My iMac is a mid 2009 model iMac with the 2.93ghz core 2 duo processor, 4GB of ram and a nvidia GT120 dedicated graphics card. I thought this would be plenty to run Mw3 in low graphics settings, but I was so surprised to see it run at high graphic details with 2x anti aliasing enabled and sustain a minimum of 30fps on really detailed open maps. When in buildings where less scenery is visible its possible to hit 60 or 70fps. Bearing in mind this is with everything set to high so the graphics look great, and 30fps is perfectly playable & fast. If you want an even faster gaming experience you can reduce the graphics quality. This is also running at the iMacs native resolution of 1920×1200 resolution.

The first step was to run the boot camp assistant in utilities and download the latest boot camp drivers. I saved it to a memory stick for installation later in windows. The next step was to partition the hard drive. I decided to set aside 100GB for windows as I’ve got MW3, BF3 and elder scrolls skyrim to play on the pc (until the Xbox is fixed).

Once partitioned I rebooted with my windows 7 ultimate X64 in the SuperDrive. Remote holding the option key on the keyboard and select the windows disc to begin the installer. Work through the installer and when asked to select an installation partition, select your boot camp partition and click format. Once formatted proceed with the installation. Once complete the system will reboot and boot into windows.

Next insert the thumb drive from earlier and install the drivers. The setup failed to boot on windows x64 so I went into the installation folder and into the apple folder to start the installer manually. This will install all the graphics, airport, volume controls and every other driver required, ensuring maximum compatibility.

The final step was to install MW3 and startup the game. At first boot it was running at low graphics settings with no antialiasing. The fps using fraps was around 90fps. Once I cranked everything up this dropped to a very playable 30-40fps average even at such a high resolution. This is a great solution for mac owners, much more favourable than emulation. The performance is superb, especially bearing in mind that my machine is 2 years old. Owners of newer i5, i7 and quad core machines would see even greater performance.

I’m about 60% through the game now, with no slow downs & rock solid reliability. I can’t wait to try skyrim later today.

Here are a few pics of the game running. Apologies for any typos, I’m typing this from the iPad in a car park during a break from Christmas shopping.

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So far I’m really impressed. The apple migration assistant was great and copied everything over Ethernet in a little over an hour from my old machine to the new one. That’s over 90gb of stuff copied & organised with only a few clicks. Today I’m sat in a coffee shop working, modifying php scripts, uploading files and configuring a MySQL database. What’s more I fully charged it last night and after 5 hours of use I still have 36% charge left, and it’s been hammered today already. So much stuff open including dreamweaver, photoshop, safari, mail, iTunes.

Another great thing about this laptop is the unibody design. My previous laptops always felt a little brittle, like if you picked it up it would break in two. This laptop feels very sturdy & rugged.

Granted all these perks come at a price of over £1000 but our new philosophy is to invest in the best. For too long has cutting costs caused headaches and days of installing & reinstalling.

So far I’m loving iCloud & photo stream. All my photos in sync ready to use on the iPad, iPhone & macs. So much easier than trying to manually sync everything up and creating duplicates.

Anyway a few photos of the new baby.

So far I’ve changed the mod rewrite rules to produce friendly URL’s and changed a lot of the on page content. Also improved is the internal link structure of the site which aims to get more links to each & every page of the website. I’ve now got the total of internal links upto 108k and over 62k links coming in, mostly from the same sites (my own sites) but it’s a good start.

I’ve already hit position 5 in Bing & Yahoo.co.uk for blinds which is much better as the site was essentially unlisted before.

This Week I’m concentrating on their Velux Blind section. This has had little to no work done on it. I’m also improving their Social Media strategy over the coming weeks.

Please checkout some of their velux Blinds, let me know if you have any ideas on optimization for these pages, as always I love to hear from the blogs readers.

Acacia Apricot Velux Blinds
Acacia Azure Velux Blinds
Acacia Bazzar Velux Blinds
Acacia Beige Velux Blinds
Acacia Black Velux Blinds
Acacia Blue Velux Blinds
Acacia Bottle Green Velux Blinds

I’ll keep you posted on here with the progress and expect a lot of links to be added to the footers of my own sites.

http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/aluminium-venetian-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/blackout-roller-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/roller-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/roman-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/vertical-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/wooden-venetian-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/woodweave-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/velux-window-skylight-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/decora-25mm-aluminium-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/deluxe-roller-blinds.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/decora-vertical-blinds-89mm-slats.html
http://www.bruceblinds.co.uk/decora-wooden-venetian-blinds.html

1. Go to Sources -> Edit -> Add

3. Type in “http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/ios/” (Without the quotation marks)

Now once the repository is added and updated, search for XBMC in cydia and hit install. Mine installed really quickly and I was up and running in minutes. All that was left to do is add my SMB shares from the iMac and I could start streaming videos in any format directly from my mac. No need to convert to mp4/m4v and no need to manually copy them across into the VLC app. All in all A nice use for the iPad, portal streaming throughout the house. I’ve also setup the iPhone 4 for streaming which is excellent.

As this is a free app I’d advise you all install and have a play with it. I’ve now got XBMC on every machine in the house, including my jailbroken Apple TV 2 and it’s the centre of my home media.

This text is partly my own work and partly complied from other tutorials.

