor :-)

If I think it useful I might buy a bluetooth keyboard/mouse. I like the look of the Logitech DiNovo Mini, but steep at £99.

Video

Just tried using Shozu to send video straight to the blog but its a bit crap. It added it but makes you download the mp4 file which people will have problems playing. I also uploaded it to my YouTube account. I've added the link to Canada section on the right, so anything I record will be uploaded hopefully to YouTube.

The test video is below, it's really poor quality because I was laid in bed with only the lamp on beside me. The room is a shit tip as well because I've still got half my stuff laid about before my hols. I wont be able to embed any YouTube video while away, you'll have to follow the link ont he right.

I probably wont record any videos or take any pictures with my phone after all this testing, lol.

Phone Testing

You can see from the last couple of posts that I have been testing out sending photos from my N95 phone. I am hoping I can use the phone to take some of the picture when I'm in Canada and upload them via Wi-Fi to the internet. People could then see where we've been while we are still away.

Besides for taking pictures and uploading them, I've managed to get the phone to geo-tag the images. This means that in Flickr you can then see on a map where they were taken.

If you look at this link, it shows the 1 test image I've tried to far. Any pictures I take in the future will show up on that same map.

The main draw back is the image quality, pictures of scenery just don't come out very well. Closer pictures look good, but for a phone I guess it's good. I'm taking my normal camera as well, Kay has hopefully ordered her camera today. So between the 3 cameras we should have some decent pictures :-)

New Drive

I've just ordered an external 320GB drive to add to my server. This is a necessity because I haven't got enough storage to finish adding all my DVDs to my server as XVID files. Once this is done I can put all the DVDs in a box and can stick them in the attic out of the way.

I have spent quite a while today tidying up or trying to. I have so many unfinished jobs still to do and converting the movies was one of them. I've had piles of DVDs stacked on my living room computer since last year and a huge box full in the spare room.

Anyway the drive was £58.98 + shipping and should be here by the beginning of next week. I will set away encoding some of my movies ready to move them to the new drive :-)

The reason for encoding the DVDs as XVIDs is so I can access any of my films from either my living room or bedroom just by using my Xbox. No need to look for a DVD or try to figure out what its about. Its all done on the Xbox and as a bonus (well for them), my parents can also watch any of them down the street without ever having to come to my house to borrow the DVD.

Test Run

Distance: 1.57 miles
Time: 14:23

I went out for a run today because I couldn't sit around any longer or my knee would start playing up. My feet still hurt but they weren't too bad over the very short run and carrying nothing other than my skinny ass.

I also couldn't put off testing my Forerunner 305 any longer which came while I was away. It's a lot better than running with my etrex and tells me my heart rate, pace, distance, etc while I'm running.

I found the run very hard because I am full of cold, another reason I decided not to complete the WHW besides for the feet. I had to go out though because I'm running the Raby 10K in just over a week!

The map above is a lot more accurate than the old GPS and I've added a heart rate graph which shows just how hard I was working. I'm above zone 5 and above my max heart rate which should be 194 for a short while at the end. I think this may look slightly worse than normal because of being under the weather.

I will probably go out at the weekend and run by heart rate and try to keep it in zone 3 and 4. Very impressed so far but not exactly an extensive test though!!

Nearly forgot here's a link to this run on 2 of the sites I'm testing:
MotionBased
MapMyRun

Widgets

I'm all over my new widgets on the side of this page, In other words I like them :-)

Theres the new Recently Played tracks list that auto updates every 60 seconds and lets you listen to a clip of the song I have just listened to as well as go to the track or artist page on Last FM. It shows a picture of the album as well if you hover your mouse over the song name. How cool is that?

I have added My Playlist. Again this is from Last FM (they just keep putting out quality shit). You can now listen to my entire playlist, although it will play randomly not in the order I created it. My Playlist started off with some meaning from the songs but I have just started putting in songs I really like now.

The other Widget I have changed is the Meebo Rooms, before there was a chat section there which anyone on the blog could chat to me directly if I was logged into Meebo. Now I have altered it to a Meebo Room, where you can chat to me or anyone else who happens to be on my page or in my group. If you load up the full Room you can share videos and stuff!

