XBMC Probably the best media center…

This blog is pretty dated and most people should already know this by now. In case you don’t the old xbox is in my opinion is the best media center you can buy not to mention probably the cheapest. I use it to watch videos, view pictures and play my music via my itunes playlists which are all stored on my desktop PC from my living room TV and stereo.  There also a bunch of plugins you can add to enable BBC iPlayer, You Tube, Apple Trailers, TV guide and lots more.  I have not even used all the possible feature set, its that impressive.

The catch is that you have to do some hacking. There are 2 options the first is known as a soft mod and is all done via software and if your interested here a good article on the steps and another.

The more widely regarded is the chip option whereby you buy a chip and plug this into your xbox. The cost should be around £20-30 depending on what chip you go for. I have used the xeceuter 2.6 on 3 boxes so far and all are going strong the oldest being 3 years.

The basics steps:

1. Install the chip
2. Flash the bios of your new bios to give it superpowers.
3. Upgrade the hard drive. Optional but a good idea especially if you have an older IDE drive lying around from an older PC. Compatibility. In order to use xbox live for gaming you need to be able to lock the hard drive. Not all hard drives are lockable you can check this compatibility table.
4. If you used new drive. Partition the drive via xhdm or via one of the auto installers (Slayers or AID)
5. Format the f drive via xbpartioner using 32k clusters if you drive is larger then 137 and less then 512G
6. Install a dasboard unleashX comes highly recommended.
7. Install XBMC and set this to be your default dashboard. (Means playing around with a couple of files)

There are loads of how to guides, the xbox-scene tutorials is a good place to start, or google is your friend.  Its actually not as diffcult as it sounds, but a matter of putting all the pieces together.  The xbox-scene and xbmc forums is a good place to clear up any grey areas.

From here on in it’s all about configuring access to your media. In my case everything is on my PC so I share these drives then configure XBMC to access them via smb network shares. This can be done by either editing the sources.xml file in the userdata directory or via xbmc through the add sources option in the GUI.

What I failed to mention is that the part that makes this the best media center ever is the xbmc software. It’s free, it’s open source and not 100% legal if distributed in compiled format, its also available for many platforms, the xbox being the original. It’s a crime as this software is just amazing, it’s easy to use and it plays everything you throw at it bar new AVCHD formats as these are a little too new and the xbox is an old slow processor and was not built too last this long, but XBMC software has made the xbox live way past its sell by. Just ask an owner if they would trade it.

I will publish another blog soon, about how you can turn you xbox into a backup NAS drive, just another reason to keep that xbox.

Check out these screenshots to get you going. PS – This is even certified by the wife she loves it.

Which In-Ear Headphones?

Let me start at the beginning which might be confusing as the ending is the beginning. You’ll see. I had a pair of Shure SE110 earplugs and although I liked them I thought I could do better as they were the entry level Shure earplugs plus I have an iPhone and thought I might try some earplugs with a microphone that was just another excuse. Good news was we got my missus an ipod shuffle so I was able to pass off by Shure’s to her thus clearing the path for me.

Introducing the first challenger Etymotic hf2 rave reviews from customers (Apple Store), so I bought them. They were crystal clear, very clean sounding but I felt lacked bass even after trying different fittings and getting that all important seal. I would say these are for the purist very clean flat sound. The flange fitting irritated the hell out of me, I could not wear them for a prolonged period. This now got me thinking maybe I really was not an audiophile and a fan of enhancers and bass.

More reading reviews I could not justify splashing out for Shure SE530 which seemed like what I really wanted, other then the £250+ price tag I was going to use my headset in the gym and there no way I could justify using such a costly pair of headphones at the gym. The v-moda ones started to appeal due to all the comments on bass heavy but I thought that seems to be there main appeal I wanted the lot to be honest. So I thought let me try the Shure SE 210‘s as I did like my 110’s and this should feel like an upgrade. They were a lot like the 110’s at lower and mid volumes they were marginally better in the mid and highs (marginal) BUT at high volumes that extra mid and high was horrible you just would not want to listen. Yes I do have this problem where on occasions I like to try and blow my eardrums. Maybe it could be to do with the bit rate of my tunes which vary quite a lot, but I was not planning on adapting my bit rate to suite a pair of earplugs.

