Just Me

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos - allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music - The Music collection
3. My TV - schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

So seeing as how this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, I decided it was probably time to give it a wee bit of an overhaul.

So, I’ve upgraded WordPress and some of the plugins, I’ve even installed Donncha’s Wp Super Cache Plugin. but there’s more to come. so long as what I’ve done doesn’t explode first, Fingers crossed then.

Wow, is it really August since I posted last? Well, seeing as how I know the answer is ‘yes’ that’s a bit of a dumb question really.

Anyhow, how to start back? There is the old reliable ‘what have I been doing?’ format or the ‘ignore it and pretend it never happened?’ format (Well it’s too late for that one now) or how about the ‘come clean with the reason you haven’t been blogging’ format.

Well the last one’s easy, I didn’t feel like it. :p and that’s because a lot has happened in my life since last August. I guess that brings me into the ‘what have I been doing’ format but not for long.

So what have I been doing?

August was spent working, September was spent travelling all over Europe, October was spent visiting mum, November didn’t see an improvement for mum and she passed away peacefully at home on the 11th, December saw a Christmas of adjustment, January until now was in general a bit quiet and mostly about connecting with some old friends online, getting ready for the move into our new home, oh and I went to Creative Camp.

So am I likely to change my posting schedule? Well, let’s just wait and see

Yeah, It’s monday and I have the day to myself, Elly has to work so I’ve got the house to myself. Now what am I going to do with myself?

Well I’ve already caught up on all my blog and news reading, my Google reader has no unread feeds left for the first time since I switched from Newsgator. although it seems to not want to allow me to add more feeds which is odd cause I know I don’t have as many as the likes of Robert Scoble but I can’t add anymore now

From my reading frenzy this morning, I see Grandad has Blognapped Granny’s Blog to wish her a happy birthday, the oul romantic! Well at least he didn’t head off tourist hunting for the day

Gizmodo seems to be getting less about the gadgets and more about the gags, these days, so much so that I hardly seem to read it anymore, could it be that the volume of posts is costing them quality? Surely not.

And Finally, over on the Blather Zeitgeist, Damien has posted a brilliant short film from Blur Studios, very funny and well worth the bandwidth and time it takes to view it.

So am I going to mow the lawn and fix the Media Centre PC today or just laze around the house all day and do nothing, It’s my day off after all.

While I was playin around with this blog at the weekend I decided there are a few things I would like to change here, hopefully I’ll find the time to do them, soon.

• Make my “Archive” page work
• Make a “Category” Page
• Make an RSS news feed page

This probably sounds fairly simple and straightforward but unfortunatly my knowledge in the whole coding area isn’t the best, so these thing’s may take quiet some time

Yup, that’s how I feel about it right now. I spent some time with my blog today for the first time in ages. I upgraded to the latest version, installed a few plug-ins. I also tried to sort out my sidebar issues again, I had hoped that the upgrade might fix it for me but alas no

So I’ve been investigating and it seems that there is something in certain posts that is causing the sidebars to vanish from the page. There are a few common threads with these posts…

1. They were all written in Wordpress “rich text editor”
2. They all contain images
3. They were all saved as drafts and edited over an number of sittings

For now I’m just not going to use the Rich text editor, hopefully as I post more and the effected posts move off the front page the issue will become less prominent. I guess I’ll just have to live with it, until I work out whats causing it.

On the upside, the new plug-ins mean people can now digg my posts if they feel the need and I have some added colour thanks to the images feed. The new category cloud in the sidebar looks so much better than that horrible mess that I used to have and I finally have a functioning Spellchecker, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if it’s not up to the task

It’s one of those things that bugs me about technology at times, it’s just not as simple as we’d like it to be. There’s a lot more going on with modern technology than most of us realise and it just doesn’t always do what we expect or want it to. That said It’s great to have the technology working for us… most of the time anyway.

It’s been a few weeks since Tim broke the news that Pandora would be blocking non US Ip addresses. I was so disapointed, I love Pandora’s service and I will miss it. I mean don’t get me wrong I understand the reason’s behind this decision but it’s still a hard one to get used to.

Good luck Pandora, I can only hope that you can resolve the issues soon. I would be happy to signup for a pay per play account if it meant I could use Pandora’s service again. I’ve blogged about Pandora before and it has helped me find some great music I would never have heard without your service.

Wow, I spotted this on Gizmodo yesterday. An unconfirmed rumour of a new Logitech peripheral ideal for the HTPC user with a Media Centre PC. I just hope that it’s not Vista only. That would rule me out for the foreseeable future. I’ve heard to many storeys about DRM gone mad on the new Microsoft OS so I’m not planning on upgrading until I get a chance to check them out further.

Anyway, this little keyboard is a great idea, we’ve gotten used to having a wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room as well as the remote, but it would be nice to be able to put them away outta sight and still have all the functionality.

So, I’ve been trying to work out how to get rid of that awful Lexus off my page header for ages and finally Niall loans me his can of “Lexus begone (TM)” and the lexus is gone.

And replaced by, that, not at all pretentious looking, photo of me, hey it’s better than stock art!
I’ll be watching my stats to see just how far they drop with that in the header!

There was another problem with the HTPC…

What to do with the boxes?