1. Follow the instructions here for creating a Windows PE boot disc. You will need a Windows system to create this with. Unfortunately the file resultant ISO file is 180MB, not really suitable to share here.
2. Get your WIM image on a USB drive.
3. Create you VM, selecting the appropriate OS, in my case, XP. Use the ISO image you created in step 1 as the install media.
4. Start up your VM and wait to be presented by a command prompt.
5. Type DISKPART to start the disk partition tool. Type the following commands

list disk
sel dis 0
clean
create part pri size=30000 (for 30GB, change as necessary)
ass letter=c
format fs=ntfs label=XP quick
act
exit

6. Next you need to insert the USB drive with your WIM image on. And we need to go back into DISKPART. You need to assign a letter to your partition on the drive. So do this

list disk
sel dis 1 (confirm disk number from list disk command)
list vol
sel vol 3 (in my case, my partition on the drive was 3)
ass letter=m
exit

7. Back at the command prompt, you can now begin applying the WIM to your VM. Type the following command, inserting your own wim file name where I put in filename.wim
imagex  /apply m:\filename.wim 1 c: /verify

The variables for this are of course your wim file name, the destination drive should usually be C:, and the “1″ is the index number on your wim. This is likely to be 1 but if you are unsure or have issues, refer to the Microsoft Support pages.

Then, give it about 10 minutes to apply your WIM and once done, type “exit” to reboot the system. You will probably need to shutdown the VM when it reboots, to allow you to remove the ISO image which will be attached to the VM as a physical disc. Once that is out, reboot and make sure you’re plugged into your company network if needed, and that the networking mode is Bridged. This will give your VM a physical IP address from the DHCP server, rather than using NAT routing to reuse the IP address of your Mac.

A few months back, Boxee stepped forward and seemed to take the stage. It offered the same XBMC features, folder scanning, internet lookup on movies, TV shows, as well as a wide range of streaming sources including Hulu, iPlayer, ABC, MTV, Comedy Central amongst them. They also offered the ability to add friends, so you can see what they’ve watched recently. Boxee has a clean interface, with the main menu accessible at any time, on the left, and display and sorting options on the right. Possibly its key winner in the field was the AppleTV support. With the help of a patch stick, you could load Boxee on your AppleTV and watch streaming internet TV at any time. This was a big selling point for many.
Being in the UK, and unable to access most of the content, it was a real benefit when the BBC iPlayer was added to the streaming sites.


Last week Plex’s name came up a bit more on the internet, especially on Twitter, so I thought I’d give it a try. After downloading and running the new beta, I added my Movies folder and let it do its work. Unfortunately for me, it failed at the first hurdle. It picked up half of my TV shows, and presented all my films as “Film Showcase”. This was a step further than it managed last time I had tried it but still not working status. I gave it a chance, cleared the Application Support folder and reran it. After adding back the video source folder (I think here I may have messed up and configured this incorrectly). Checking the TV section revealed almost all my TV shows, as well as every episode I had for them. This was getting better. Enabling Fan Art lets Plex download some really good banners and posters to show you what program you’re looking at. Drilling down further into a TV show gives you full screen artwork for the show, and, as a very nice touch, plays the TV show intro in the background. It is these small features that sold me on Plex.


As I said above, Plex didn’t pick up on all my shows, but holding the Menu button button, or pressing I brings up a menu that allows you to do a forced rescan of folders and that seemed to sort my issue. All my shows were now up on screen for me to browse. Plex also tracks what shows you have and haven’t watched so you can be sure you’ve seen every episode of 24. Plex also has its own App store, allowing you to add more plugins as they are added. For me, I decided to add a TWiT Live plugin so I can watch Leo’s live stream.

While I do sometimes use Plex to watch TV on my Macbook Pro itself, I usually hook it up to my TV for a more pleasant and larger Media Centre experience. Even going through DVI to S-Video and into a standard def TV, Plex looks gorgeous (as does Boxee but the Plex UI wins here) I can only imagine how much nicer it would look on an HDTV. So rather than buying an AppleTV, why not pick up a Mac Mini, throw it under your TV and enjoy a richer media centre experience?

Plex Homepage
Boxee Homepage

Well with iPhone 2.0 software, there is support for certificates. But how do you get it on your phone?

Well…

1. Go to http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoneconfigurationutility10formacosx.html and download the iPhone Configuration Tool. Install

2. Open up the Config tool from your Utilities folder.

3. Select Configuration Profiles and click New

4. Fill in the details on the General Tab.

5. Click Credentials. and click the plus sign, and navigate to the Certificate file (in my case a .cer file). Click OK.

6. Check the details look correct, and give it a name.

And thats it! Done.

Well not quite. You need to install it on your iphone. You have two/three options but the third involves Mac OS X Server which many personal users won’t have. So your two options are host a file on a website somewhere, or email it to yourself. If you want to host it, click the Export button, save the file to disk, and then upload it somewhere. Then navigate to that file online and it should ask you to install.

The second easier option is to email it to yourself. So click Share, and wait for Mail.app to open a new mail and punch in an email address you can access on your iPhone. Click send. Wait (or go and check your mail).

Then in the email, click the file, and you will be asked to install the file. Do so and bingo. Success. Now go test it and make sure it works!

Update: I have tested this at work, and it worked perfectly. You have to make sure you enter your username as Domain\username and your password as normal or it won’t authenticate. So now I can use the internet connection at work. Only thing is that IMAP and POP3 ports are blocked so can’t use the Mail.app to check them, but everything else works a treat!

Well, after a recent visit to the Apple Store in Birmingham, I made a choice, one which cost me £40! I bought an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB Stick. What is it? Its a TV receiver built into a USB stick, about the size of those wireless adapters. Plug it into your laptop or desktop, hook up an antenna, either roof top aerial or the mini-aerial included in the box, and very soon you’ll be watching TV.

The software, EyeTV, which is compatible with many other PVR devices, is simple to install. You’re asked to sign up for tvtv.com which provides TV listings, and during the setup you do the initial tuning. Clicking the Auto-Tune button does a quick scan and picks up any TV and Radio signals in your area (you can also do an exhaustive scan which takes longer but can pick up missing stations).

To record, either press the Record button on the controller while watching any show, or click a programme in the Guide, and click Add Schedule. When you’ve recorded a show, you can play it back on your Mac, or export to iPhone version, AppleTV version or send it to Toast to burn to a DVD. Another nice feature is the Wifi access – you can set programmes to automatically convert to iPhone versions for Wifi viewing, so if you’ve got your mac on all the time, you can watch those shows, streaming over Wifi from your iPhone or iPod Touch, which is done using the built in web server in Mac OS X.

Recordings come in MPEG-2 files, wrapped in an EyeTV wrapper, which includes thumbnails and info on the recordings. You’ll use about 2.2GB for an hour’s recording. Exporting will obviously reduce that file size, so if you are low on space, it might be good to export to AppleTV for storage. 

A exhaustive scan of channels picked up about 64 channels in total (radio and TV), all coming from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter. Comparing that to my Virgin Freeview box, and there are some missing. Specifically, I could not pick up E4+1, Dave or Virgin 1, despite being able to get them on the freeview box. This is probably just differences between the lowest signal strength each device needs to get a signal. 

Not all channels picked up listings from tvtv.com – those listed in blue have no listing, but you can manually select these channels from a search list, and then will be able to get listings. Those that don’t have them at all can be picked up from the signal transmission, and you select DVB for those channels to get the listings. 

For me, the killer features are the Wifi Access, and the smooth integration into Front Row. If you have the EyeTV software running, and grab your Apple Remote, you can switch between Front Row and EyeTV by holding the Play button. From there you have access to almost all features, scrolling through channels, and setting up recordings, using the Menu. Then you can quickly switch back to Front Row for your Podcasts or Movies.

For 95% of my watching and recording TV, this is perfect. If I had a spare Mac MIni, i would turn it into a media centre, and use the EyeTV as my main Freeview box. Having full control over TV, movies, podcasts, and purchased TV from iTunes through one small remote would be lovely, as would the Live TV functions (EyeTV records what you watch as you watch it, allowing you to pause, rewind and replay live tv. You can limit the buffer used for this in the Prefs).

Overall, the EyeTV was a great purchase, Its functional, small enough to throw in my bag when travelling, and I can see it staying in regular use, at least until we move and get Virgin+ or Sky+

Notes: I purchased the Digital only version, there is a Analog+Digital version at a higher price. There are also dual tuners, allowing you to have picture in picture, or record one channel and watch another. 

GimmeSomeTune – This is the most useful iTunes plugin I use (and the only but thats beside the point). What it does is simple. It does loads. I will give you on-screen displays (like Growl) of your currently playing tracks, add hotkeys to control iTunes globally. It will fetch album art from Amazon, it will even fetch song lyrics from Leo’s Lyrics (which I find particularly useful). Basically, its a nice little plugin to have running. Only downside is upgrading it isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Missing Sync for Windows – I won’t say much about this since I don’t use it now. I was using it to sync my iPaq 5450 PDA with Address Book, and iCal. Its still really useful, but since I got my iPhone, I don’t use it. Still worth checking out if you own a PDA.

Miro (Formerly Democracy) -Its like TV on your computer, from the internet, like IPTV almost. Its a massively useful program that will let you watch video and audio from the web. There is a built in directory for videos, and you can subscribe to podcast feeds and (here is the best bit) you can subscribe to bit torrent RSS feeds and get your fave shows as soon as they are released. I tend to use it for any shows I don’t wanna watch on my iPhone, like Command-N, Webnation, Unwired, Diggnation (sometimes) and so on. Check. It. Out.

Microsoft Office – Now we all love our Macs, how could we not, but the fact is, there is a large amount of people who don’t know about them, so use Windows, and they are likely to have Office (99% for Word) so to help them in their niche little world, we can get Microsoft Office for Mac. And guess what? It’s actually better than the Windows version. I could tell you why, but why don’t you just try out the 30-day trial and see for yourself.
If you’re not bothered about the tracking features, and other advanced stuff, try iWork ’08 from Apple. Its lurvly.

Onxy – Another little utility which you can use to keep your Mac running smoothly. Great for laptop users. The most useful tools are clearing caches (to free up some much needed free space) and running the cron jobs that should run to help maintain your disk which usually run at 3am.

Original List, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Well thats your lot. I’m done with this. I might put up some more suggestions as I think of them, but for now, I can close this chapter of my blog.

I downloaded the dmg file and installed the software, and put in the serial number supplied via email. And there I was, ready to install Windows. I pulled out a disc I had nearby and got to work on the dreaded install. I’ve already done this a few times with Boot Camp beta, so was more than familiar with the many many many many updates needed when you install Windows, and because they don’t do bulk updates like Mac OS gets (only their infrequent Service Packs) It took about 4 reboots, to install around about 90 updates, hotfixes, bug fixes and new software, included the fantastic(!) IE7.

So I finally got that sorted, downloaded Firefox, TweakUI, Acrobat Reader, and got them installed. Finally I was ready to actually get studying, but before that, a good nights sleep.

Well it seemed to do the trick cos I passed the exam, and now I have XP working for the future. I’m going to keep the virtual image on my laptop cos it will no doubt come in handy next time I need to tech support for my parents.

The next step for me is to set up a Ubuntu install. Its all done (off the Live/Desktop CD) and now just updating that. To make it work smoother, I need to install VMWare Tools, to allow shared folders and other business. Luckily, this website provides a great step-by-step for this  as it seems a bit tricky.

So I’ll be a triple boot system soon, which is nice to have. And certainly one to impress the friends and family, and people at MMUG.

I got this idea from the In The Trenches podcast  and saw the post on George Starcher’s blog about how he set his up, and with some adjustment, I got mine working. Here’s what I do.

First, follow all the instructions on the blog post. I created a 5GB image first, but am now moving that to a 10GB one as I’ve decided to include backup of my Photo Library.

All the rest is the same, with the exception of the Script file. I built into mine some logging (thanks to google searches) which I then pump through and display on my desktop using GeekTool. Just choose a File to be shown, and type in the path to the log file (in my case /Users/username/.rsync.log)

Below is the script I use, which logs to a hidden log file in my home directory.

echo ================================ rsync Backup script ================================= >>~/.rsync.log
date >>~/.rsync.log
echo ==Mounting Backup Disk: >>~/.rsync.log
hdiutil attach /Volumes/Dom\’s\ iPod\ Video/Backup/EncryptedBackup.sparseimage
echo : Backup Disk Mounted >>~/.rsync.log
echo ==start rsync logging== >>~/.rsync.log
rsync -aE –progress –exclude=Library/Fonts/ –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/iDVD –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/iMovie –exclude=Library/Application\ Support/Garageband –exclude=Desktop/BitTorrents –exclude=.cpan/ –exclude=.Trash –exclude=.DS_Store –exclude=Library/Favorites –exclude=Library/Print* –exclude=Library/Icons/ –exclude=Library/Indexes/ –exclude=Library/iMovie/ –exclude=Library/iTunes/ –exclude=Library/Safari/Icons/ –exclude=.Trash/ –exclude=Library/Caches/ –exclude=Movies/ –exclude=Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/iPod\ Photo\ Cache –exclude=Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music –exclude=*.mp3 –exclude=*.m4p –exclude=*.m4a ~/ /Volumes/EncryptedBackup/>>~/.rsync.log || echo -n
sleep 2m
hdiutil dettach /Volumes/Dom\’s\ iPod\ Video/Backup/EncryptedBackup.sparseimage
echo =====Backup Complete===== >>~/.rsync.log

A few points to note. I have two folders on my desktop, Downloads and Bit Torrents which I don’t want to backup. I also exclude some cache folders in the ~/Library folder, some font folders, Indexes, etc. I also exclude my music files, so I exclude the iTunes Music folder, any MP3 and AAC files, and the iPod cached Photo files (whats the point?)

You’ll see that my disk image is located in /Backup on my iPod and the script is located in /Scripts.

Like George, all this is executed via an Automator action which sits on my Desktop.

The only thing to watch

So thats it. Just plug in your iPod, run the action, and watch it fly by on your desktop.

Once you have your VIDEO_TS folder (from a personally owned DVD, not copyrighted materials*) make sure its somewhere handy (in say ~/MOVIE_NAME/VIDEO_TS). Then fire up the Terminal from Applications>Utilities and type the following magic command:

hdiutil makehybrid -o MOVIE_NAME ~/MOVIE_NAME/ -udf

Then sit and wait. A .iso file will slowly be created in your home folder with the movie name as its title. It will take a while depending on the size of the VIDEO_TS folder.
REMEMBER: You must have enough free space to fit a file the same size as the VIDEO_TS folder plus some spare. So don’t go making a .iso of a 8Gb folder when you only have 3Gb free!
And thats it. Now you can test that ISO by mounting it, then you can open up DVD Player, or burn that out to a disc with DisK Utility or Burn

Simple!