Yep back they went whilst in the apple store, by the way at this point I would like to mention no stores let you return earplugs normally, but the apple store has a 7/14 day satisfaction return policy which is usually excluded on headphones, but the receipt or small print does not say that, so I figured I would make the most of it before they realised. Anyway I noticed Apple’s brand new in ear headphones with remote although the volume does not work with the iPhone but forward, rewind, play, pause and answering calls is supported. I convinced the staff that they should break open a pair for testing which wasn’t hard they were just as eager. After half the store trying them out with mixed opinions I had my turn and on first impression I liked it the extra bass was there and they sounded reasonably clear with my love for Apple products tainting me I bought them (that’s a new pair not the now used ones).

They were not as clear as the Shure’s or the Ety’s but they were not miles apart and the extra bass was nice. With the phone features and remote I thought I can live with this compromise plus my tainted romance with Apple (don’t get me started). Haha after a week or two I realized I was constantly adjusting them because they would pop out the sweet spot every few minutes. I tried bigger tips but same thing happened after a few days. Then my moment of magic, ‘I will take the Shure foam tips from my 110’s spares and force them on these’. It worked (picture included of my conversion) and the fit was better, but now I just realized how much I miss my 110’s, yeah I know where did that come from, right? Well whilst changing the tips, I picked up the 110’s and sat there and compared the same tunes and the Shure’s were just amazing in comparison, I would want to listen to songs that I did not even like that much, purely because the Shure’s made them sound so damn good, they would just put into a world of your own, I really can’t explain very well, but I knew the 110’s were the one. Oh why oh why did I ever bother but then I would never have known how much I loved my 110’s in the first place.

Luckily I had passed my 110’s to the wife who really doesn’t care what she uses, so I swapped the apple ones for the Shure 110’s. She was happy with the shorter cord and funnily enough commented that she these blocked out all the sound out (with Shure tips on them), this means she never got the right seal on the Shure’s.

By the way after all this reading it will not help you one bit because I read tons of customer reviews on Amazon and the Apple Store and they all sounded good but truly it’s based on your personal taste, you can take a little information from the reviews, but headphones is truly a personal choice, no one can tell you what sounds better, this just backs the theory that we all hear things differently, just listen to a recording of your own voice. So try them yourself and find your perfect partner more so while apple have this return policy, just ask at the store they will probably tell you if you use them you cannot return them, in which case buy them and then show them the receipt that says clearly you can return them even if they are used, if they have changed the policy then just return them there and then unopened.

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention, I have seen a number of reviews and posts saying that the Shure 110 do not have much bass, I would say either they are bassheads or they have not got the perfect seal, because I can definetly hear some nice tight bass it not lacking at all, I would say its finely balanced.

iPhone 3g Software Unlock Available

So I like many others have been waiting for this day for almost 6 months. Yes the iPhone Dev Team have released the iPhone 3g software unlock last night. 

Steps involved (iPhone Dev team blog post):

1. You need to be running firmware 2.2, update via iTunes. 
2. You need to Jailbreak your iPhone. Follow this iClarified tutorial Windows or Mac 
3. Now to install the unlock known as yellowsn0w. Follow this iClarified tutorial. 

Since last night there has been a number of revisions to yellows0w, but in theory reboot your iPhone with the sim card you want to use if you carrier does not appear on restart, pull your sim card out and re-insert, and you should be good to go. The Dev team is working to remove this step in future.  (UPDATE: Version 0.9.0 to 0.9.3 I had to take the sim out, but 0.9.4 don’t have to do anything, just reboot and Vodafone UK came up straight away.  So I think this may already be solved)

The good news is that the unlock runs as a daemon and on startup injects some magic to allow any sim card to work. So unlike the 2g unlock you really should not be able to brick your lovely phone and you can reverse the process by uninstalling yellowsn0w.

That leaves me just one thing to say THANKS again iPhone Dev Team you know your da man/woman and I do love you, at last back to carrying just 1 phone.

Free Hack to forward hotmail

Since my article on trying to get your hotmail account on your mobile, I found a hack that seems to work and is free, I should call it a workaround and not a hack as your not doing anything illegal. However I guess once MS find out this will probably stop working.

The issue is with a free account you cannot forward to anything but .hotmail, .msn or .live email accounts.

The hack is:

1. Go to options and subscribe to ‘Mobile alerts for new messages’, this will lead you through a wizard which requires a mobile number that you have to verify, just follow the steps its simple. Once you are signed up and back, just click on finish this process. If you have already signed up in the past then you can skip this step. I have included a screenshot of what the mobile alerts screen should look like once it is setup.
2. Then goto Options –> ‘Forward mail to another e-mail account’ and now you can set to any email address you want. And you can unckeck ‘Keep a copy of forwarded messages in your Windows Live Hotmail inbox’ if you do not want to maintain two copies of the same emails.
3. MOST IMPORTANT go back to ‘Mobile alerts for new messages’ and select ‘None – Never send me mobile Alerts’ (So you will not get charged for anything)

Thats it, seem like the forward remain intact and working, I have had this running for over 2 months on someone account and its works fine. I still would advise that you switchover totally but this buys you some time to cleanup and accounts you have tied to hotmail.

