Daniel Maclean

With the release of OS X Yosemite from Apple last week it's been a few days of exploring all the different features that have been introduced into Apple's latest OS. I like the sleek new UI and Safari looks much better. Spotlight has had a facelift and seems to do so much more than it did before. But the feature that sticks out for me, is Continuity. I really like the Continuity feature in OS X Yosemite with my iPhone 5. So I wanted to find a way of pulling together a way of quickly dialling numbers on my desktop without having to fire up FaceTime or use Spotlight. One way of doing this is to create an Automator application which executes some very simple AppleScript so that when you double click the app on the desktop it dials the chosen number, here are some steps to re-create this: Fire up Automator and Click "New Document" Select "Application" and click "Choose" In the search bar at the top left, type in "AppleScript", then do...

I don't normally do reviews on just products themselves, but thought i'd make an exception. I was in the market a few months ago for a new monitor and as the last time I bought one was over 5 years ago much had changed (both how I use a computer and what is available). I mostly multitask between coding, emulators, emails, web and chat which means I need a lot of screen real estate to avoid alt-tabbing every 2 seconds. The monitor I had at the time was a 24" Acer monitor which was fine, but was VGA driven and I have a Macbook Pro Retina  which required converting from DisplayPort to VGA. For reference, I have two brands of this converter, the official Apple one and a 3rd Party. Both are terrible and are prone to flickering and general crappiness. This more than anything coupled with not enough screen pushed me to get something different. So, after a few weeks of research I settled on the LG 29EA73 With it's super wide aspect ratio at 21:9 vs my old 16:9, I c...

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...

Been meaning to post about this one for a while, but I suppose with some actual experience using the system now i'm better placed to give some real feedback. The Hardware So before getting started, the following are the various bits of hardware I had to purchase from Amazon: 1 x  Raspberry Pi Model B 512 MB RAM Latest VERSION 1 x  PCSL Brand - Cyntech BlueBerry Case for Raspberry Pi with adaptor to fit to VESA 100 Monitor 1 x  FLIRC USB Dongle for Media Centre / Raspberry Pi / XBMC 1 x  UK Micro USB Power Supply Charger For Raspberry Pi - 5V 1000mA 1 x  Edimax EW-7811UN 150Mbps Wireless Nano USB Adapter I already had a few SD cards lying around, so I just used an 8GB SD card that used to be in my SLR. It was actually one of these: 1 x  Sandisk Ultra 30MB/s SDHC Card 8GB Putting it together is not complex. The case I bought fits the RPI perfectly, just slots into one half and just attached the other. Couple of screws later and it's ...

Wow, what a nightmare Sky Fibre is. All I wanted to do was replace the crappy Sagem wireless router with my Asus Black Diamond router and it turned out to be a 3 week sprint of reading about Asuswrt, Tomato and udhcpc. Turns out that yes, it's a pain to setup, but it's definitely possible... and with the stock firmware! :-D So, how does it all work? Well, firstly, the Sagem router communicates the with BT OpenReach modem like any other ethernet based device, except it uses MER (MAC Encapsulated Routing) to authenticate the device so that you can't just plug in any old router. What does this actually mean? Well it means the Sagem router sends some very specific information to the OpenReach modem, the client id. This client id is naturally not found in any configuration screen, you have to sniff it out of a DHCP packet to get it. You have to connect your laptop/system via ethernet to the Sagem router and make sure nothing else is connected. Then give your laptop/sy...

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...

Normally I wouldn't write a post for something so trivial such as a memory upgrade. In a normal ATX or AT form factor Desktop PC or even a modern laptop, it normally isn't that difficult to upgrade the system memory. In fact this was one of the first things I learnt to do when playing around with my dad's old system, an Intel 486dx based system with Windows 3.11 installed. However for those who own a ER1401 they will know that it's form factor, case design, etc is compact and I had some challenges while doing the upgrade. Here are some notes for others which if I had known in the first place would have helped me: Please note that this is not a complete list of instructions and that if you attempt to do this, that you may (and probably will) cause some damage to the chassis due to the fact it was never designed to be opened!  I done the whole upgrade i.e. Opening of case, removal of old memory and installation of new and rebuild in around 30 minutes, but if you ...

In my previous post I talked over the experience I had with the initial upgrade. It wasn't the smoothest of upgrades to be sure, however it's always a good upgrade when it works without my better half knowing anything has changed :-D I also mentioned some issues I was having, specifically the following: VGA Mode error on boot Audio set to Analog but coming through HDMI anyway Thumbnails on my shared drive don't seem to work with the new database, this is either because XBMC Eden index's them differently or that during the migration from the old to the new format, there was a conversion fault in the DB. However I haven't checked this out yet in more detail, could well be something entirely different. Well the good news two out of three of these issues are solved. Details below: VGA Mode error on boot So it turns out that a fix that I had to put in place with a previous version of OpenElec caused problems for the newer version. Specifically the splash scree...

