a day in the life of wayne ward….

well the aple tv 2 is ordered today! bloody great price of a hundred quid delivered direct from apple! now you get a remote with it and power lead but no lead to connect to the TV – usually hdmi lead but in my case were the TV repair man screwed me hdmi i got a hdmi to vga lead coming for it till i get my new tv … real soon!….
anyways quite a bit of change with the apple tv i see it has a 8 gig internal storage and 256 meg of ram and a A4 processor and bluetooth. Now out of the box you can stream movies and music from a itunes share on the network also photos from iphoto share and do some web browsing and some music streaming from last.fm
now getting your films and extracting them to the format to import into itunes sounds alright tp me but a tad messy – it is possible… but messy
so poked around and found a bit of software called atv flash – now this software opens the machine up to what it should be like including playing video from upnp and loads of other features like dvd’s on the network and other crazy stuff which makes techies like me happy now its been available for the first generation of the apple tv for a while and the 2nd generation is in beta test but they are looking like they are nearly ready to release!! ive signed up to beta test as im the perfect person for it! and i will test it – infact i cant wait to get my hands on it! ive already got the software and image to jailbreak my box when it arrives friday!!! then i can ssh into the box and then its prepped to get the atv flash softare on aswell
being able to get movies @ 2.50 GBP each aint bad at all
apple tv will cost you 100 GBP and atv flash will cost you 50 USD -> bargain
its mad that you flash the apple tv same as a iphone ! interesting …

atv flash details here

apple tv details here

ive just took the plunge and thought id try google chrome on the mac.. after using firefox from version one its been a while but sometimes nice for a change!! I can say the install was easy but isnt it always on a mac?… the gui is very simplistic and i like this a lot. Now the extensions i needed were mostly for SEO which i found some great ones actually better than the ones i had loaded before! i also found a great little ebay extenesion and a shareaholic extension which lets me post to multiple site! plugged in a nice little search bar and a pretty neat wordpress extension which is handy for fast blogs.. i found the usual digg / delicious and stumble upon extensions and of course xmarks which brought in all my bookmarks which id been syncing with the firefox xmarks extension.. alexa plugin works well so extensions 10/10 !! browser speed and rendering 10/10
so id say go for it ! i love firefox for being a great browser and certainly better than internet explorer – for lots of reasons including security!!!…

give is a whirl… available for windows and apple mac and linux!!!!!!! i just love multiplatform

Get chrome here

Chrome extensions

More chrome extensions!!

Ive been playing round with SIP clients
works good on iphone out of the bx – got me a local number for free!
Im pretty certain i can get a sip client that will register multiple sip numbers – virtual office…
Just testing on the mac now…
Might set up a sip server again you never know…
Finally im comfy on my new office chair bloody nice bit of kit of the old ebay!!!!! i like cheap !!
New curry house opened up near me the baber elephant – tried out the food was pretty damn impressed!!
Nice bar inside – welcome visit ! happy days
I see facebook added the delete account option ! thats going to fuk quite a few people up!……
Good gig yesterday bill on keyboards – good turn our – i played bass and guitar – kicked out some shit hot solos
fuk im good! i actually enjoyed listening to myself ha ha ha fukin amazing!! my strat and george dennis were sent from above!!

Anyway busy as hell with work – worked in kendal 2day and maybe 2morro — got a few more sites in – shit hot
booked tickets for me and our lass and my partner fred and his lass for level 42 concert – looking forward to freds visit from the USA and going on our road trip from lancaster -> liverpool -> london!!! stopping in some of the finest hotels in the UK !!! amazing
watch my blog for a full write up – and if you are lucky enough to be on my facebook friends list the pictures aswell!!!
saying that i might post the pics on a picasa for my blog fans to check out the exclusive places we stay… keep tuned fans
dont forget vote for wardster
wardism policies are the best and we can put the GREAT back in britain

(please mail for tshirts and mugs)

Just a quick test from MacJournal! to my personal blog
Ive decided ro do a personal blog aswell as a online blog

Take a look here around 24 quick for a licence

http://www.marinersoftware.com/

this is a handy little bit of kit for your mac dashboard

todo that ties into ical

take a look here

to do widget rocks

this is the mag safe cut off and resoldered and witing to be re – connected

this is the magsafe end stripped ready to be resoldered

the end re-aplied – and works perfect

my next blog about this is when i have found something that makes it look like this!!