I have seen tons of other stuff I would like to add but I cant keep adding stuff or it will take all day to load up my blog!

Forerunner 305

I ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305 from MNC after a Froogle search. It cost me £170 + delivery, which is lot cheaper than when I first started looking a year ago. I have been wanting one for ages and have constantly put it off, thinking that I would get sick or running and it would be a waste of money. A year later I'm still running, not regularly enough and have some races planned (GNR for 3 years). I found my self looking at the website again today as I have done most days for weeks, so I thought bollocks its a pain in the arse carrying my GPS and its not designed for it. So decided to buy this for myself as next months Birthday present.

This is the last extravagant buy (until the next one), no it will be until after Canada and I've paid off some bills.

Testing phone GPS and Viewranger

I just went for a walk to the shop to test out Viewranger using my phones in-built GPS. It worked really well and showed correctly exactly where I was on the map. It produced the tracks above of the route. There are some slight glitches but they are more to do with errors in the map and me messing about with the phone.

Happy with it so far anyway :-)

Nokia N95

I finally have my new phone on the way. I've been wanting the Nokia N95 since I first read about it in January. It has pretty much everything you could want in a phone, bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, 5MP camera, music and video player, expandable memory.

The phone came out at the beginning of April. I had been into Carphonewarehouse and the Orange shop to see the phone and speak about getting one. In the Orange shop because I wanted to keep my number they said I had to pay £250 for the phone and go with £35 18 month contract. If I scrapped my number and got a new contract I could have it for £80, I said that was stupid and left.

On Friday I decided I would have a look at getting the phone on another network and transfering my number. Both O2 and T-Mobile had the phone for under £100, with better deals than I was on.
So I rang Orange and went straight through to disconnections and expected to be offered something. If they didn't, then I would get my PAC code and leave. With very little effort I was offered the phone for free, £30 a month contract with £180 a month worth of texts and voice.

The phone is being delivered on Tuesday :-)

Holy Shit!

Christ it's £259 for a new 80GB iPod (f**k me!)

I might see if anyone wants to buy a kidney online?

Edit: Found it for less than £220 + postage. I think the cheapest I've seen is £211.75 but not sure how reliable they would be.

While I'm moaning!

While I'm moaning I will also mention that my iPod is bricked as well. You get the error message on the screen with a sad face. This happened a couple of months ago but righted itself but not this time. I will try running the repair utility thing which I think is now built into iTunes (gonna have to install it just to try the repair). I'm fairly certain its not gonna make any difference because I can hear the drive inside trying to spin up and not making a noise.

I will have to buy another though because I have an iPod dock for the car and a iPod speaker in the house. Damn apple this is why they make proprietary connectors (bastards!). I wanted a Nano for when I go walking in May but I need a bigger iPod for general stuff. I can't get enough stuff on an 8GB Nano (the biggest). Because I now hate Apple I don't think I will buy a Nano, and will look for something better (maybe a Samsung). I will still have to buy an 80GB Ipod though for the Car and house. I don't have any money for either but Tunes are a huge part of my life and can't live without them. I have been listening to MP3 CDs in the car which are so like 5 years ago. I wanna see Album art, ratings and have more choice!!!

Suppose I better go and cry by looking at the price of a new iPod. This iPod was a replacement after the first iPods drive I had gave up after only 2 months. That was a free replacement then though. I have had this one about 18 months since then.

RSS

I've spent a lot of the last 24 hours messing about and thinking about RSS Feeds. They have been about for ages and I have used them on and off for years now. Yesterday though I noticed that a site I use a lot had started testing RSS Feeds for searches.

What this means is rather than me having to keep going to the site and doing a search for something, my RSS Reader would do the search as often as I told it too and it would return the results to me. So I no longer have to mess about doing it manually.

The next bit I have been trying to do is to get an RSS Reader to automatically download the results for me. This is possbile but unfortunately the site I'm trying to download from doesn't appear to have implemented the feeds correctly but as I said they are only testing it.