You will need a copy of Lion GM installed on your mac, along with a copy of xcode 4.1 (available from a lot of places, legitimate or otherwise). You will then also install first macports and then samba 3 via terminal, but most of this stuff is copy & paste. Finally, I’d install a copy of Textwrangler for mac. It will let you edit files in its text editor without using the command line, which is much easier, and will let you unlock & authenticate to save/open files anywhere in the filesystem.

First, install Xcode 4.1 (DP7 or GM is needed currently).
Second, install MacPorts from SVN using these directions taken from macports site

Check out MacPorts source
In Terminal, one line at a time

sudo mkdir -p /opt/mports
sudo cd /opt/mports
sudo svn checkout http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk


Build and Install MacPorts

MacPorts uses autoconf and makefiles for installation. These commands will build and install MacPorts to /opt/local. I ran all these with the sudo command before them to avoid permissions problems


sudo cd /opt/mports/trunk/base
sudo ./configure --enable-readline
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo make distclean

Open /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf in a text editor. The last line which should look like this:

rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/

Change it to point to the working copy you checked out:

file:///opt/mports/trunk/dports

Now MacPorts will look for portfiles in the working copy.

After installing MacPorts, you may need to add it to your PATH, so go ahead and run in terminal:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

and then

sudo port -d sync


This will make sure that it is added to your path, and you shouldn’t have to specify full paths to binaries. The second command tells macports to download the latest versions of the portfiles (instructions for macports on installing a program)

Once everything with macports is finished setting up, open up a terminal window and type

sudo port install samba3

It’ll automatically install samba 3 and all of its dependencies.

Now to edit the configuration! It’s pretty straight forward if you read through the config file located at /opt/local/etc/samba3/smb.conf (it’s callend smb.conf.sample, just remove the .sample from the filename and open with textwrangler).

Your shares should look something like this (you can have as many as you like):

[Downloads]
comment = Downloads
path = /Users/jodsclass/Downloads
available = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 644
directory mask = 755
read only = no

[Movies]
comment = Movies
path = /Volumes/MyBook/Movies
available = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 644
directory mask = 755
read only = no

[TV]
comment = TV
path = /Volumes/MyBook/TV Shows
available = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 644
directory mask = 755
read only = no

Also, remember to change your workgroup name to match the rest of the machines on your network, mine are all on workgroup so mine looks like

# workgroup = NT-Domain-Name or Workgroup-Name, eg: MIDEARTH
workgroup = WORKGROUP

And the name of my mac is imac so my server string is

# server string is the equivalent of the NT Description field
server string = imac
(that way SMB shares can be accessed at smb://imac instead of using IP based). You can leave the rest of the config file commented out.

All that’s left now is to do

sudo /opt/local/sbin/smbd -D && sudo /opt/local/sbin/nmbd -D


(I’m using full paths so we dont accidentally start up the apple supplied smb server ) and samba will be up and running. The only downside I’ve found is that you do need to remember to start samba every time you reboot (the “sudo /opt/local/sbin/smbd -D && sudo /opt/local/sbin/nmbd -D” commands).

You can use the following launchagent to start the samba server everytime your machine restarts.

Download mine here and put it in /Library/LaunchAgents, and it should automatically start up samba for you.

Now in XBMC just add your samba shares as follows.

smb://imac (or whatever your machine is called in the server string above)

NOTE: Please remember to turn off SMB sharing in settings>sharing>File Sharing as the built in OSX Lion SMB implementation will clash with the one you installed via Macports

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I’m really impressed so far. My only criticism of the iPad 2 is the quality of the cameras. They are adequate, but feel like an afterthought. The resolution is rubbish on both front & rear cameras and my ageing iPhone 3G takes much better stills.

With that in mind let’s look at the iPad 2 itself as a functional mobile device. I’m not entering into the post pc era nonsense. This device will never replace my iMac, but it will complement both the iMac & iPhone. Right now I’m writing this blog entry from my seat on the train somewhere between cornwall & london. my power adapter is buried deep inside my luggage, I won’t be needing it. I’ve got my headphones in, and my music library on shuffle & I’m multitasking between my business email, website backends and my twitter feed. It really is an amazing device and already has changed the way I can work.

I will put a full review up shortly. Now back to my work and onwards to london to support Gary @the marathon.

I finally took the plunge and bought a decent sized external hard drive. Up until now I’ve hoarded away my movies & media on DVD’s but with the cost of storage media plummeting I decided to opt for one of these 2TB hard drives from Western Digital. The My Book Essential is a nice looking unit with a gloss black finish, rubberised feet to stop vibration and a front facing storage gauge indicating how full the drive is. The drive is nice and fast over USB 2.0 and does a great job of spinning down when not in use and even shuts itself down when I put the mac to sleep so is very conveneient.

The drive itself is pretty silent, and apart from the odd click I never hear it operating.

Formatting for the mac was simple and Disk Utility did a full format in around 10 mins. My first impressions of the drive are positive. I’ve already copied a lot of my media back from DVD’s onto the drive and in my quest for a minimal digital footprint I’ve disposed of the disks.

I’ve now used a terabyte of space, but all my disks are now archived on the drive so It’s just free to fill with movies & TV shows now. Now that I’ve got XBMC installed on the apple TV I’m allowing it to scrape the drive for all my media and adding it to the library which is very convenient. True on demand media, complete with movie posters, series information, actors etc. Superb