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

Well I’ve finally done the untethered jailbreak of my apple tv 2 and I’m really impressed with the results.

The jailbreak wasn’t too difficult (although I still use pwnage tool to get the apple TV 2 into DFU mode as it seems much easier). Once in DFU mode I plugged in the power cable then  it’s just a case of running greenpois0n RC6 (mac version) and hitting the jailbreak button. Once it says complete, wait around 40 seconds before removing the usb cable and inserting the HDMI cable. You will have an extra tab on your apple tv called greenpois0n. Click this and click install cydia and it will download cydia from the repository using apt.

When the apple TV 2 reboots you will have a nitoTV tab, which allows you to install a few different apps including XBMC. I installed XBMC this way, but the installation failed so I fired up terminal on my mac, logged in via SSH and ran the following command ‘dpkg –configure -a’ as root. This fixed the local apt files and re-installed XBMC.

Following a further reboot of the Apple TV 2 we where rolling. I had lost wifi, but re-installing nitoTV fixed that. I also disabled the apple software update in NitoTV to stop it nagging in the future.

XBMC looks amazing in 720p over HDMI. I installed the PM3:HD skin which is quicker than the default skin, and matches that used on my old xbox. I’ve now retired the xbox and the new apple tv is superb. Plays 1080p .mkv files without issue. My only complaint is that the remote is a little limited, but using the xbmc control app for my iPhone fixes that. Right back to work on Kool Badges before having another play with the Apple TV. Any questions lease ask.

I’ll post up more findings.

Well after all the hype over the iPad, I have to say after playing with one I’m not overly impressed. It’s a quick ass piece of kit, don’t get me wrong, but the price point is way off. After all it’s iPhone OS so we rely on apps, and the lack of file system access & printing mean it will never replace a laptop. Besides, I can’t see CS4/CS5 for iPad arriving anytime soon. I really do think it’s a good piece of kit, and would have one no question if the price wasn’t so high. I’ll get one soon enough but it’s not a game changing device so no rush.

So today we have the iPhone 4 announced, and that is a game changer. The iPhone 3G I have is probably the single most influential piece of technology I have bought in years. It has freed me from the office allowing me to do my work from anywhere. Emailing, blogging, tweeting, calling, texting, browsing, apping. It really is a great device, and the iPhone 4 promises so much more. A 5MP camera, front & rear facing with flash, awesome. Glass front & back which is many times stronger than plastic, and won’t scratch like the plastic backed 3G, awesome. Faster HSDPA superb. 720p video recording, nice. Multitasking, yes. It’s just ticking all the boxes for me. Video calls look fun and I could see myself dealing with my Business Partner in Scotland from down here on the south coast improving no end with Video calling on our iPhones.

I love it already, and will be buying one. The slated release date is 24th June so I’ll be there for the 32GB version. Only choice I need to make is Black or white?!?

That is all. iPhone 4 awesomeness.

iPhone 4 promo