Kerry and I were invited to a combined Halloween and Flat Warming last night at Anna & Jen’s new place. Kerry was unforuntely working and so I went alone, without a costume. I did bring snacks, liquer and wine so they still let me in. Lots of people had cancelled and Anna wasn’t very well so the back-up plan of heading to the Auld Hoose swung into action. We somehow got stuck watching Bound (the Wachowski bros. film before The Matrix) and ended up at the Hoose just after midnight. It was packed out with lots of kerazy dressed-up folk, so I had a quick drink and then escaped to annoy Kerry at work.
Archive for October, 2005
post a commentI’ve just realised that I haven’t blogged about the free blueyonder speed increases. I was originally on a pretty standard 1Mb cable line, but now have a mighty 4Mb! This is mainly the cable companies playing catch-up with ADSL and completely out-doing them so they don’t get left too far behind. This new connection means I can download at 500kb/s (that’s kilo-bytes!) and upload at 48kb/s. Awesome 
So now that I have my shiny new wireless access point I’ve managed to get my media player thing working over wirelss. Which is just beyond cool and keeps Kerry happy, as there aren’t huge lengths of CAT-5 trailed eveywhere. Its a nice little box and fits in with the rest of the D-Link range. I’ve had no problems so far with reception but then it’s only going about five metres. The firmware is pretty neat and has stuff like syslogd support so that the access point log gets piped across to my linux box’s logs aswell. Now I just need a laptop or something to waft around the flat, marvelling at the magical wireless technology.
Woo-hoo, an extra hour in bed!
We’re often joking at work about how cold it is. Maybe this is the answer: The Heated Mouse.
Now that we’ve got a TV and everything in an actual living room the problem arose of how to watch all of our downloaded media on it. Kerry would have probably killed me if I’d set-up a noisy media PC in there, plus it would be a bit too expensive. A chipped xbox was another option, or some kind of dedicated divx player. I was browsing ebuyer and came across the Lite-On LVD-2010 which is a DVD player than can also play mpg4, divx etc and can stream stuff via ethernet. Seems pretty sweet! I faffed around too long though and ebuyer sold out, I eventually got one from dvdplayers.co.uk, who have now sold out aswell.
It’s a neat bit of kit. It looks just like a normal DVD player but can play content from a ‘Media Server’ on the local network. This clever ‘Media Server’ is actually just a web server that offers a file browsing interface and streams the files to the box. The server software that comes in the box is pants, and uses Java (eww). SwissCenter is a much nicer, open source project that just uses a mini version of apache and PHP. The only problems so far have been that it can’t play q-pixel encoded divx files (whatever the heck they are) and it doesn’t support movie subtitles in external files.
In the retail box you also get a wireless bridge adaptor so that you don’t need to run CAT-5 to the box. I haven’t yet got this working, mainly because I don’t have a wireless access point for it to work with. This presented an excellent opporunity to get one though, and I shelled out for a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ which should arrive tomorrow. More toys!
Kerry and I watched this last night and it was pretty good! If you’re expecting a Gladiator-esque Crusades movie, this is not it. There is actually quite a bit of plot and acting around all the usual Ridley Scott high speed photography battle scenes.
It’s a wee bit slow at the start but picks up towards the end with the siege of Jerusalem being a high point. Very nice CG, as pretty as Lord Of The Rings but not quite as ‘magnificent’. Neil is right about Orlando Bloom’s character. One minute he is a lowly blacksmith, the next he is a master swordsman and siege tactician.
I got this from the library a couple of weeks ago and have been engrossed by it since. Now that we have an actual bedroom without tv and computer I have much more time to read before bed, which is nice.
Blimey! Dabs have gone all CSS, and have valid XHTML! They’re even displaying the W3C buttons in their footer. I can’t think of another sizeable e-commerce operation that does that. Good on ‘em!
via: joshuaink.com