Running your webserver from home gives lots of opportunities to connect the real world to the internet.  I’ve previously connected a webcam with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather updates.

I decided my next project would be to put my front doorbell online.  As well as being a relatively simple, fun project, it also makes some sense: coupled with the webcam it can be used to give me a decent idea of who’s there when the doorbell goes and I’m out.   It also means I can hear the doorbell when I’m at the bottom of the garden, thanks to SMS or IM alerts on my iPhone.

Here’s the project in it’s rough state, before it gets packaged up into a project case.

If you’re interested in setting up a similar project, read on…

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When I was in New York last summer I picked up an AppleTV set top box.  Personally I think it’s the bargain of the century — for £200 I got a fast, virtually silent, easy-to-use replacement for my noisy old Windows Media Centre PC.   Best of all, I managed to sell the old Media Centre on Ebay for £270.

I liked the AppleTV when I first plugged it in with its Version 1.o software.  I liked it even more when they added YouTube in 1.1.   But it was Take 2 that really made it special.  Being able to find and stream Podcasts directly on AppleTV is my favourite addition.

However, the one niggle I’ve always had is the need to convert videos to MP4 then add them to iTunes before I could watch them.  Software like iPodifier made the process pretty simple, but on my old ‘always on’ server machine (a 1.4GHz Celeron) it would take a couple of hours to convert a typical half-hour show.

Fortunately, a group of like-minded individuals have now come up with the solution, and it works both on PC and Mac.  Basically, the key is to build a ‘patchstick’ — a bootable USB memory stick that you insert into the AppleTV which then enables SSH access into your set-top box!  There’s a fairly long-winded process available to Mac users, but if you’re on a PC you can now shortcut the whole process thanks to ATV4Windows.com.

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Ok, so I’ve just bought a nice new Dell Quad Core machine.  It’s fast, it looks good, and it’s dead quiet.  Or at least it’s quiet until you ask it to do anything. (more…)

I’m kinda really annoyed by BBC iPlayer.  Not the technical execution, but the concept itself at the most basic level.  Everyone’s complaining about the fact that it doesn’t work on Vista, or Mac, or Linux, or anything else except Windows XP, but…

Surely the real problem is that it only plays BBC content?

Imagine a TV that could only show Channel 5, or a radio that could only play Classic FM.  In this age of open standards and digital convergence, doesn’t it seem odd that playback technologies are becoming more diverse, more closed and proprietary?  Already we’ve had the Sky TV player, the Channel 4 player, the ITV player and others.  Now we’re expected to install yet another DRM-infested “player”* just to play the output from a handful of BBC channels — no thanks.  (more…)

I recently received an email from John Marshall pointing out that everyone was reporting sequential write performance on my ReadyBoost compatibility chart, whilst the official requirements were for random write performance.

I couldn’t get to the bottom of it on the web, so I emailed Matt Ayers at Microsoft, the Program Manager who’s in charge of the ReadyBoost feature.  He explained that early beta versions of Vista measured sequential writes, but that the release version measures random writes.  Everything has been updated in the release version apart from the EventLog entry. 

Matt has filed a bug, so expect that to be fixed in future updates.  Thanks for pointing that out John!

Anyone who’s tried to use the ReadyBoost chart recently will be pleased to know that I’ve given the page a bit of a speed boost.  When I first put up the page it listed the compatibility of about 32 Flash drives.  That list now runs to 880 devices and increases daily, making the HTML page 500Kb — quite a lot to serve over my home cable line!

I’ve now split up the chart so it shows 20 results per page.  There are options to jump to specific makes, and so far no make runs to more than 7 pages, so hopefully that’s an ok compromise for everyone.

Please let me know if you spot any problems!