/~lickylip

Should I move to linux

2012-01-24T19:36:00.001Z

I'm toying with the idea of moving off my Mac Book Air onto a linux laptop. Most stuff seems fine, I live mostly in the browser now so it's easy enough. That said here are some points that are making me hesitant..

Netflix - I've waited for years for netflix to be available in Ireland. While it doesn't have the selection that they have in the US it's better than the nothing I had before. If I move to linux though that's gone. Netflix uses stupid silverlight with DRM so no chance of linux support for that
iTunes - I use Google Music but since I can't buy tracks for that outside of the US I'm still buying my music on iTunes. I've tried 7digital but I find the music is more expensive there and my wife is used to the iTunes way. Also, I have quite a few digital copy videos that I got with dvd/blurays that I will have to convert or download if I move over.
Remote Desktop - I use windows remote desktop to access my TV server at home. To use RDP on linux you need to use an older less secure version of the protocol on your server. I know I can set up VNC over SSH and all that but it is just a drag when RDP works so well to OSX.
External Monitor - Linux doesn't seem to play very well going between docked and laptop modes. Trying to the the external monitor to be the main monitor while docked was not fun, and it didn't play well with the desktops when it undocked either.

is it too much to ask for an os that does everything that OSX does only is not made by apple :) I don't know if I want to move over. I'd love to take a step away from Apple relyance but these things, though minor, are just not making me feel happy about making the switch.

TV Setup

2011-11-28T09:07:00.001Z

My current TV Setup at home is using Windows Media Centre. Microsoft recently announced that, while they will be including MCE in Windows 8, they aren't releasing it in the early dev releases. They say this in a recent blog post [ZDnet via MS Building Windows 8]:

Our opt-in usage telemetry shows that in July, Windows Media Center was launched by 6% of Windows 7 users globally with the heaviest usage in Russia, Mexico, and Brazil (frequency and time). However, most people are just looking around; only one quarter (25% of 6%) of these people used it for more than 10 minutes per session (individual averages), and in 59% of Media Center sessions (by these 6% of users) we see almost no activity (less than a minute or two of usage). TV was the most common scenario we observed, and not surprisingly, traditional media (DVD and CD) are less common (and declining over time) than streaming and file-based content.

So I'm one of the few (6 million assuming there are around 400 million Windows 7 users out there) people that regularly use MCE. And I'm a heavy user. I got rid of Sky about a year ago now and moved to MCE exclusively. I've got a TV in my Living Room, Kitchen and Bedroom. The Kitchen is hooked up over HDMI to a PC in a cupboard in my Hallway that has two DVB-S2 cards installed and is running Win7 Pro. Just pulling two Feeds from my existing Sky Dish I was able to get everything from the Freesat lineup (on Astra 28.2°E and Eurobird 1).

Using existing Xbox 360s that I had in the Living Room and Bedroom I was able to get all the same live channels and schedule recordings from any room. While I lost all of the premium channels, I found that the Free-to-air channels had plenty of content to keep me going.

Now this system is working well for me and more important than that, My wife knows how it works and is happy with the remote. It does have some limitations though

MCE only works with 2 Capture cards at a time

So I can't add in a DVB-T card for the terrestrial channels

EPG is a struggle some times.

it can automatically pull the listings for Channel 4 for Channel 4+1 which can mess up recordings.
lots of "rubbish" channels that I don't want are hard to configure
you need 3rd party apps to bulk edit the EPG

Recording format is MS proprietary

Need more 3rd party apps to convert to something useable like MPEG2 or H264

No DVB-S2 support

BBC, ITV and Channel 4 HD channels are all broadcast on DVB-S2 but MCE can't view them

On top of all this, the hardware I'm running this on is getting older, the Computer is 3+ years old now. So MS are not focusing on new features for MCE, my setup is getting old and the aforementioned issues all add up to me being on the market for something better. Now I'm full sure I will end up just getting windows 8 when it comes out and hopefully they will roll in DVB-S2 support and fix some of the issues with it but I might as well have a look around.

I've looked at media portal and mythTV a bit but can't find a lot of people using it in the same way as I want to (with a TV server and quiet machines to view live TV and access media from the server).

Does anyone out there do anything like this?

Skerries Indoor Market

2011-07-31T15:22:00.000+01:00

Time for some shameless plugging :)

www.skerriesindoormarket.com

My mother and sister have a stall at this market, selling Cupcakes and Customised Cards.

Come by if you're in the area, well worth a visit. Check out the website to see what else is there.

I Hate the Ras

2011-06-03T21:22:00.000+01:00

So, for the last couple of years they have been having a leg of a bicycle race in Skerries. It's a big day and they have street parties and and all that other cool community stuff that people like. I however hate this event. I hate it for one reason only. They close the whole town down for two hours on the Sunday that it is on and the just manage it very badly.

First of all is the signage. These posters were put on all of the roads out of Skerries. Some of them are like the above and some say "traffic restrictions on All roads into Skerries". What neither of them say is when the stupid event is on. So at the very most these signs can only be up for less than two weeks ("Next Sunday" means that it can't have gone up until after the 3rd last Sunday before the event). On top of that, the fact that it says Next Sunday means that if you see it for the first time the week before the event how the heck are you supposed to know that it is, in fact, this Sunday.

Along with the short notice, I have a problem with where the posters were put up. They were on the roads out of Skerries. Which is useful if you drive out of Skerries every day. If, however, you are amoung the hundreds of people who commute out of Skerries every morning you are going to have a very reduced chance of seeing the signs until right before the event.