Its easy enough to remove the outer casing with some cutters and remove the inside – the connector has two wires which is soldered to three parts on the internal pcb.
Ive seen posts that say you can kill yourself doing this – but i never!! ha ha. All you need is a low wattage soldering iron and a steady hand, de-solder the old wire and re-solder as shown in the pictures to the right places.
I just need to find or invent a external fitment which will replace the old casing which one will look good (so no tape) and another be easy to take off to fix if it needs re-soldering again – plus it would be nice to gain extra strength and still show the LED light……

Im just moving service providers and phone provider and have a 20 day switch over – so I purchased a mifi adapter which I blogged about below. One of the problems stated was it wont let email relay out for my domain name. So ive had to use webmail provided to me from my hosting company. The choices i have are Horde – SquirrelMail and RoundCube. Ive always used horde as being a kolab user it comes bundled with it.. horde it pretty lean and has other features including mail – tasks and its very configurable probably a bit over the top for someone who isnt very technical – one of its good points is a white list and blacklist for killing spam now SquirrelMail on the other hand is very cut down and very lean it comes with address book and you can see your imap folders, you can add a signature and thats about it! id say not very nice to look at but does the job fast. Roundcube now this is basically the same as squirrelmail very cut down with the same features address book and signature and access to imap folders, no tasking or calendars but it looks great – i like the option Focus browser window on new message! so if your looking for lots of features go for horde if you want cut down go for squirrelmail if you want it more pleasing on the eye without all the tasking and other productivity addons roundcube is great. Check out the main sites for more info:

Horde
SquirrelMail
RoundCube

Sat up late last night and did some linux installs in virtual boxes to brush up my skills!! In virtual box I installed arch linux which was very nice to install and pretty straight forward, I installed some packages using pacman which was pretty straight forward and got xfce4 installed in a breeze make sure you have hal and dbus as it needs it and gnome extra icons package to fix menu items – nice lean bit of kit!
i then went on to install gentoo mmmmm now i got the new gentoo 10 which is a 2.5 gig dvd? crap – tried it in my virtualbox and it never started up crap! ill try again as i think its something to do with not pressing alt + f1 ??!! anyway got the older 2008.1 install in a flash booted of that followed the handbook as its been a while built the OS in a hour with everything built into the kernel and ripped all the crap out – rebooted 100% – then went on to do a debian 5.0 netinstall this just installed in a breeze i must say gentoo just has this feel about it yes it takes a time to build but on todays hardware and with the price of memory why not build your own OS ??? you want power id say go gentoo defo.

while trying this i was talking to gareth on skype and we was screen sharing we noticed my macbook was running with the 32 bit kernel – you find this in apple sign top left of screen – about this mac – more info – left hand side – software –

64-bit Kernel and Extensions: ??

mine read no – so i rebooted holding down the keys 6 and the key 4 for 64!! and hey presto i got a 64 bit kernel!!! yum yum!!!!

linux is cool and so is my mac

Just got my hands on the new version of mac osx – snow leopard, awsome bit of kit. I decided to go for a clean install as there was so many changes to the core – one being full 64 bit otherwise i might have gone for a upgrade – anyway the install is very slick and simple much easier than any windows install! anyway cleared the drive and 20 minutes later im in snow leopard, first thing i noticed how much snappier it was! from then on it took me a hour to setup all my apps which wasnt bad – most of the apps are snow leopard compatible now I ran into 3 apps !! which aint bad. I use codeweavers games to run GTA vice city and a few other doze games that run badly in a ciderized wrapper so i got the new version 8 down and this also failed? so i downloaded crossover pro and this works 100% – one of the others was smallimage2 which to be fair stated it on their website when i downloaded it but i found imageresizer which i have to be honest is more what i wanted in the first place! and last but not least the real pain in the ass is artisteer which i just payed like 70 quid for! this creates my wordpress and joomla themes except it doesnt until they fix it!! and it turns out its not down to them its more the mono wrapper it sits in! as its basically a .net proggie!! how dare they charge me 70 quid for a non native app?? i hear they are working on it and have working patches…
anyway some nice features built in to many to list but all i can say is its worth the upgrade specially for 40 quid for a 5 user pack! knocks the socks of any windows operating system 100%
if you havent got a mac .. get one

ive been using clipper for a while now on mac osx but they have changed it for the worse!
I found another simple tool called jumpcut works with snow leopard and is available from here
Its is simple and free