Please also read my post ‘Setup Hotmail on your iPhone or any other Email Client‘ for more detailed instructions, you can insert this hack into those steps so it does not cost you anything.

Looking for a new all in one IM Client?

MOTIVATION: I use several IM service providers and don’t want to run 4-5 clients for each service. By the way this is not by choice, but friends all use different services! I have used GAIM (now Pidgin) but never liked it. I used Trillian for years and that worked just great. Although I had to get the Pro version in order to use Jabber. I then started playing around on a MAC and found an all in one IM client called Adium and that was really really good, so it got me looking around for a Trillian replacement.

Along this search I came across Digsby which is still in beta, but I thought I would give it a shot. What can I say its very cool, it’s more then just an IM client. With ever growing popularity of social networking sites, Digby has cottoned on to that and included connections to Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. So you can connect to a ton of IM services, plus your social networking websites. It also lets you connect to a number of Email service providers, so you got multi IM, social networking updates and an email previewer/notifier. Updates are provider in popup which looks a lot like Growl notifications on the Mac, again very cool. Take a look at the screenshots for yourself.

DOWNSIDES: No video, audio or chatroom support yet. Although these are going to be coming in future releases. If you can live without those I would suggest giving Digsby a try, i doubt you’ll regret it.

I have been running Digsby for a couple of months, no crashes, stable and works well, can’t wait for more features to come along, I am hoping for cross service chatroom support that would be cool.

Lastly, I still think Trillian is very good, but I just got bored after using it for years 🙂 Maybe one day I will switch back.

FOR MAC USERS: Adium is the way to go, its not as detailed in its coverage of Social Networking or Email, but its a darn good client, love it to bits and Adium was the reason I had to find something new for my PC, so you could say this is the guilty party, and by the looks of their logo I would say they agree.

New Browser in Town! Google Chrome

Here come the big boys! Yes, Google are entering the browser market. They’re calling it Google Chrome and the beta version is available for download now at http://www.google.com/chrome

The story behind it: well if you’ve got time you can read Google’s comic book story detailing the background and how their browser will work. In summary, the plan is to design a brand-new browser made for today’s market of users, with the introduction of IM, YouTube, Facebook etc this has changed the way we interact, and this is an attempt to build a browser around our new demanding requirements.

First impressions, I like it, but beware it’s in beta and it looks like there’s still a lot of work to do. The basics all work fine, but currently there’s no way of adding plug-ins like the Google Toolbar or any others for that matter. No choice of colours, skins, fancy icons. But you know what? It doesn’t seem to bother me too much.

The biggest difference I see is that each window/tab is actually its own process. If one of your windows/tabs freezes, you don’t lose all your other sessions. You have your very own Task Manager, where you can see exactly what resources are being consumed and, best of all, you can kill individual windows. I can recall many an occasion of IE or Firefox crashing due to a single window – and that really did tick me off.

The other cool thing I’ve found is the homepage, which basically shows a mini copy of your most visited sites, and on the left you can search your history, bookmarks and recently closed tabs appear. Take a look at the image, it’s much easier to see what I mean.

You can also move the tabs around by a simple drag and drop or even pop them in or out of a window, pretty cool.

Startup time is very quick, probably because it doesn’t have to load any plug-ins, and of course a lot of very good Google code no doubt.

In terms of browsing experience and speed, niceeeee – pages load very quickly and it seems to handle everything well. Plus, there are some cool security features you’ll no doubt come across while using it. I like it.

What I cannot work out is how this links to Google’s idea of a new experience with the new demands of today’s surfer, but maybe time will tell.

It’s a very good start and I think I’ll be using it as much as I can. No doubt more functions will be added over time, and hopefully it will integrate closely with other Google products. Considering I’m already a user of Google Email, Calendar, Documents, Bookmarks, Notepad, Pages, Reader, Maps, Picasa, Froogle, YouTube, Blogger and Photos how could I not uptake another Google product!

Another company that should be paying me 🙂

Setup Hotmail on your iPhone or any other Email Client

Have been asked this question a couple of times and there’s no straight forward solution, so I’ll try to keep this as simple as I can.

