Category: Technical

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Downsizing Challenge – Bumps in the road but luckily no car

John Large 3 Comments

So we are still in the process of simplifying our lives. As you can tell by the blog, this has been put off for a while due to various family issues & our need to drive to/from Scotland every few weeks. We are slowly getting back on track but the downsizing is going to have to take a different shape.

As an update, we have now spoken to our landlord & are waiting on them finding a suitable tenant for the property. We are going to end the lease on this property & stay with family until everything calms down allowing us to move on. The plan for the future is still the same but due to the family problems we are going to be putting all of our things into storage for a while. Our storage is already sorted and we have committed to a 150sq/ft room. That’s pretty small when you consider we are in a 4 bedroom house with garage. Read More....

Downsizing update – One room empty

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I finally managed to clear a whole room. The room happens to be a spare bedroom we where using as a store room/guest room. After a lot of selling & donating the contents of the room have been sorted & downsized considerably. Bed has gone as has associated bedding. Furniture has been sold and a lot of the stuff we where storing has been sold off. Feels great. The room is now clean & closed off.

Most of the stuff we had stored in this room where things that people had bought for us which we didn’t really want but felt obliged to keep. These have now been donated to charity. This means that someone will get some joy out of them rather than us storing them & our charity of choice makes some cash in the process. Furthermore we have reduced the size of home we need by one whole bedroom. Read More....

Still downsizing

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Our downsizing challenge is still going on. But things are much harder than we first thought.

Firstly it seems like many people are doing something similar. It’s so hard to sell anything on eBay now and their fees are beyond ridiculous nowadays. People are just less willing to spend. We have sold quite a few things such as the Nintendo wii and other electronics, not to mention furniture, but they have sold for much less than expected. We do feel a lot lighter already so every cloud I guess. Read More....

Downsizing day 19 – wheels in motion

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It’s been 10 days since my last entry on here. Unfortunately work and life has taken over and I didn’t have time to update the blog. However I’m still making a lot of progress.

Last week we sorted out our dressing room (a spare bedroom where we have clothes rails and my wife has her makeup). It’s not as posh as it sounds. We both went through our clothes racks. On our first pass over the racks we tried to look at everything we like and didn’t like or wear anymore. On the second pass we took out a couple of items to give to charity. Mostly older stuff and clothes we hadn’t worn for ages. We did a third and forth pass each time removing things we could part with. Doing this allowed us both to cut our collection of clothes in half. We donated them all to charity and rather than feeling sad about giving up some clothes, we are overjoyed at how easy it is to see what we have. Read More....

Downsizing Challenge – Stuff for sale

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Below are the things that I’m selling off as part of the downsizing challenge. If you are interested in anything drop me an email jodsclass@gmail.com

1. Nintendo Wii + loads of extras – Softmodded consoles plays backups & homebrew

Nintendo Wii With Wii Sports, wii Sports resort and Wii motion plus controller, Mario Kart with steering wheel, wii fit plus & balance board, console in white with nunchuk, standard controller and arcade controller. All boxed. Very good condition. Looking for £100 for the lot, or a near offer. Read More....

Apple TV 1 – CrystalBuntu – OpenELEC

John Large 49 Comments

It’s been a busy week. With the lack of ability to jailbreak the Apple TV 3 and the rising prices of the ATV2 due to it’s jailbreak friendliness I was torn between spending a lot of money on another Apple TV 2 or going down a different media centre route.

I’ve always used XBMC (now Kodi) since it’s birth, even before when it was Xbox Media Player & my family have become accustomed to how everything works. It works wonderfully for our needs & we now don’t have any subscription TV services (granted we download TV episodes but we have a TV license & could watch them for free on our set top box so hardly a crime). We also convert all our DVD’s into .mp4/.m4v/.mkv files so we can watch them without going to find the disk. Read More....

Air parrot for osx – AirPlay mirroring to atv2 & atv3

John Large 1 Comment

Although AirPlay mirroring is slated for release in OSX mountain lion next month, I’ve always found air parrot to be a great way of AirPlay mirroring & want to share this review with you before Apple steal a lot of their custom.

Air parrot allows you to mirror what’s on your mac screen over the network to your apple TV. It will mirror in 1080p if you have the latest apple TV and it also mirrors the audio from your mac. Surprisingly it keeps everything in sync audio wise and is a great way of watching silverlight content such as SkyGo on your TV via apple TV. Read More....

Google Chrome for IOS.

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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 & passwords ready to go. Read More....

OSX Lion SMB Samba XBMC fix

John Large 32 Comments

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 grab a copy of NFS Manager for free & Install. Its available from NFS Manager Read More....

iPad 2/iPhone 5.1.1 Jailbreak absinthe music not working Fixed

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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 itunes match.
3. Install Open SSH via Cydia.
4. SSH into your device with the default username of root and password alpine (I use cyberduck to SSH into my ios devices as it’s a familiar FTP style interface over SSH, very easy to manipulate files without terminal).
5. navigate to /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control
6. Delete everything inside the Music folder
7. Delete any file modified recently, all playlists DB files etc from the itunes folder at /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes (You could probably delete everything in the folder as it should be regenerated by ios, but do so at your own risk, perhaps backup all files in this folder first.
8. Once deleted go back to settings & enable itunes match.
9. Fire up the Music app and watch all your music re-download from iTunes match, now click any song and it should play from the cloud.
10. Download any/all tracks you like & enjoy. Read More....

Mophie juice pack air for iPhone 4 – review

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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. Read More....

Finally invested in better batteries for our gadgets

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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 a set of 1300mah batteries and cost £5.99 from asda on offer. We also opted for some heavy duty 2300mah batteries to power things such as our digital camera. The 4 2300mah where more expensive at £10 but they are well worth it for high drain devices. Now here is the fun part. We spent £16 in total. We have been buying disposable batteries in packs of 4 for £1 each and buying maybe 8 packs a month. So in two months this will have paid for itself, and these are guaranteed for 100’s of charges so they will essentially save us hundreds of pounds over the coming years. The Eco benefits & the cost benefits make this purchase a no brainier and I really hope all my readers will switch to this much greener & cheaper way of powering gadgets. Read More....

Raspberry PI – the perfect project machine?

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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 of joy. With a simple software mod (jailbreak) I was able to install XBMC on the atv2 and replace my 3 original xboxs from my home. These where fully reconditioned, chips removed & donated to charity as simple xboxs once again. Read More....