Daniel Maclean

Recently I grew tired of my complex XBMC setup for the house and decided to see what all the fuss was about with Plex. I'd heard about Plex many years ago as an alternative to XBMC, but at the time that was all it was, just another variant of XBMC. Targeted primarily at Mac users, I had little interest because XBMC was also available and it was very good and more customisable. However. Plex got serious! It's barely recognisable compared to what I remember. What stuck out for me: Incredible ease of pairing my NAS with the Media Center's using a email address and password (plex.tv account) Installation and setup on my Ubuntu based NAS was simple and didn't require any command line foolery The availability of Plex for iOS, Android and the Raspberry PI (not officially supported but works great) The great web interface allowing access from anywhere to my content Airplay support (although this is in XBMC as well) Built in transcoder! Channels for BBC iPlayer, e

Some time ago I bought a new Macbook Pro and gave my old one to my wife. She loves it but it already had a good few years on it. It was a Macbook Pro 13 (Mid 2009) and was in need of a good home. At the time since I had my fancy new machine, so the normal maintenance cycle i'd do on a 2-3 year old system just floated by. My wife isn't a techy so naturally she put up with the bad battery life and the performance issues and just put it down to the "Crapbook" :-) Enough was enough! There being nothing technically wrong with the system, fans were operating as expected, memory wasn't dropping address's and even the HDD, a 500GB Hybrid Momentus XT was working great. The battery I actually replaced about 6 months ago because it was lasting all of 40 minutes, got it off ebay and was easier to install than the HDD upgrade. The only clear reason for bad performance was that after years of OS upgrades from the original version of OS X to the very latest, it was fina