Firs thing I should mention so that I don’t waste anyone’s time, I could not find a free soloution. The methods described here both cost a little something.

UPDATE 16-OCT-2009: Please read my post on ‘Free Hack to forward hotmail‘ because I did manage to find a free method.

Firstly, most email companies use either POP or IMAP protocols to talk to the server and most email clients can handle these protocols, hence you can setup your email on mobile devices or any email client. Second, some email providers charge you for the pleasure and some do not.

Hotmail, well this is different kettle of fish since it doesn’t use POP or IMAP – hence the headache when you want to setup hotmail on an email client. WHY? For me its just Microsoft being diffcult (and I do love Microsoft, really). Or I hear it’s a way they control the advertising, but who knows and who cares – you just want your hotmail on your iPhone or mobile device.

The first solution is provided by IzyMail, where you create an account and then IzyMail takes care of pulling your hotmail and allowing you access via its own server. I believe there is a $20 a year registration fee, but its free to trial. You can get full setup instructions from http://v3.izymail.com/

The second method which I will detail, uses a gmail (Google’s free email service) account. There a catch, you will require a paid hotmail account (hotmail plus), because without this you cannot forward to any email provider. The way it works is that you forward your hotmail to gmail, you setup gmail on you mobile client. The only catch is that all the emails will still be on your hotmail account, even if you delete them from gmail, so you’ll have to regularly clean up your hotmail account. Small price to pay. There’s also a method to make the reply from your mobile email client look like it came from hotmail and not gmail.

As regards paying for hotmail, you could subscribe for 1 year and have this forwarding solution detailed below, in the meantime you have given yourself one year to change over all your accounts to your new free gmail account, then once the subscription if over, you could close out your hotmail account altogether. I know it sounds painful, but you’ll never regret it.

1. Create a gmail account http://mail.google.com/mail/signup
   
   
   
2. Login to your hotmail account, click on the options in the top right corner, just under sign out.
   
3. Click on ‘Forward mail to another e-mail account’
   
4. Check the ‘Forward mail to another e-mail account’ and in the text box enter your newly created gmail address. Then click Save.
   
5. Login to your new gmail account http://www.gmail.com and click on settings (top right)
   
6. Select the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab, and under IMAP access check the enable IMAP, then click on save changes.
   
7. If you want your replies to look like they came from hotmail, then within gmail settings.
1. click on the ‘Accounts’ tab, in the section ‘Send mail as:’
2. click on ‘Add another email address’.
   
3. A popup will open asking name and email address as you want them to appear in your replies, enter and click ‘Next step’
   
4. Now click ‘Send Verfication’ (you must be the owner of the email address)
   
5. Your hotmail will have received an email from gmail with a verification code, get this code from the email and enter the code and press ‘Verify’
6. All done, you should be back to your main window and your hotmail address should appear in ‘Send Mail as:’ section
7. Now in the same section check ‘Reply from the same address to which the message was sent’

All done in terms of the email setup – so you’ve created a Google email account, forwarded your Hotmail to this new Google email account, and if you’ve followed the instructions in Step 7 you’ll find that any email in your Google email that came from hotmail should appear as if I replied from my Hotmail account.

The last step if to configure your email client on your mobile or computer. For this Google has some handy guides. Go to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12913. Under ‘Configuring’, select your email client or device and follow the steps.

All done. You have your Hotmail on your chosen email client. Don’t forget that your hotmail account still gets all the emails, so you have to cleanup. Also, if you do not login to your hotmail account every 120 days your account will be deactivate. The good news on the gmail front is that you setup IMAP and hence your gmail account and your email client is synchronised 2-way, so no cleanup required, whatever you do in gmail or in your email client reflects the other.

Better than all of this is to just discard hotmail completely and get a gmail account. I know its easier said than done, but I migrated from Yahoo to gmail some time back and it’s been well worth it I’d say.

Hope this helps someone.

Best Universal Remote, Pound for Pound (Harmony 555)

So any boys with toys will probably have a TV, amplifier, 10 million speakers, CD player, DVD player, PVR, satellite or cable, maybe a freeview box, a games console/media centre etc.

Then you have the wife who wonders why she just can’t turn on the TV without a major surgical procedure, and that’s of course after she shouts at you about the fact she can’t find that 1 remote she’s looking for out of the 10 you have lying around.

OK, well that’s my household anyway. Introducing the Logitech Harmony 555. Firstly, let me give you my credentials: I’ve used some cheap unbranded all-in-one remotes, the Sony RM-AV2000 and something that looks like the UCommand 515 to name but a few. What you will find is that I mainly went for touchscreens because they looked flash.