I have tried loads of RSS/podcast Readers over the last day, Google Reader (used before), CITA RSS Aggregator, Juice and many others, but decided I like Newz Crawler the best so far.

The Readers do appear to of got better since I first tried some a few years ago, Google Reader has improved since it launched as well but doesn't allow you to subscribe to password protected feeds otherwise I would of chosen it. Although wouldn't download files automatically.

It's a shame I can't get my email as an RSS Feed, maybe it's possible will have a bit more dig. I've already emailed the BBC to ask if they plan to produce the Live Text Sport Commentary as RSS Feeds, they have loads of other Feeds.

Xbox arrived and sorted

My Xbox turned up on Saturday while I was walking, luckily the postman left it in my parents coal house. He is used to all my parcels now :-)

When I got home I unpacked it and had the software modified in less than 10 minutes. Then copied over Xbox Media Center and configured it which took about 15 minutes. So I had my Xbox totally modified and connected up to the network streaming my movies and music in under 30 minutes.

Why anyone would pay for any of these other various other media players from Netgear, Linksys etc is beyond me. This cost me £51 including the £10 delivery and can play any audio or video format you can throw at it.

I have watched a few films and TV shows from the comfort of my bed and I am listening to music playing from it now rather than tying up the computer.

My New Phone?

After sending back the Nokia N73 to 3 in December not because of the phone itself but because the extra applications from 3 and the coverage didn't work as advertised and promised. Since then I found the best Nokia smartphone I liked was the N80 but it seemed that only 3 were doing now (no way). So I had decided that I was going to have to get an N73 again but on Orange or O2. Orange are out of stock so have been waiting for them to resupply before calling.

While I have been waiting I saw an announcement for the N95, which is replacing the N80. This does everything 3G, WiFi, 5MP camera, records 640x480 video and the holy grail GPS. The reason I am wanting a Nokia phone is purely down to ViewRanger. With any of the other phones N80 or N73 I was going to have to buy a bluetooth GPS but with the new N95 its integrated.

Unfortunately it's not out until March, but I can wait 2 months and carry on using my 2 year old SPV 500. The major set back could be the price, I would want a 12 month contract really and not pay more than £35 a month but for this I could have to pay quite a bit for the phone but I will see.

Succesfull Bid

I have been trying to get an Xbox off Ebay for the last day or so, since I managed to put XBMC on one for my dad. It took all of about 10 minutes to modify it to enable me to do this. When I first did it 5 years ago or however long ago it was it took me hours. I had to hex edit files and risked bricking my new Xbox but now its very simple.

I wanted a second one for my bedroom but have been reluctant to buy one until I first did the one for my dad. It lets me stream my films, music and recorded TV to my TV. This is what I already do in my living room but wanted to be able to do the same in the bedroom.

Val recommended I try using AuctionSniper to bid on Ebay. It let me add a load of different Xbox's in and set my bid limit for each. Then it would bid in the last few seconds of an auction, as long as it didn't go over my limit. It would only bid on an Xbox if I hadn't already won one. I tried yesterday but they all went for more than I was willing to pay, so last night I added loads in and left it. This afternoon finally it got me one for £41 plus £10 postage costs. I got the Xbox, a controller, DVD remote and 7 games :-)

I haven't had an aerial plugged into my TV for a couple of months since I hooked my TV Recorder card up. So now I will be able to watch TV as I record it from Bed and watch any films I fancy :-)

New Phone

Yesterday 3 rang me about interest I had expressed in X-Series from them. I said I was interested but had another month left of my Orange contract. So they said they would give me £50 credit which is more than it would cost for a month of my existing contract.

I decided to make an order. My Nokia N73 is being delivered on Tuesday along with my slingbox which will enable me to stream tv to anywhere in the world including my new phone.

Mobile Phone

I have been looking at new phones. My contract expires in January, Orange have already been on the phone trying to get me to take a new contract but their offers were rubbish. My phone broke 2 days after they rang. I have an Orange SPV C600 and the main menu button stopped working. Which means I can't unlock it, nevermind do anything else. So I have gone back to my SPV C500 which is actually a better phone (the keys work anyway).

