My EyeTV Hybrid arrived today. I’ll tell you what, it’s a good job I didn’t get the DVB-T only version despite being a lot cheaper because as expected I get sod all Freeview here, it does detect the existence of a couple of Freeview channels, just the BBC ones (do they have preference where freeview frequencies are concerned?) but it can’t make head nor tail of them. To be fair my room hasn’t a roof-top aerial connection, I have to use a portable, but I did also try it on the house aerial downstairs via the iBook and it still had no luck.
So, I’m having to use its analogue support which still gets you the quality EPG via a web service and recording facilities so woo. From a portable aerial my reception is barely watchable… as expected. After a mammoth amount of hunting through old cables and shit I found a CAT5 splitter from many years ago so I was able to see if there was anything pick-up-able from the Telewest cable, which my cable modem is using. Hey, who’d have thunk it, Telewest are still transmitting a couple of analogue channels. Analogue cable TV has always been pretty grainy and a little washed out but its preferable to all the wierd ass atmospheric interference I’m getting from the aerial. The channels I get are BBC One, BBC Two, Channel 4, ITV1 and bizarrely a channel which seems to be Bloomburg during the morning and early afternoon and E4 the rest of the day. I cannot fathom why i’d be able to find that, and not say Channel 5?

I’m finding the software to be neat and well designed but during the messing, re-scanning and all that it did crash a few times, or as the mac puts it, unexpectedly closed.

It isn’t quite as streamlined and intuitive as a PVR, for instance you can’t just pause live tv any time you like, it isn’t always recording so you have to press record before you can pause it. Although, confusingly when it isn’t recording pause will do “freeze frame” which at first looks like it’s paused but when you press pause again it will jump to whats happening now and you’ll have missed what had happened meanwhile.

I’m disappointed with EyeTV’s apple remote interface. It feel’s obviously not integrated with front-row despite them trying hard to mimic Apples interface. Also, I appreciate that the Apple remote is rather lacking in buttons but even still they could have done better to make the most of it. Up/down does volume and left/right does seek. If you do Seek when record isn’t running or you aren’t playing something back it just flashes up “not applicable” or words to that effect, you would have thought it more sensible to make left/right do something else useful whilst seek isn’t applicable, especially when stupidly if you want to change channel you have to press “menu” to go back to the menu screen, which makes good old channel surfing a total chore.

Word on the street… I asked 5 people who were mowing their lawns just down the road… is that the latest Pre-RC1 beta of Vista isn’t half bad. They’ve optimised the speed and things are falling into place much more nicely all of a sudden. Thing is however I still don’t feel very excited about it, it still looks like windows to me and a screenshot on Gizmodo reminded me of this perfectly.

Compare these 2 images (no idea if my css is going to cope with 2 images plonked in a post in this fashion). Is it just me, or when you look beyond the nice glass borders and into the actual meat of the standard GUI is it still just a load of boxes? With OSX barely anything looks boxy even in Acivity Monitor, even the boxes don’t look boxy. I know this is just task manager and it isn’t going to be prettified but to me its an indication of how attractive an OS is through and through, when you get past the showcase interfaces.  Who is Craig?

I’ve been doing more tweaking with my WP installation, i now have OpenID support back and fixed some styling issues. BTW, do you like my new tag cloud? It’s funky.

Unlike Movable Type, Wordpress doesn’t have a system whereby entries are published to static files, every page is php, including all the index’s and archives so every time the service dishes out a page it’s having to render it. This is my biggest concern, generally my site does feel a little slower, but not so slow that i’d be overly bothered. It’s just if the shared server starts getting bogged down in php it’s surely going to suffer.

On the plus side having all pages dynamic and in a language I familiar with is surely got some potential for reeking havoc.

Something worth noting, wordpress’s “write post” page uses a rich text control of some sort to provide a partial WYSIWYG solution, unfortunately it doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work in gecko based browsers.

The battery recall discussion on MacInTouch is interesting. Seem’s i’m far from the only person who had problems getting the serial code to validate, the consensus is that it’s due to the website being overworked, which in that case isn’t very good from Apple at all because surely it should display an Error, and not a message making out the serial was to fault. They’ve also amended the affected range of battery serials as well, so if yours wasn’t one of the baddens when you first checked it might be an idea to have another quick look-see.

I’m convinced that since getting my iMac back that the fans are running more loudly than before. It may of cause be my imagination, so anyway, i’ll probably be obsessing over the constant slight hum I’m hearing right now for the rest of the week, driving myself slowly insane. The polystyrene blocks than you sit the iMac between when you box it up don’t seem to be quite as snug as they should be, maybe the box has bulged a little, but it means that whilst you carry it… by the handle the insides rock back and forth a little as you walk. So now i’m thinking all the walking with it has made the fans inside a little loose or something.

Yeah, i’m obsessing. I bet you it isn’t even any louder. It certainly doesn’t compare with the turbines you hear from the average PC. Also, a slight problem with the iMac is that its at the same height as your head, so any noise it emits is right in front of your ears.

I still can’t get my iBook battery serial to validate on the battery recall page. I would take a photo of it so that you can all have a go yourself in case I’m miss-reading one of the letters in a foolish manor. But i’m not sure if there are any implications to telling the world the serial. I can’t think of any reason not to, its not like someone can go on a spending spree with a battery serial number. But somehow it doesn’t feel right to.

Apple have recalled their battery’s. Basically you can say all of them because the numbers in the wild that aren’t affected, macbook’s and macbook pro’s must make up such a small percentage when you’re talking 5 or 6 years worth of products. It’s got to be funny though hasn’t it? I had just got my fixed iMac back home (hurray!) and then straight after I hear about this. So does this mean yet another trip to the Genius Bar? Ugh, I freekin hate trips to meadowhall, it’s a non-stop journey of traffic and roundabouts from the south of Sheffield to that place.

Funny really, I was all for gushing about how fantastic Apple’s service is, how I only took the iMac in on Tuesday and it’s already been done. They’ve also been super super friendly in the store and quite informative too. Ah well. They’re gonna have fun collecting up all them batteries. Damn Sony. OMG yeah! How awful are Sony now? Have they done anything right in the last few years? First the Rootkit fiasco, then the sweat inducing pricing for the upcoming PS3 and now the guilt of having supplied a plague of dangerous batteries to most of the popular laptop manufacturers of the world. Shame on them.

UPDATE: I’d better add that the person who told me about this exaggerated a tad, and in the style of Chinese whispers I’ve ended up making out that all batteries on earth need to be replaced. Any poop, it turns out just 1.1m in American and 700k elsewhere are being recalled. Unfortunately I’ve just had a quick check and mine is one of them Mine’s a model A1061 with a serial of 6C533xxxxxxx. Ah pooies.

UPDATE 2: The recall page is being super super slow, so I guess it’s getting battered by battery fans. Thing is try as i might I cannot get my battery’s serial number to validate, it says “This serial number is invalid or does not qualify for the program.” and I am so sure i’ve got it right, i’ve re-checked it about a million times. Dagnamit, I wonder if this page is only for checking US models.

UPDATE 3: I gave up trying to convince their website so I called Apple’s tech support and the battery did indeed need replacing, so they’re sending me one (4-6 weeks lead time, thats quite a long time to not be allowed to use it off battery). So, methinks Apple should double-check their validation code on the website, and if you suspect you have a recalled battery but the website says it isn’t valid don’t take that as meaning it doesn’t need replacing.

This is Mr Side-Saddle, double barrelled name, very posh. Oh, could be a sweet-heart and vote for my podcast at Podcast Alley. Knowing my reach that means no votes but hey ho.

Being without the iMac is difficult, I’m suffering cold sweats. I checked the repair status but alas nothing has been noted yet. I hope they are treating it well

I’ve finally managed beat that bastard with the helmet in Zelda, I must have only been lacking by about one swing of the sword all them failed attempts, the relief was massive. So cannot wait for the Phantom Hourglass on the DS.

My iMac’s Superdrive is no longer very super. Last week it started making some worrying scraping sounds whilst both spinning up, and spinning down. Also, around the same period the eject mechanism became clunky, in fact one time it ejected with such force that the disk fell out and plopped onto my desk making me jump with fright. Then, it started rejecting some disks, for example I tried to re-rip “blue lines” by massive attack, but when inserting the disk it made just a quick mechanical moan and ejected it, and no amount of persistence would get it to keep it inside.

The last straw came today when, after burning a dvd the eject mechanism failed to dismiss the disk. Each time I held eject it would make the obligatory clink-clunk.. pause and then clunk-a-junk it back in again. Well that ain’t much good now is it?

I hate speaking on the phone, I sweat and pant and panic and go dizzy. But I really wanted to know if I could wait for the meadowhall store to get a replacement drive in before I made a trip up there, and plus if I did so I wouldn’t be without the iMac for too long. So I hunted out the branches number but upon the automated menu I made the mistake of choosing tech support rather than waiting for an operator and was redirected to some call centre to be greeted by some woman with a peculiar accent who also spokeveryquickly, I think I said “pardon” about 50 times, really really embarrassing and it doesn’t do my phone anxiety much good at all. In the end it turned out that the tech support line can’t actually access the stock info of branches, so I hung up and tried again. This time I learned from my mistake and got to speak to someone at meadowhall. Unfortunately they told me that they haven’t my particular optical drive in stock and even still they can’t order one until checking mine out

So I’ve taken it in and now i’m minus iMac Tell yer what though, having an Apple Store in town is soooo useful, the 20″ iMac’s box is freaking huge so it would be an absolute nightmare having to ship it off to some far away repair centre.

I did want to open the iMac myself to see if I could just get the disk out and somehow whack the drive back into life but apart from the memory’s cover the iMac has those odd looking astrisk shaped screws, a sure sign that you’re not meant to open it up.

I’d like to add that Apple are in an unfortunate position with the optical drives on the iMac, if you hold a normal PC’s internal optical drive against the current iMac it’s immediately obvious that Apple would need some of the doctor’s Tardis technology to fit it inside because not only would there be no room left but it wouldn’t actually be possible even if the iMac was empty inside. So they have to use the slim-line drives, like the ones in laptops, which are slow(ish) noisy and very unreliable. But that doesn’t tend to matter so much with a laptop because you don’t use the drive all that often. But I use the drive on my iMac all the time and slim-line drives just don’t last well. It’s a problem.

I need to go on a publicity drive, yesterday Social Meter was all the buzz and just go a look how unpopular my blog is lol. I’ll still carry on blogging, and I don’t think I even mind that much, but it would still be a nice if someone read this damn thing.

Hold on, it’s in even more of a state than it was yesterday, there was just under 100 google links, now there’s none. Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t take that thing seriously.

It’s a good day on the MAMPtel front, mysql.org have finally made available universal mac versions of all their tools. Previously the Query Browser was only PPC and it had many a bug when run through rosetta. They’ve also now tied up all the tools into one download, they don’t even seem to offer them individually anymore which is odd.

I’m stuck on Zelda 3. I’ve reached the dark world, and there’s this eejit boss who wears some kind of head armour you have to bash with a hammer, it’s driving me mad, I just know I’ve come close to chinning the bastard but that just makes it all the more annoying. UGH, games!

I am so so so so so so so so so tempted to get an EyeTV Hybrid. As I’ve said before i’m sure, freeview reception is still in a dire state in Sheffield but we do plan to move soon, and also it’s only a matter of time before the reception is improved, although we might have to wait for analogue to be shutdown. Anypoop, the hybrid looks great, you just stick it in a USB port exactly like the EyeTV 2 for DTT, and has the same great (or so i’ve heard) software but it supports both Analogue TV as well as Freeview. So I could get it now and put up with analogue until I can pick up freeview. And I’m kinda desperate because I don’t have a TV of my own at the moment, nor do I want one ruining the feng shui or whatever you call it of my room, mind you I’ve put up without for this far and it is kinda a nice feeling not to own a TV.
Another useful thing, it also has composite/S-VIDEO input so I could use it to play consoles. I’m really looking forward to the Wii, but I won’t have anything to play it through so this would probably do the trick quite nicely. Oh course, it won’t be HD (is the Wii even HD?) but I don’t care that much.

Anyway, yeah, I really really want one but I can’t find it anywhere except this one place who seem to be over charging for it by about 20 or so quid. I guess I need to wait for the other stores to get them in before bargains can be sought.

Tomorrow I’m having the carpet replaced in my room because the one I have is all moth eaten and yucky and we want to sell the house some-time in the not too distant future (betya it doesn’t happen). So you know what that means, I’m having to clear the room out completely, moving desks, wardrobes and all sorts of heavy lifting mayhem. I’m totally pooped right now, sweat is dripping from my forehead in almost rain forest proportions. Thankfully I’ve also a Guinness to sup, but somehow it isn’t helping too much lol.

I’m not looking forward to the wwdc keynote at all. Intel have released the core 2 duo faster than anyone could have anticipated, and apparently its 20% faster than the cpu I’ve got in my iMac, which I’ve only had for about 3 bleedin’ months!

Sure, I positively absolutely do not need that 20%, you probably wouldn’t even notice it most of the time. Just in games I guess, and I don’t play PC games very often anymore due to them all being sucky FPS wanky nonsense, and yet still, I want that 20% I am so going to cry tomorrow.

I always make the worst purchasing decisions I swear!

Discovered Kip the over day. At first I was overjoyed because I thought I had found an application I’ve been waiting for for a long time, turns out its not quite my dream app yet.

You see, we have iPhoto for looking after our photo’s and displaying them in a way that suites photo’s, we have iTunes looking after our media files and displaying them in a way that suites media files. So what became immediately obvious to me is that we should have other cataloguing applications for other kinds of files. In particular, an app for cataloguing document files… and displaying them in such a way that suites document files, and maybe even spreadsheets. I think it would be ideal for apple to do this, after all, they seem to be struggling to move finder onto the next level, if you had specialist apps instead you would only need finder for odd bit of archiving and such like.

So yeah, my first thoughts were that Kip is THAT app, but it turns out it only supports PDF’s, and is especially geared towards scanning stuff in to be turned into a PDF, and then catalogued. You can drag existing PDF’s in, or create new ones by simply dragging images into a drop box. It’s still early days, this is a free preview edition, it will be commercial pay-for software eventually so maybe it will support other files by then. The way you tag the documents is highly effective, you can click on a tag and it will show just those documents, but also hide the tags that are no longer relevant, and you can keep drilling down by selecting more tags until there’s just the couple documents left. Also, when you hover the mouse over a thumbnail it shows a zoomed in portion in a floating break-out box, a little in the style of that trick aperture does, you know the one…

Oh and, it crashed on me today so…