John Large ⁽¹²⁸⁾

I can't believe it has taken such a long time for chrome to appear on the app store for ios. I switched to chrome on all the desktops & laptops a while ago as safari was buggy & a memory hog & Firefox started crashing a lot since they tried to update too much of it. Chrome on the desktop is great. It syncs all our passwords and bookmarks on all machines, which is a great help when you share hardware like we do. It means that no matter what machine we are using we have all our bookmarks &…

This is an update to my last post regarding fixing samba in OSX Lion. I have since ditched samba altogether in favour of NFS. NFS is built into OSX as standard & is a very fast unix sharing protocol. It's quite hard to configure but thanks to a handy OSX tool called NFS Manager it couldn't be simpler to setup. NFS is now also supported in XBMC and Firecores Media Player for ATV2 so this is a good time to get to grips with NFS & rid your life of Samba once & for all. Ok First you need to…

I've been having a problem with Music playing on my iPad since jailbreaking with Absinthe on ios 5.1.1. It's jailbroken so I can install retinapad for iPhone apps & xbmc for plugin development. Music in the built in app wouldn't play. I Use itunes match and it would show as playing but nothing would actually play & the track time wouldn't progress. I suspected a corrupt library somewhere, so I fixed it as follows. 1. Close the Music app, then force close the app to make sure it's not in memory. 2. Go into settings > Music > and disable…

I finally took the plunge and invested in an external battery pack for the iPhone 4. Being an iPhone owner since the 1st generation I'm well aware of the iPhones issues with battery life. I've managed to change my charging habits so that Everytime I'm sat at the iMac I dock the iPhone, Everytime I'm in the car I charge it via the 12v socket in the car via an adaptor, and whenever I travel I take the powercord with me and plug it into any plug I can find. I'm forever topping up. This has served me well, but…

It's been a long time since we last had a decent battery charger & batteries. In fact it was october 2007. I remember it because we took them away with us to NYC for a trip and they never came home with us. Since then, many of our gadgets come with good quality built in lithium ion batteries, so there has been little need for a battery charger. Regular visits to the pound shop or ikea have been perfect for cheap batteries, but far from froogle or Eco. So we invested in an energizer accu recharge. It came bundled with…

I'm not really an Eco warrior. I do my bit, save power & recycle like everyone should, but the major driver for me in being more economical & in turn environmentally friendly is costs. I hate paying lots of money to oil company's, gas suppliers, electricity companies and other multi nationals who literally have us over a barrel. They have given us an appetite for energy with low costs and now we are held to ransom paying huge amounts of money to continue our lifestyle. Much worse is that many of these things such as driving to work and heating…

I finally managed to get hold of an energy monitor for the house. I've been looking for one of these for a good while and finally got a great deal on an unwanted eaga monitor via eBay. My monitor is brand new and in original retail packaging and cost me £11 including delivery. The monitor itself consists of a live cable clamp, a battery powered transmitter and a mains powered monitor. The live clamp clips around the live feed cable on the house side of the electric meter. Small magnets detect the current running through the cable and the transmitter…

Anyone who knows me personally or follows my twitter/blog will realise I'm the eternal hardware geek. I love tinkering with stuff, hacking it to go beyond its manufacturers limitations and generally trying to squeeze every single use out of my hardware. I used to do loads of Xbox hacking on the original Xbox, experimenting with various chips and firmwares and generally making that underpowered box do much more than it should. From web servers to media players, fully fledged emulators to NAS I used my xboxs for everything. Then along came the Apple TV2. A £99 fully self contained box…

We finally took the plunge & invested in an apple airport extreme. We have been having a lot of problems with our normally rock solid Cisco router and e crappy salem router supplied by Sky. The problem is while we are in between houses we are living in an apartment. It's not ideal as we are used to living in a larger space. The key to where we no rally live is the lack of wifi interference & channel overlap. Before we moved out of our last house there where no wifi networks in range of our property, not one.

I've been having issues with my Xbox overheating. It's due an upgrade but I'm saving hard for a new car so I'm not spending any money. Since I don't have any windows machines anymore I decided to setup a boot camp partition and install windows 7 to play modern warfare 3. 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…

I finally took the plunge and bought the MacBook pro to replace our ageing dell 1545 laptop. What an upgrade. I was really torn between the portability of the MacBook air and the power of the pro. After weighing it up and asking certain techy friends I decided to ditch the portability of the air and go for the slightly heavier but more powerful pro. 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…

I Finally got around to installing XBMC on my iPad 2. I've been meaning to do this for ages but I've been waiting on the Jailbreak coming out. Setup was really easy simply go to cydia on your jailbroken ipad and do the following :- 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…

I tend to listen to SomaFM a lot. I work from home and always have either secret agent, doomed or groove salad pumping out in the office. This goes back to my days working in a web design/development studio. We had Soma playing in the office all day, and it was a really chilled out atmosphere (We developers even got on with the designers some of the time :) ) Anyways I finally bought the SomaFM app for the iPhone and I can't recommend it enough. You get access to all the channels you can acess via Soma, and you…

UPDATE - I've found a much better fix - Use NFS shares instead- Use NFS shares instead of Samba with XBMC Well it's been a nightmare few days with the upgrade to Lion GM breaking Samba sharing. For me NFS isnt really an option, it's clunky, and my network is full of old windows machines, not to mention the XBMC's on the Apple TV 2, Ipad 2, iPhone and the old Xboxs. i needed a fix for Samba, and this came in the form of installing Samba 3 on Lion via Macports and setting up the smb.conf file manually to…

I've finally started reading Digital Editions of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Historically I've been buying the magazine from their Yahoo store and having it mailed to me from the USA, but the kindle edition means I can have it on the day f release, and read it on the kindle or the iPad. Perfect. Also means I'm building up a great library of digital content with me at all times, ideal if I'm out & about and want to refer to an article. Check it out

I'm currently reading The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. I downloaded the book as a DRM free epub (I'm funny about where I buy my books from as I have a Kindle, an iPad & an iPhone so i tend to chop and change my reading device). I'm about 50% of the way through the book and it's quite scary stuff. It's so far prompted me to slim down my Facebook account, including removing extra information from the account. I've also taken steps to block tracking websites by disabling tracking in Firefox & ramping up my Adblock Pro. It's really…

After a month searching the length & breadth of Britain for a 3G iPad 2 I finally got hold of one in the Exeter apple store. It was a 150 mile round trip with no guarantees of bagging one but I did it. I'm now the proud owner of an iPad 2 64gb 3G model with an O2 microsim. 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…

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…

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.

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…