Matts blog

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

I’ve been scrobbling music from iTunes for a long time (I started a new last.fm account in 2004) but to be honest I play only a fraction of my music via iTunes so untill now my last.fm has on reflected a small percentage of my music listening.

That has now all changed, I have installed MobileScrobbler on my iPhone to scrobble the music I listen to in the go and hacked the last.fm Mac client software in to my newly upgraded AppleTV Take2 box, this pretty much plays music from the time I wake up till when I go to sleep, so should give a much better set of statistics on my music playing habits.

This article is extremely interesting, I’m not sure I fully agree with all its points about Dyslexia, but certainly a very interesting and hopefully en-lighting to people without dyslexia as to why a lot of dyslexics, including myself think it is an advantage rather than a disability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/business/06dyslexia.html

I finally sat down today to migrate my Twonkymedia Server to my AppleTV so I can get the automatic updating of the library via iTunes without my horrible rsync scripts to my old TwonkyServer.

Why do I need a media server if I have an AppleTV? So I can share music with my Xbox 360, MS kindly let you play whatever music the 360 can get its hands on in game and theres something nice about listening to Radiohead’s In Rainbows whilst playing Crackdown

It turned out to be incredibly easy….

1) Install the latest Twonkymedia Server for MacOS on you Mac
2) scp -pr /usr/local/mediaserver to somewhere on your AppleTV (I used ~frontrow/Applications
3) Edit ~/frontrow/Applications/mediaserver/twonkymedia-default.ini and edit first 3 lines as follows:

contentbase=/
contentdir=+A|/mnt/Media/
friendlyname=Twonky AppleTV

4) add a line to /etc/rc.local (or your startup scripts) to start ~/frontrow/Applications/mediaserver/twonkymedia
5) Go to http://appletv.local:9000 and check that its indexing files ok
6) Enjoy music on a uPNP device via your AppleTV

See, Easy!

I found this video on YouTube and it lead me to www.yubliss.com, looks pretty interesting. Certainly a new way of looking at stuff in the world.

It is my opinion that people on Facebook need to sit down, stop playing pirates and ninjas, or whatever, and REMOVE apps from their profiles, I went to leave a quick message on a friends wall just now and it took 20 minutes to find the wall in their 2 mile long profile page, serious, it was so long I had to replace my mouse batteries due to overuse of the scroll wheel.

Facebook is now on the brink of being so overly successful as to break its fundamental use - to connect people and facilitate easy communication between those select friends.

So we got Leopard on a MacBook Pro we purchased at work today so I thought I’d try out Mail.app and see if the rumours about being able to subscribe to imap folders is true.

It seems like the functionality is there, but I can’t seem to actually get it to work, the problem seems to be related to the IMAP Path Prefix, I use dovecot and Cyrus IMAP servers and can’t seem to find a setting that lets me see both public and my own folders off my inbox.

The other thing is why does something get marked as read when I click on it, just because I’ve clicked an email does not mean I’ve read it.

Why can’t apple make this work? With Thunderbird IMAP works with any imap server I connect to with out a problem, so it can’t be that hard.

The rest of leopard looks fine, nice UI, seems responsive, Spaces is very nice (but so was virtudesktops), would I go and buy the upgrade for my own mac? Nope, Mail is the reason I would upgrade and as it seems to be still very broken I might as well save myself the pain of getting everything set up (Fink/MacPorts being the biggest unsupported feature).

Leopard - a big disappointment.

If Apple are reading this, PLEASE fix IMAP support in Mail, even if this means copying Thunderbird, even outlook express does a better job at IMAP than Mail.app.

So I decided to become fully apple-ised…. I’ve got myself an AppleTV to replace my Zenzonic Z500 that wouldn’t play H.264 and have spent the last couple of days ‘tweaking’ my apple tv, it now supports samba, has gained 100Gb of hard drive space, and has the ability to play media of various types including Hi Def Divx’s with AC3 sound tracks.

I am happy Anyone want a Zensonic Z500???

Bad news is my Xbox360 has got the 3 lights flashing problem as is off to visit Dr. Microsoft

Since I became yet another facebook user I can’t say I’ve updated this blog very much

Life in California has been busy, busy, busy, my parents came over at the start of August so we got to finally tell them we are married

We took a very cool roadtrip down to Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon, and I can say, those trees are pretty big! We then headed down to Ventura through the ’scenic’ route over the mountains through the old oil areas south of Bakersville, which is a very interesting drive.

For my birthday I got a box full of balsa wood and some radio gear and have pretty much spent the whole time building an aircraft which is now looking very flight worthy! I also got some UK essentials - Marmite, Bluetak, Whiskey and Yorkie Bars,

I just watched this presentation on identity on the online world.. The speak brings up some good points and offers a solution, I’m not sure I’d be willing to implement it right now, but if a few big Web 2.0 companies jump on the band wagon I might: