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.

Mac Tip: How to launch applications - Fast!

Here's a little tip of how to launch Applications really quickly on your Mac. This makes use of the Spotlight feature to search for the application you want to launch, which saves you all the work of going through the finder and searching for the launch icon.

Tip: Hold the 'apple key' and press 'Space' this is really easy as they're next to each other and can easily be done with your left index finger and thumb. This opens the spotlight searchbox, now start typing the applications name. Within a couple of letters it should have selected the app you're after, so just hit Enter to open the app.

eg: 'Apple key' 'Space' 'i' 't' (searches and selects itunes and enter opens it straight away!

Seventh Day - Skate Video

This video was made circa 2006 and reminds me of the time I spent living in Cornwall and riding long boards for the Christian Skate clothing label - BelieveClothing.

Particularly happy with capturing my 360 on film (at 17:21 mins)

A video about Skate-boarding in Cornwall. With a focus on long-boarding and downhill sliding.

The video documents a group of Christian Skaters as they reach out to young people of Falmouth Cornwall. I am both in this video as well as helping film for it. This video was edited and produced by David Renyard - davidjdesigns.me.uk

WD500 External Hard Drive Stopped Working

Recently my Western Digital 500GB external drive stopped working. Fine one day, then no power the next.

Symptoms: No Power at all, no noise or spinning. The power unit itself will light green when not connected to the drive, but as soon as it's attached the green light goes out. If connected the power light will stay light for 1 second, then no power.

This seems to be a common fault with this drive and it would seem obvious that the power supply has failed. However following through the problems these guys had, it would seem it's not the power supply, but the external casing that's causing the drive to fail.

Solution: Rest assured your data is probably still safe, as the hard-drive itself is likely to be fine. You have a couple of options:

1. Buy a new external hard drive casing/enclosure, this costs around £20-30


2. Fit the drive in you Desktop PC as an internal drive.

Seeing as you can buy a new 500GB for under £50, I didn't want to spend £30 on a case. So went with the internal drive method. It's easy to do and if your PC's not too old it'll probably have everything you need inside the case!

First take your external drive to peices, just strip off the outer case until you've freed the drive. It's a standard 3.5" SATA HDD. It has two connectors on the back, the smallest is the SATA DATA connection that connects it to the motherboard, and the longer connector is for power.

In your desktop you'll probably have a spare power socket on a ribbon cable behind your existing drive, you can also use the small SATA cable to connect it to the motherboard.

Boot up your PC and your away! The drive will be recognised in the My Computer window. If your PC's a bit older it may only have IDE connectors, but all is not lost, you can pick up an IDE to SATA converter that'll allow you to connect it up.

I bought a SATA and Power connector from Maplin for just under £4.

Good Luck!

Switched to Mac!?

After years of criticizing people who buy macs, i've made the switch.


I've never understood why anyone would pay so much more for a machine that essentially does the same job as a PC, and yet for some reason i caved in and last week went out and bought myself a Macbook Pro.

Why? well, now i'm working as a full-time php developer i spend all day building solutions to problems and so when i get home i just want to use my laptop quickly and easily without having to deal with any issues. My acer laptop had begun to overheat with normal usage and would frequently freeze up, so i decided to take the plunge.

So far i'm extremely impressed! the quality of the build and the functionality builtin to the hardware are exceptional, little things like the light senstive backlit keyboard are just stunning.

Of course i'll contine to use my Windows Desktop machine, mainly for editing podcasts as it's geared up to handle my HD video, but for day-to-day usage i'm goin to be using my macbook.

Expect more posts on switching from PC to Mac, and web development!

Create Your Own G1 Android Wallpaper!

Ok so if like me you have invested in the world's first Google phone, chances are sooner or later you'll be wanting to change your wallpaper.

Of course there's plenty of free wallpapers out there, but if you want to make them yourself here's some info you might find useful.

Resolution

the G1 display is 320x480 pixels (portrait mode), but then of course you have three desktop screens to slide between left and right.

These screen are not side by side though, they overlap.

The overall wallpaper size should be 640x480.

Here's a visual representation of how the desktops overlap



Click it to view this Jpeg in full resolution. You may find it usefull as a guide when making your own wallpapers to see where they'll overlap.

Alternatively you can download the Photoshop Template i built here  Photoshop G1 wallpaper template.

When you've built your wallpaper, save it as a jpeg and email to yourself at your Gmail account.

Easily pick up the email on your phone and save the attachment, it'll save by default to your pictures folder.

that's it, Have Fun!

Extra stuff in the Box - G1 (UK Feb'09)

I just got one of the latest released G1 phones exclusive to T-Mobile.

I say latest release because they've started including a couple of extra things in the box.

I chose the Black one (even though the White one came out after), and was pleased to find that they'd bothered to re-package the black phones too.

The three things i found in the box that i hadn't seen on previous unboxing videos, was:

- a cleaning cloth (like you get with glasses)

- a screen protector, a thin piece of plastic to peel off and stick over your screen, although it wasn't sticky at all, more like it was held in place by static, saying that i got in prefectly lined up (second attempt) and it hasn't slipped despite me draggin my fingers across the screen, it won't budge.



- Headphones/Handfree adapter, the phone used to come with a pair of headphones with their unique usb plug on (not the normal 3.5mm headphone jack) but i got an adapter with the usb connector on one end and ended with a mic pod with the standard headphone socket in (plus the pair of crappy headphones that come with it, like will most likely stay in the box), and a small button, i guess when using the headphones if your phone rings you can press the button to take the call using the handsfree.

I'll come back and add some more pics once i've had chance to take 'em. (pic taken on my G1)

Dual boot Vista and XP? #Fail!

K so I had two major problems with my Vista Desktop.

- Mainly my Wacom Bamboo, won't work properly, despite the advertising that it supports Vista. The guys at Wacom told me i had to disable all the features in order to get any functionality out of it, which kinda defeats the point right?

- Secondly (not vistas fault) but my video editing software conflicts with itunes, and obviously i need to be able to run both, not at the same time, but at some point i'll wana change the tunes on my ipod.

So i thought i'd found the perfect solution reading a tutorial on dual-booting Vista and XP on the same machine. I've got 1TB HDD so thought i'd set up the XP side for editing and Vista for normal day-to-day stuff. i was wrong!

I partitioned the drive and installed XP, well i tried.. the problem is that the Vista machine only wants to boot into Vista, and for XP to install it reboots itself halfway through then continues to set up windows.

I found and excellent piece of software called EasyBCD which handles the boot options for different Operating Systems. As XP installs it puts it's own bootloader in, then reboots and fails.

So i get stuck with 2 operating systems, none of which will boot. I have to boot with a partition disc, format the drives, re-write the bootloader and reinstall Vista from a recovery disk. Phew tried that bout 3 times now...

So i've been sat thinkin of an alternate method of getting the same results...ah VMWare.

VMware will let me have a virtual XP environment on my Vista machine, I can just run the Video converter that conflicts with iTunes on he virtual machine (all editing will be done on Vista, with VM closed to get the best render times possible.)

and the Wacom... would you believe it.... once I'd recovered Vista to the factory settings with the backup cd, I installed the tablet driver and it worked - PERFECTLY!

Windows 7 - Vista's Replacement

So Windows 7 will be the new OS from Microsoft, and finally we get to replace that horrible Vista package.

I'm really hoping that they'll have listened to what people want from an OS and have addressed the issues we've all had with Vista. My main machine at home came with Vista pre-installed, but at times I've really considered just formating it and clean installing XP instead, there's just been problems installing stuff, drivers, programs etc just dont support Vista properly.

Anyway... Windows 7... what to expect? Well why not find out for yourself?

Microsoft are providing the Beta as a free download! but don't get to carried away, with dreams of free software. Some things to keep in mind are, it's only the first Beta, so still has alot of problems, the whole point of releasing the Beta is that we will all install it and tell them what problems we find.

In return we get a glimpse of what the new operating system will be like, i say 'a glimpse' in order to make something very clear, you are not gettin Windows 7 for FREE. In fact i've recently heard that the beta will end in August.

Whilst it's a nice idea that the testers would get it for free, can you imagine the effect this has on their initial sales. On the first day the Beta was available the servers crashed cause so many of us went there looking for our free copy.

Well with all that said, if you're still interested in testing the Beta for Microsoft you can head here to download it.

Warning: Don't install this on your main pc, chances are you'll blank your computer and end up with a buggy version of Windows that'll only last till August. If you've got a spare pc, burn a disc and give it a try.

Comic Idea

RobinHood Land

K so i moved from Sunny Cornwall to the crime filled streets of Nottingham (dubbed the gun-capital of the UK) back in July, and spent three months applying for work in Website Development.

I'd spent 6 months in Cornwall looking for a suitable position, and hadn't found a single vacancy. So when i arrived in Nottingham i was over-whelmed with the amount of jobs goin.

That said it took 3 months of applying for 2/3 jobs a day before i was offered a position. Actually that's not completely true, I was successfully interviewed twice before my present job, but certain job specifics lead to me holding out for a more suitable role.

On my third interview i was successful and for the last 2 weeks have been working for an international engineering company as a Web/Graphics designer. The job came nicely bundled with some C.A.D. training which may prove useful in the future.

So that's where I'm at lately. In Nottingham now, working full-time in Web and Graphics and still running theLostnFound on the weekends and organising a few Halo nights!  see theLostnFound for details.

Moving Away....

Hey guys, haven't posted in a while, as it's been a bit crazy at this end.

I'm moving to Nottingham at the end of the week, mainly to get more work in Web Development as there aint much in Cornwall.

Other than that i've been spending all my time developing www.theLostnFound.co.uk my gaming website and sitting in Cafe Nero Truro, planning new web projects including a hilikusOnline redesign if I get around to implementing it.

I'm really pleased with LnF, it's been quite a bit of work re-designing it all, but this time it really works well, and after a few months online is already proving successful. Our Video Podcasts are pulling in around 7,000 viewers and the forum is buzzing with activity, and podcast requests. Some people have started wanting to play online on xboxlive, so we've held a few special Halo Nights which have been awesome to catch up with people and play as a team.

theLostnFound - takes off!

Two years on theLostnFound is still goin strong and with a recent relaunch things are lookin good.

New Video Podcasts Online Now!

Whole NEW section PODCASTS 

Hey guys, i've been filmin podcasts for a while now with theLostnFound.

Unfortunately their site is currently being redesigned and i've decided to post some of the videos here too.

Also in the future i may be recording some of my own vids too specifically for this site.

Have a watch and feel free to post comments, you don't have to sign up just post away!

thanks,

Halo 3 - Over in a blink of the eye.

I can't believe it's over!

Remote control tank?

Haha, check this out, a remotre control tank!

DVD Wars - Blu-ray or HD-DVD?

Dammit! Toshiba, the company behind the HD-DVD technology has backed down, meaning Sony's Blu-ray will be the new standard.

Are Video Games to Blame?

Of course not! 

Im posting this after reading this news story from MSN.