Nothing more nerve racking than preparing for a major upgrade on production hardware. Sure I could have installed the new OpenElec to a external disk then tested from there, but I prefer to jump in with both feet! So how did it go? So I downloaded the latest image from the openelec.tv site (the 1.95.1 version which to all intensive purposes is 2.0) and extracted the contents as normal. I used my Windows laptop to do the work required below as apposed to my Macbook, simply because it was closer to me... yep I'm hardcore :-p I then copied the new KERNEL and SYSTEM images (along with the MD5 files) over to the SAMBA location //openelec/updates on my running ER1401 system. So far so good, system restart is then required to have OpenElec do the upgrade based on the files that I just transferred above. Apon reboot I got the familar messages than new images had been detected and that it was upgrading. It automatically reboots then starts with the new and updated OpenElec and XBMC...

So after the release of XBMC Eden , it was only a matter of time before OpenElec was also updated to include the latest version of XBMC. The guys over at openelec.tv have now also released the 1st beta version of OpenElec (1.95.1) or 2.0. Good times! As i'm running a system which is classed as "Generic" i.e. doesn't require a custom build, time will tell how the update/installation goes. What i've read so far is that not only is there significant changes on a OS level within OpenElec, but also there have been changes to the DB that XBMC maintains, so i'm not expecting the upgrade to go smooth, but here goes nothing! The guys over at OpenElec.tv have put together a wiki on how to upgrade , so give it a go yourself if you feel up to it. Will post my results after the upgrade has been completed. Image can be downloaded here . UPDATE: To see how it went check out this  post !

Can't imagine this is very ergonomic or even safe to wash! But that aside, nice idea, just can't imagine you'd fit into any real office tapping away at your crotch while looking at a screen. http://www.webpronews.com/exclusive-keyboard-pants-so-you-can-dance-and-still-type-browse-etc-2012-02

Ok, so took some reading and exploring to fix this one but it's actually relatively straight forward to fix. I actually don't use the standby/suspend feature that much because I'm a bit of a hippy and would rather it was just off. However it annoyed me that it didn't work. What was the problem?

In an effort to build the most powerful HTPC system that you can have you have to consider not just the technologies which are useful to yourself, but others in the household. More often than not my explanations on DLNA, UPNP, SMB or AFS go down like the titanic and no matter what measures I put in place it never seems simple enough in reality to demonstrate. So what am I rambling on about? Update 1: I wrote this article some time ago now, but much has changed since then. Firstly OpenElec was released as final and has been updated a few times since then. I'm now on 1.0.2 for instance. The guide was written for RC5, however the instructions should still be applicable. Update 2: If you are struggling to get this working or it just won't work, then don't worry. The latest version of XBMC Eden (currently RC2) has Airplay and AirTunes support built in! http://xbmc.org/download/

Ok, so yep. Photographers worst nightmare next to batteries running out during a special event. Dropping the camera. If i'm honest it didn't drop as a result of slippery fingers but because the tripod I was using wasn't properly secure. Doh!

Updated 20/05/2013: Openelec keymaps have moved from /Userdata/keymaps.xml to /Userdata/keymap/keyboard.xml Ok, so thought it would be worth noting this down for others as well. I use a One For All Smart Control  to control my TV, Xbox 360, Surround System and SkyHD box. I figured that it would be a natural extension to include the new ER1401 system into this mix. Note: For those coming straight to this article, this is my system running OpenElec i.e. XBMC, i've written articles before on how you can build one of these systems if you can get the hardware. So, thankfully after a rummage through my "man cupboard" I found a old Microsoft Media Center remote and IR receiver which by luck works out of the box with OpenElec. So I configured my One For All remote control to send Media Center remote control signals and bush bash bosh, I had control of my OpenElec system.

Ok, so after the massive success of getting OpenElec up and running with little to no problems I faced what initially seemed like a big problem, but as always once you have a solution, it seems trivial. Within the XBMC Constellation application there is a button on the connection menu to send a WOL (Wake on Lan) or "Magic Packet" to turn on the device which it is controlling XBMC on. Clicking this buttons straight away did nothing except change the label in the menu within XBMC to "Package...". Not informative at all.

Ok, so spent a couple of days playing around with my newly built eMachines ER1401 and i'm really in amazement at how powerful the setup has become. Let me try and share some useful information so that others may benefit. First of all here is the specifications of the system itself, i pulled this from the site I purchased the system from. Here is a link, they still have the deal on for this system: http://www.ebuyer.com/267867-emachine-er1401-desktop-pt-nbzec-004

So after an evening of downloading distros and more reading I've now got OpenElec and XBMC on two separate USB sticks ready for usage on the new hardware when it arrives tomorrow. Interesting experiences getting them on sticks though, OpenElec was a breeze as it came with the software to do this as part of the distro download however with XBMC I had to use a third party tool called Unetbootin . Tested both of them on my normal desktop, so far so good. Will post a blow by blow entry of my experience with the installations soon.

I'm all for experimenting with OS's and discovering this for myself. However I was a bit disappointed to see that there wasn't a blow by blow comparison on the internet. I found the following pages for other peoples reference, they don't have pretty tables, but make for interesting reading, really to gauge other peoples experiences: http://htpcbuild.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/xbmclive-v-s-openelec/ http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12376.0 http://xbmcmediacenter.com/openelec-htpc/