I have been looking at all the offers from the different companies and I have always avoided Three because their coverage was always rubbish but it now appears they are as good as the others. I then noticed that from next month they are lauching X-Series which is like unlimited broadband for phones and comes with some useful programs like Orb, Slingbox, Yahoo & Google among others. At the moment there is no indication on price, it will be announced on the 1st December. Only 2 phones will be supported initially but I quite like the look of the Nokia N73 after a lot of research, takes good photos and can use my existing 500MB MiniSD card. It may become my new phone on Three if the price is OK and they will transfer my mobile number?

Nildram = Shit

I have been using Nildram as my ISP since I moved to my own house, previously I used Zen who were fantastic but had introduced a more strict usage limit for new customers. I decided to go with Nildram because they had no usage limit outside of peak hours. Yet in reality I have downloaded nowhere near any limit in an entire month anyway.

Since June I was over billed for 3 months for a static IP, after several complaints I finally got refunded. Then they said I hadn't paid for the static IP in June yet they had over billed me for it for the 3 months following.

It appeared I had finally sorted out all the billing but then from last Friday I kept having intermittent problems accessing websites. I would eventually be sent to: http://194.74.65.98/index.html
This makes it sound like a BT problem but I never had the time to investigate further. This has kept happening intermittently ever since. I started to think it could be a problem with the DNS servers when the fault arose again tonight, yet my FTP download continued to work. I rang Customer Support who told me to write in the IP addresses of the DNS servers to my router rather than obtaining them automatically. I did this but the problem persisted. I decided to have a look on ADLS Guide at the ISP forums and in the Nildram one there were several people complaining about the same problem.

I decided to use OpenDNS servers instead and so far have no more problems and websites appear to be loading more quickly too.

If I have any more problems I am moving back to Zen.

TV Recording Certainly A Project

I said I wanted a project when I first mentioned building a computer to record TV programmes. That's certainly what I'm getting, I have had nothing but problems from the beginning and I'm only on the testing stage of the card. I couldn't get any signal when searching for channels but disconnected my freeview box to test it upstairs and when I got back upstairs it had found some channels on the second attempt. I think it could of been because it was splitting the singal without a booster on the aerial. Haven't connected my Freeview box back up to test this theory yet.

The actual card itself seems very good its just the software that came with that is crap. It's based around 6 or 7 year old programs, that I first used about that long ago. Anyone who isn't very technical doesn't stad much chance of using the bundled applications successfully.

I had already decided to try GB-PVR a free PVR program for Windows. After a few minutes of searching a found the information I needed to make GB-PVR recognise my card. This part worked fine but I have had hassle with the TV listings. I tried Bleb free listing but they can't show ITV channels so thats no good. Then had load of hassle using XMLTV listings but sort of got it working now. Another problem is that the 2 tuners in the card don't pick up all the channels, each tuner seems to pickup channels the other doesn't. This may be because of the aerial and will know better once I get a booster downstairs.

I have recorded several programs and watched some of them back all worked without any problems. At first there was a problem trying to play them back on the Xbox because of the format the programmes were being recorded in "dvr-ms" its about the only format the Xbox doesn't playback perfectly but after more hassle I got it recoring in "MPG" and all is now well.

I have recorded 3 programmes tonight, Beyond Boundaries, Cold Case, Incredible Animal Journeys and Las Vegas is recording at the moment. I probably wouldn't of had time to watch any of these normally, but with recording them I can whenever I get chance.

I could leave the card in my main computer for a while until I have more money because I can still use it to do most things while it is recording. If streaming to the Xbox works perfectly I could then put the TV recording computer under the stairs as I had hoped. The web scheduling worked perfectly once I got the channel listings sorted :-)

Labels

My last post mentioned about labels as a way or sorting blog posts. I can't be bothered to go back and label all my 800+ posts but I have labeled the last 25 or so. If you scroll down on the right hand side there is a section called labels. If you clicked "run", it will show you any posts I labelled run. I will try to keep the number of lables small or it will become useless, wont label every ne post either.

Eventually I might label most of my previous posts, at the moment it can be filed with the other tasks like re-organising my music, updating websites and painting. Will get done one day when I can be bothered.