Daniel Maclean

So it's been some time since I last posted. Much has happened since then, some big life changing events but all good thankfully! My life has settled down a little bit now so have found myself with some free time. I thought then it would good to start posting on blogger again; about something new and not media centre related. Although, plenty of that to come as OpenElec and XBMC has been making big waves since last year. Over the Christmas period just past I was able to get myself a shiny new Macbook Pro Retina while out in the states. Amazing machine. I'll save you all the usual amount of "it just works", but really it just does. After getting back I immediately set about customising and getting it to a place I was happy with everything. However, one thing I was lacking was easy ways of getting to information on the system without having to run up several apps. If I wanted to get my IP, I could either use the terminal or the network preferences, if I wanted to c...

In an effort to try and streamline the blogging process I checked out some blogging software for the Mac. I came across two of the mains ones which seemed to fit the bill but all with there pro’s and con’s. MacJournal Very easy to use and simple native interface will all the bells & whistles you’d expect. It acts more like a standalone journal first though and a blog management tool second. It can download previous posts but doesn’t seem to have two way synchronisation (at least with blogger the only blog I tested) e.g. I noticed some of my posts were missing tags, thought it would be good to add them now, not happening as it turns out. All in all nice journal editor for offline editing but lack of two way synchronisation disappoints. And it's not free. I wouldn't recommend MacJournal. http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85 Mars Edit Very impressed with the range of features and quickly became my favourite. Some of the features included are flickr...

Imagine my surprise when after completely giving up on streaming video's/music/photos to my Samsung TV (due to the Windows only software supplied with the TV being unreliable and slow) that Vuze, the torrent client, suddenly supports this very function. Turns out that the developers actually have a similar model in there office and added support for it just because :-) Excellent stuff guys! And what is even better about this is the support for doing this from Mac OS X and Linux too :-) :-). I've tested this on Leapord and Snow Leapord for the Mac as well as Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. All work perfectly although the Device menu is missing from Vuze on Ubuntu. The developers have said this is due to it not being supported yet, which is fair enough. I think by default all files are shared anyway... To be honest, I played around with that many settings, I may have enabled it without realising it... http://www.vuze.com/features/device Now Vuze is lacking a few features which...