After having used touchscreen remotes, I missed good old solid buttons, that tactile feel you get wen you press a button, plus the remotes I had were huge – none felt right when you held them in your hand, in the Sony’s case you needed to use both hands. In addition to this, programming them was a major disaster – it took me forever and things were never quite setup as I wanted them.

Then I made the dive into the Logitech Harmony market. I bypassed the top of the range models – the 885 and 895 – because at the time they were priced at about £200, plus the 555 had everything I needed, and the bonus was that I found it on offer at Pixmania for £40.

Programing any of the Harmony remotes is simple. Install the Harmony software from the CD provided or download the latest version from the Logitech website onto your computer. Fire up the software and create an account. Login and then fill in the blanks. So you say my TV make and model is XXXXX, my Amplifier make and model is XXX… you get the idea. I’ve entered some obscure brands and it always finds the remotes. The remote database is huge, it even located my infrared light switches, cool. I believe they boast of having hundreds of thousands remotes listed and I daren’t question that. Oh if you can’t find it, then you also have the option to teach the logitech via the original remote and then submit that to be added to their database, very sweet. Their support line I hear is very good, I know a few people that had issues where a single click was so fast that it done the same action twice, this setting can be adjusted too, by yourself or you can get their support to do it.

The next step is to setup activities, such as Watch Cable, Play CD, Watch DVD. A wizard walks you through this by asking you what you use for each activity. For Watch TV, it will ask you what’s your TV source (cable, satellite, freeview), which AV channel is it plugged into, what device you use to change channels and control the volume (your amplifier, for example). You do this for each activity you’d like to setup.

Then we come to the best part – connect the USB to your PC and the other end to your Harmony remote, hit ‘Update Remote’ and watch it go!!! It uploads all your settings into the Harmony remote. Once this is complete, you are good to go.

So now you hit ‘Activity’ and select one from the onscreen display. Whatever unit needs to be turned on for that activity will be switched on and all the channels and settings will automatically be set. Now all the buttons will be for that activity: like channel changing, volume, numbers etc. It’s like you’ve merged 2, 3, 4 remotes and transformed it to a single remote with all the features you want.

There’s advanced setup in the logitech software, where you can customise the onscreen button to do different things if you’re missing something, or you can even get the hard buttons to perform another function if you need it to. I find that it has all the hard buttons you need for most activities you use. Plus, best of all, when you change from Watch TV, to Watch DVD or Play CD, the buttons will do what you expect, Play is play, Record is Record – sounds obvious I know, but trust me, many folks have got it wrong, or miss some key buttons. From past experience, you end up setting say the Guide button to change the aspect ratio of the TV. Not having to do such silly things makes the remote very intuative so anyone visiting could even work the remote and they’ll have it sussed in minutes. I’ve had four of my friends buying this Harmony remote after using it at my place for only 5-10mins! (never did receive my commision)

Another great feature of this remote is that if your batteries run out and you don’t replace them for a long time, resulting in the remote losing all your settings. No problems, you just login to your account, plug in the remote and update. Capow!, all your settings are back.

So why the Harmony 555? Well this is a personal choice. All the Harmony remotes can do everything I’ve mentioned above, but the main difference is that the higher the model number the more remotes they can programme – the 555 can handle 15 remotes and I believe 8 activities, which was more then enough for me. Then the 885 and 895 have colour displays and a rechargeable base. The colour display does have a nice function whereby you can have icons on the buttons, but I was happy to forego the icon..the function alone was enough!. The rechargeable base would have been nice, but the batteries last about 6 months under much abuse at my home, so I am happy with that, plus I’d rather have one less plug to house. Then the 895 also has an RF feature. Then there’s the fact that the back of the 555 remote is rubber and is contoured, so it feels comfortable to hold – the 885 and 895 models don’t have this, although I see that this feature has been adopted in the new Harmony One. And, with the 555 costing less than £50 – the choice was pretty clear for me!

Logitech, I think you should pay me with a new Harmony One remote – only to test drive, of course 🙂

A Whole New Meaning to Search the Net

A good buddy of mine gave me this link to try out. When you’re searching for something on the net try:

http://www.searchme.com/

It’s totally amazing. The load time is great considering it loads the actual page as opposed to a list of possible sites, plus it’s very visual and lets you filter the crap and get to what you want fast. I believe this is in beta right now. I hope it remains free and goes into production.