Sandboarding

Found an old cd with some photos and a video clip of a Cornish adventure... One of my friends had built a prototype sandboard, which in theory 'should work'. We climbed the biggest sand-dune we could find and started practicing our new sport...

Boxee media center on an Acer Revo 3700

It's amazing that you can get a full HD 1080p home media center for under £200. The Acer Revo 3700 is a prefect piece of hardware for running Boxee's free media center software. If you're thinking of gettin something like this for your home, it's definately worth checking out Boxee's own hardware - the Boxee box by Dlink, which is an acquired taste in design, but also comes with the Boxee remote with a full keyboard on the back. I decided to go with the Acer Revo instead, as it left more options for updating or switching to other software down the line. Note Boxee is built on xbmc and if you're not keen on the social sharing side of Boxee, it's well worth checking out! So here follows a brief guide to setting up your Acer Revo 3700 as a home media center.

1) Assemble your kit, hook up your Revo to your TV for audio or sound, i use the VGA and standard audio out, but there's HDMI there too, either way you'll get the full 1080p presuming your TV can handle the resolution.

2) Install Ubuntu. The cheaper Revo comes with Linux Linpus installed, I created a Live USB of Ubuntu 10.10 and booted to usb. To do this press f12 when you turn it on at the initial Acer screen and select the USB stick from the menu. Then once the desktop loads, use the icon on the desktop to install Ubuntu, let it use the entire disk and replace Linpus on your Revo.

3) Once instaled there's some tweeking to be done, first is to fix the wireless card. Open the terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

then add the following line to the end of the file:

blacklist rt2800pci

press 'Ctrl + O' to write the file, then 'Ctrl + X' to close it. That's it! the first time you shutdown the machine it'll freeze, when this happens, hold the power button in for 6 seconds and it'll power down suddenly. Press it again to power it on and it shouldn't freeze again now the fix has been applied.

Then apply the updates. Go to System -> Administration -> Update Manager install all updates. It'll take a while. Then go System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers and enable the nvidia driver (recommended). This will require a restart to take effect.

4) next install Boxee. Go to www.boxee.tv and download the version for Ubuntu Linux. Once downloaded install the software.

That's essentially it. You're now ready to go, launch Boxee and add your videos to the library and enjoy watching some videos!

From Wordpress to Blogger

As a PHP web developer, i often use my blog as my testing ground for new stuff. I've always used Wordpress for small sites and blogs and Drupal for my larger sites, but always wondered how well Google's Blogger works...

Seeing as they use it for their own Google blogs (webmaster, analytics, etc..) i thought it can't be bad, and obviously you don't have to worry about SEO, as i'm sure they pretty much have it covered, so I decided to move my blog and give it a try for a while.

Moving was pretty easy. First I created a new blog using my Gmail account and chose a theme. Second i exported my blog from Wordpress and used http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/ to convert the xml backup file onlline. Third I imported the new backup file into Blogger and tweeked some of the themes widget settings to get my 'Labels' displaying as links - done.

Hope this new platform will inspire me to blog more often. I'm still busy running the Xbox gaming blog: theLostnFound but I have lots of other stuff i want to blog about, which'll end up here.