Author: jamesclay

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Plex Media Centre

I am still evaluating a Mac mini under the TV and decided to give Plex a go.

Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

One way I have heard it described is, Front Row on steroids!

To get the most from it though I do need a much faster internet connection, one day soon I hope.

It installed fine and I immediately installed BBC iPlayer. Hoping to get more done with it over the next few weeks.

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US iTunes Account (in the UK)

There are quite a few Apps that are not available in the UK iTunes Store that I know I would find useful, so I got myself a free US iTunes Store account.

Launch iTunes.

Select iTunes Store from the left side panel options, you will then see the iTunes Store home page.

Select United States as your location from the country selection drop down menu available at the bottom of the page by clicking the Union Jack icon and then clicking the American flag.

After choosing the country, search for BBC News (though that is now available in the UK).

When the application’s page is loaded – click the Free App button, and the login window will appear.

Click on the Create Account button.

Fill out US address details and click on continue. If you don’t know any valid US address you can use Apple US retail store address by pointing your browser to http://www.apple.com/retail/ and choosing a store from the list available in the page.

Beverly Hills 90210 is another useful address!

After submitting valid US postal address details, iTunes Store registration takes you to payment mode page.  Here choose the option None and finish the registration.

You will now see the congratulation page.You’re done! Your iTunes Store account is created without credit card and from now onwards you can download all the free applications available to US users.

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Still no Blu-Ray on the iMac

Apple has updated their iMac range.

Though I do like the idea of having a dual drive 27″ iMac with the main hard drive been an SSD that would result in improved speed and performance.

However we still are not seeing any Blu-Ray drives in any of the new iMacs.

I think I need to stop hoping and forget about Blu-Ray on the Mac. It’s too obvious that Apple believe the only way to get video is through the iTunes store. I wouldn’t mind so much, but… I still can’t buy HD movies in the UK iTunes Store. I can rent them on the Apple TV and the iPad, but I can’t rent them (or buy them) on my Mac.

I can buy HD TV shows (and I did like Doctor Who in HD) so it’s not a technical reason, it’s a rights problem.

So with no Blu-Ray and no HD films, I can’t watch HD movies on my wonderful 27″ iMac screen.

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Amazon Kindle Sold Out

I was quite impressed with the fact that the Amazon UK version of the Kindle has sold out, though you can still order for the next shipment.

Considering that Apple’s iPad probably is stealing a fair bit of the Kindle market, the fact that the Kindle device has sold out shows that there is still a market for this type of device.

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New iPod touch

This September we will see a new updated version of Apple’s iPod touch.

We have already seen changes in the iPod touch in previous years and last year it was speculated we would see an iPod touch with a camera, well we didn’t.

Since then we have seen the release of both the iPad and the iPhone 4, both of which will have had an impact on the market for the iPod touch.

This year expect to see a redesigned iPod touch.

It will more than likely have a front facing camera so that it can be used for Facetime. As Steve Jobs said at the iPhone announcement, tens of millions of Facetime devices would be shipped. At the time of writing the only Facetime device is the iPhone 4.

So what about a rear camera for taking photographs?

I do think that is a possibility, but possibly not as it would eat into iPhone 4 sales.

I do think also we will see an iPod touch with a 960×640 retina display like the iPhone 4.

An 128GB iPod touch means we will see the end of the iPod classic.

I also do think we may seen an Apple TV iPod touch hybrid replacing the current Apple TV product.

All speculation mind you.

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Mac mini Entertainment Centre

I have managed to borrow a Mac mini, one of the new ones, and I have connected it up to my HD TV using an HDMI cable.

After realising that I needed to change the audio output from the built in speakers to the HDMI output I was very impressed with how well it looked and worked.

I haven’t put any content on the Mac mini so far, just streaming content from my home iMac across our 802.11n wireless network.

The first thing I tried was EyeTV, using EyeTV 3 on both computers I was easily able to stream recordings from the iMac to the Mac mini. I was quite impressed with the picture quality, even though it is SD television. There was no buffering or stuttering which impressed me.

I then tried Front Row and browsed my shared photographs, which looked lovely on the big 40″ HD TV.

I then was able to browse my iMac iTunes Library from the Mac mini and was again impressed, though it made me realise I need to be better at playlists. Then I tried to stream some HD iTunes content from my iMac to the TV and fingers crossed, was it going to work?

Yes, worked really well.

Very impressed.

I may have to get one for myself.

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TomTom Car Kit for the iPhone

I’ve had my TomTom Car Kit for the iPhone for some time now and have been quite pleased with it. The enhanced GPS signal does work really well and it manages to get a lock really quickly. The handsfree calling does work, but not if the road is noisy. I thought the kit came with a FM transmitter, it doesn’t, it comes with an audio out port. Quite useless for a car with no audio in!

My main concern now though is compatibility with the iPhone 4. It does click in, but you wouldn’t want to do it too often. However even if you do click it in, there is no connection made with the Car Kit, so no charging and I guess no enhanced GPS.

You can , according to the internet tubes, add some padding that will allow it to work, but not tried that yet.

I would like TomTom to offer upgrades to an iPhone 4 model or even free upgrades would be nice.

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iPad update

Apple have released an update for the iPad, taking the firmware to 3.2.1

Quite big at 456MB.

The update is hoping to solve various iPad wifi problems.

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How many wireless networks do you need?

Both the iPhone 4 and the iPad can connect to the faster 802.11n networks, but it is not as clear cut as that.

Whilst the iPad can connect to a 5GHz 802.11n wireless network the iPhone 4 can only connect to an 802.11n wireless networking using 2.4GHz.

Whilst that is much faster than connecting to an 802.11g network one reason for having a 5GHz is to avoid the often crowded 2.4GHz spectrum as the rest of the world has discovered the advantages of wireless networking.

So if you if you only have a single 802.11n wireless network you will need to ensure it is either running at 2.4GHz or add a new network just for the iPhone, which is a little bit over the top.

I can see myself adding a 2.4GHz 802.11n network for my new iPhone 4 in the main so I can stream video over my network using the AirVideo App.

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Why, Apple, why?

There are times that I wonder if those that design software actually ever use it? I usually lay this charge against Microsoft, but last night Apple in their wisdom really annoyed me.

I have a very poor internet connection and as a result if I download any big files I generally try and do it overnight, partly as these downloads take so long and mainly that if I am downloading files, it sucks up my bandwidth making the internet unusable for anything else.

So last night I set iTunes on my iMac to download a HD episode of Doctor Who and a couple of very large iPad Apps. About 2-3GB of data.

I went to bed, came down this morning to find a message from iTunes asking me if I wanted to download the latest version. Well I do have this setup in preferences, so that iTunes checks for updates.

So what’s the problem?

Well due to this unanswered dialogue (I was asleep in bed) iTunes had stopped downloading my downloads. It was waiting for me to say yes or no to downloading the new version of iTunes!

As a result I had only downloaded one of my downloads, all the rest were waiting…

Why can’t iTunes continue to download the files in the background, why does it have to wait until I answer the dialogue box?

In my mind this is poor design. If I decide that I do want to update iTunes, I can always stop the downloads, in fact I would probably want to finish them first before updating. So iTunes should really keep downloading even if it is asking me if I want to update.

So the end result is that I have to turn off “checking for updates” so this doesn’t happen again.