Well everyone in my opinion should be protecting their new nano against nasty scratches. I hate babying the nano everywhere I go so as to not scratch it!
I did a little poke around on ebay when the new nano was first released, nothing. A couple of weeks later, boom, someone in China (HK) is flogging silicon cases. The pictures didn’t look that accurate, I ordered two cases anyway (one for me, one for a mate). I told my mate not to expect a well made or good fitting case, oh well. They arrived, and you know what, they fit perfectly, look good, and work just as you’d expect. It’s much like the case I had my previous nano. Fantastic! Now I’m not scared to put the nano down on ‘whatever’ surface, or scared to sit it in the car glovebox for when I’m on the road.
I stumbled across this plugin for wordpress that makes your wordpress site nicely viewable from an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. Infact, if you have either of these devices, I’d love it if you could try viewing this site with it give me some feedback!
“The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. It detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s User Agent and serves up the content with the special theme only to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.”
I’ve been tinkering with iLife ‘08. Going to get a site up and running for my wife to play around with on her Mac. I’m setting up some adsense ads in the site, which is now built in to iLife ‘08, but I cant figure out for the life of me how to set the ads up to channels, using my existing adsense account. If anyone knows how, let me know!
It has a neat feature where you can set how much bandwidth the client has during certain hours, like an on peak and off peak.
My off-peak quota is 15Gig, not much I know, and isn’t nearly used enough. So I figured why not set Transmission to start downloading at 2am when my off-peak quota starts?
I added the Transmission app to the crontab to start up at 2am:
open terminal, type “crontab -e” this will open vi. Hit “i” to start inserting text and put in:
then hit “esc” then “:wq” to write and quit. The “2″ in the above line represents 2am. Dont forget to remove the entry when you do not want transmission to start at 2am! you can do this by opening the file as per the above, but instead of “i” inserting text, just hit “dd” to delete the line, then “:wq” to save and exit.
you could probably do this with just about any app (schedule them to open/run as you desire)
What is Perian? Perian is a codec that lets you play various file/media types under quicktime, Apple’s flagship media player, editor, etc. For example, if you have encoded some of your DVD movies into DivX format, Perian will play them in quicktime.
What’s that got to do with the Apple TV? Well the Apple TV only plays mpeg-4 / H.264 media. What good is that if you have a huge collection of other-format media? Get Perian on your Apple TV asap! (see www.awkwardtv.org for information on how)
Where are we going with this? Okay, okay. The real, reason behind this post. I figured something cool out! I’ve been using Handbrake to rip some of my own purchased DVD movies to disk. I’m ripping them to H.264 (mpeg-4) and then playing them with my Apple TV, only, hang on! Some, if not all of these movies look a little “dark” on my Apple TV. When watching them, they look DARK. I checked it out on my Macbook Pro, same thing! really dark compared to the orginal DVD! Striving for quality I did some reasearch. It’s not a Handbrake issue, it’s more of a Quicktime issue. I read somewhere that the easiest fix (apart from adjusting brightness on your display) is to install the latest version of Perian component on your machine. I did it on my Macbook Pro and wow, it worked! Don’t ask me anything technical about it, I don’t really know what Perian has to do with mpeg-4 / H.264 I didn’t even know it was used to decode these formats. But it works.
I previously had Perian 0.5 on my mac, installing version 1 really helped. I erased the Perian off my Apple TV and installed the latest version that I had on my mac. bingo, looking great!
I forget where I found this information, it was in some random forum. Thanks to whoever!
Well, after enduring 20 months of overcharged bills, frustrating customer services and dropouts more frequent than a quokka’s digestive system, I finally said goodbye to 3 and went back to my old time fav: Optus.
Ive been waiting for this day a long time coming, and just to make sure there were not gonna be any nasty hidden costs in my termination from 3, I logged in and checked my account and bill details. Upon doing this, I stumbled upon my latest bill (yet to be paid) and saw something really irregular. For some unknown reason, 3 had decided to charge me from a period of 3/8 to 30/8 and then a SEPERATE billing period from 31/8 - 3/9.
I rang up and followed through the normal routine of getting to a live customer rep.. and eventually got through. I asked how this had happenehttp://www.invertedreality.com/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=browse&post_id=117&_wpnonce=1c9b297461&ID=122&action=view&paged
 d, and they gave me all sorts of responses, badly constructed sentences that were confusing, but suggestive of me being the source of the hiccup. To cut the long story short, I managed to claim back almost $37 credit to my current bill.
I ended the call.
I asked for an extended lunchbreak, and went to an Optus service provider down the road.
About 45 mins later, Same call features, better coverage, friendlier LIVE customer service, Credit to offset my 3 cancellation fees (and with change!) Built in no fuss Insurance plan and a 0 dollar SE W880i Walkman phone! It couldnt been sweeter.
This phone is absolutely beautiful. Slim, light, and amazing screen and sound quality. Pure Sony…
Wow, my first blog post.. Thanks James for opening up my first semi-attached blog account!
I have never been one to tell my own tales… but lets just say occasionally, Ill share some thoughts and ideas relating to the Daily Ramblings, Nerdology, Art, Toys and of course… R/C racing goodness.
Well I might as well start with something fresh.. my new Mobile Phone! The tales of the mobile saga coming up…
I couldn’t help myself! While I was at DigiLife buying my new iPod nano. I bought a 40G Apple TV too! Why only 40Gig you ask? I don’t really have any intention of using the internal hard disk to store media! Here’s what I went through when I got it home on Saturday evening:
Firstly, I video’d myself un-boxing it. Then I plugged it in via component cable to my widescreen CRT and chose 576p @ 50hz for the resolution. It fired up and was running in no time, connected to my iTunes, all very easy.
I downloaded the “patchstick” and created a USB bootable thumb drive. Stuck it in the ATV and rebooted. It did some trickery, rebooted and when it came back up it had a new menu in the main menu “AwkwardTV”. Excellent. I enabled SSH then proceeded to have some fun.
* note, I’ve not once opened up my Apple TV. You just don’t need to do it these days. Patchstick = awesome.
The Patchstick copied Perian to my ATV for me (codec to play divx, among other formats). I found that apple file sharing wasn’t working. My Apple TV came with version 1.1 of the software, with no easy way to revert back to the ideal version 1.0. Not to worry, some more tinkering and I had this baby cranking!
I needed to copy some files from my Macbook Pro 10.4.x install to the ATV to get some functionality back, like mounting afp shares over the network. Only, get this, 10.4.10 binaries will not work in the ATV’s kernel. I discovered that I had to download the 10.4.9combo updated from apple and extract some files from that! After many hours of goofing around and more downloads (turbo’s kext enabler) I had my ATV connecting to my other mac’s!
I also installed ATVFiles, and nitoTV to allow me to browse the network shares and play movies using quicktime or mplayer.
I carried out a few little other things as I discovered that I needed them, eg creating an /etc/rc.local with the kext enabler within so I was able to mount afp shares on boot. I might in the future modify the rc.local file to auto mount a machine/share upon boot up. Perhaps when I decide how I’m going to store all my movies.
So far so good, I love it, the youTube plugin is cool too! unboxing video:
