Posts Tagged ‘macosx’

Review: Elgato EyeTV DTT USB Stick

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

As you dear readers will know, I had some recent ventures into the world of PVR’s, and specifically, MythTV, and you may have read about the failures I came across.

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. 

 

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Google Ate my Contacts

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

So you may have heard a few weeks ago that the Address Book in Leopard now syncs with Gmail contacts. I heard this and thought GREAT! I can keep it all together, up to date with gmail, and have a handy backup.

After firing up Address Book I got it all in sync, and as expected, had a few duplicates which I sorted out.

Unfortunately, as the title suggests, I received a text from my girlfriend but it didn’t come up with a name, just her number. So after a visit to the contacts I noticed that ALL her details were gone, except her work email. I had a look at other people and there were more missing people.

So now I have lost faith in the contact syncing. I made no changes at all but somehow lost everyone. I did of course make a backup, but that doesn’t seem to import back into Address Book. Thank GOD for my second backup at Mozy.

Right now I’m downloading a backup from a few days ago and will give this stuff another shot. Glad I have my backup in hand in case Google poops on me again.

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Leopards in my house!

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Don’t worry, its not actual Leopards. Monday was pay day and my treat for the month was to get Leopard. Obviously its been out since October 29th but I wanted to save getting it till later. I had two main reasons.

1. Save my money
2. Wait till I had an external drive (Christmas present) and could do a backup.
 
So here’s the tale of my upgrade.
 
I started off by clearing as much bumff off my laptop onto my external drive. This mainly consisted of movies and torrents I was in the middle of. Then I used SuperDuper to do a clone of my hard drive to a disk image on the Western Digital 500GB MyBook Premium drive, hooked up via Firewire (because it is supreme over USB2.0!). This turned out to be a bit of a mistake but I will come to that later.
Next, I was ready to install Leopard. I had chosen to do a Clean Install over an upgrade because my current user account was partially migrated from my old Pre-Intel Powerbook G4 (that was a lovely machine). My hard drive had crashed and I had only managed to retain a small portion of my data. Luckily I had most of it saved on various DVD’s, and on my iPod (iTunes library). So I wanted to clean install to ensure that all permissions were correctly set, and also to clear up some of the crap that got added to it during various Terminal adventures.
So I clean installed. This took about 40 minutes maybe to wipe and install the OS. Then I went through the setup proceedure. I had sought advice from the MMUG and Drew gave me some good words of advice. So I set up my first user with the same shortname as my old. Now as you may not know, your account has a Name (i.e John Smith) and a shortname which unix uses to assign permissions to, and creates the basis for your home directory and preferences (i.e johnsmith). I used the same shortname for my new account, and booted into Leopard.
My next stop before getting my data back was to get the majority of my applications installed and up to date. I ran Software Update twice (which took a while. Thanks Virgin Media!) and was done. Then I needed to reinstall iLife ‘06 from my Macbook Pro Install DVD’s. This took a while too (30 mins maybe) and then I was good to go. One more Software Update for iLife and we’re there. (I will probably update iLife in the coming months).
So I was now ready to migrate my data. I plugged in my external drive, mounted my backup image, and ran Migration Assistant. I selected the disk image, and it correctly found all the user accounts. At first I was confused as it said I needed another 2.5GB of space free, which seemed crazy since my user folder was only 73GB and I had 95 to spare. I selected my user name and continued. I was then told that as the shortname already existed, I could import to a new user/shortname, or do nothing. Well that was no good. There second option was actually grayed out and that was what I wanted. Import settings and files into existing account. But I couldn’t do that while logged in with it. So I quit MA, went into System Preferences and set up a temporary account, logged out, logged back in as that, and ran MA again. Sucess! I can select the second option. So I carried on and was finally at the end, where I could import my files. I was told it would take about 4 hours. Fine, I can go to bed,  but in reality that time dropped quickly and became 1 hour 35 minutes. Fine I’ll wait up.
So come 1.30am it was done. Account data back in, and most of my apps installed.
 
 So what have I learnt as I now look to upgrade my GF’s Macbook? Well I think it would be easier if I had just partitioned a 120GB drive on my external HD and cloned to that, then I could just import during setup and all be fine. But hey we live and learn. 
 
So will this affect how I upgrade my gf’s laptop? Not in the slightest cos I’m just going to do a standard upgrade after backup to image. She has no legacy stuff so she should be fine. She’s a normal user, no terminal craziness or hackery. 

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Great Mac Apps - Part 4

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Ok, well I failed and didn’t do this over Christmas. Had too much to do giving advice to my parents about their own PC’s to worry about mine. But here it is, the fourth and final part of my Great Mac Apps segment.

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.

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Great Mac Apps - Part 4 (prequel)

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

It just occured to me that I never did part 4 of my Great Mac Apps list (see part 1, 2, and 3). So my objective for this weekend is to do just that.

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HOWTO: Make a disc image from a VIDEO_TS folder for free

Friday, October 5th, 2007

This tip is widely shown on the interweb but I thought I’d post it too for some reference. Thanks to AppleFritter for this tip.

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!

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