Then, when the event is actually on, if you have no interest in taking part in this event you are stuck either outside of or inside of Skerries for those two hours. There is absolutely no way to drive into your home in Skerries. I was stuck last year, having not seen these stupid signs, trying to get home with two cranky kids in the back of the car. We tried every road into Skerries (North and South) and could not get anywhere near our house for the full two hours.

That's my rant. Maybe I'm being overly critical of it because it has inconvenienced me. So maybe I'll just leave it as a rant. Maybe I need to write a letter to the organisers to tell them to sort their house out :)

Skerries St. Patrick's Parade '11

2011-03-18T09:28:00.000Z

We had a great day yesterday at the parade in Skerries.

Skerries St. Paddy's Day Parade '11

Bit Picture

2011-02-15T20:29:00.000Z

Our new camera has a panoramic function....awesome!

Fancy!

2011-01-12T12:57:00.000Z

Me and Little Sean Looking Splendid :)

Christmas Choices

2010-12-20T21:00:00.000Z

Today was my last day in work before the Christmas break. Around lunch I finished off all the stuff I had to do while physically in work. I had two choices...Stay in work for the rest of the day and go for drinks with the gang after work or go home after lunch and work the rest of the day at home. It had snowed a little in the morning but by lunch time it was nice and sunny and most of what fell had gone already.
I chose to go home and miss out on the after work fun...and boy am I glad I did. The snow has come down BADLY. So had I stayed in work, no only would I still be there, but I'd have missed out on some fun times with my kids in the snow!

Good choice!

Visiting Santa

2010-12-12T20:19:00.000Z

We went for a visit to Santa at Skerries Mills today. I don't know why they insist on putting Santa in dark creepy rooms ;) the kids were not pleased ;) we did the best we could with the photos. And since when is coating a room in tin-film count as Christmas decorations. All in all it was a good santa experience 'cos you have the whole workings of the mills and decorations all over the place. Though the kids are still a bit too young to not freak out at the creepy dude at the end of a long dark passageway.

RIP: Kay Sheridan (1930-2010) - My Nan

2010-12-07T21:47:00.000Z

It's been a strange couple of days. Yesterday my Nan passed away. She was my Nan, my Babysitter (as in she looked after me while my Mam and Dad worked) and most of all she was the Boss. She rulled the family (mostly with an Iron Fist ;) ). I haven't really been able to say anything online since she passed so I want to make the effort to say it here so I can speak again.

She lived a long life, she recently had her 80th Birthday and She made it to both my and my sisters weddings...I hope that I can make it to Little Sean & Aislings wedding, let alone their kids weddings. She had somewhere in the regon of 15 Great Grand Kids. Not a bad innings, but still we'll miss her.

I think that's all I had to say...Love you Nan.

Gone skiing

2010-12-04T17:36:00.001Z

Could I pull off the ski look?

Space Odyssey

2010-11-26T08:13:00.001Z

Just finished reading the space Odyssey books for the first time in around 18 years. Good books but it seems like Arthur C. Clark was the inventor of copy and paste. Exposition is completely copying chapters of previous books :). Very interesting to see what they thought then what the future would hold. He thought tape would be the best storage medium for a long time.
Now that I think of future predictions ....where is my god damn jetpack!

Endorsement

2010-11-13T20:30:00.001Z

So, it seems David Norris is going for president! Time for my endorsement.
Norris for president!!!

Big Me!

2010-11-11T14:25:00.000Z

I'm a giant! Look as I tower over this full sized pint glass and dispare for the world!

The Disney Store : A little rapey

2010-10-30T13:47:00.001+01:00

So I went into the Disney store in Liverpool. I was expecting high prices but holey moley they were expensive. There was a big tigger Teddy for 20 pound. I got the very same one in tesco for the kids and it was only 10 euro!
Then, because there are disney stores all over Europe, they have the euro price too. The handy Manny I got for Seán was £12 or €20. That's a messed up exchange rate!
Still...I had to get the kids something :)

It's been a while.

2010-10-24T16:47:00.000+01:00

Just realized it has been quite a while since I blogged. I suppose I should write some shit down at some point. Just need to think of something...heck, this is nearly short enough to be a tweet :(

Stop Discriminating Against Non-iPhone Users

2010-02-01T09:42:00.000Z

I am totally sick of companies jumping on the iPhone app bandwagon. It is getting bad in Ireland now too. RTE brought out a handful of iPhone apps, free iPhone apps. Why? Why go out and pay a company to make you an iPhone app that will only work on iPhones. I would understand it if you were going to sell this product and wanted a way to charge for the app. That would make sense, but they are not trying to do this. RTE should be working to get as many mobile users getting content directly from RTE so they can increase ad revenue. They are producing a video stream for the RTE News iPhone app that could just as easily be put in a web app that could be viewed in iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile or any other standards based smart phone.
I don't pretend to know the inner workings of RTE but tell me where this leads? Either everyone has to get an iPhone or RTE has to pay to write dedicated apps for all of the major phones so they have equal mobile coverage across the population.
It's not just RTE though, lots of people that are producing information that would be useful on the go (metro-herald, entertainment Ireland etc) are all making Free iPhone apps that only exclude people who don't have iPhones from their services.
Why can't you be like Goldenpages.ie? They have produced a great web app that can work on any smartphone. It will even detect your location using standard location services in HTML5. It can have all the features you would expect in an iPhone app but works on any phone with a browser.

I don't know what to do about this situation other than rant about it, but man alive it's annoying me!

Sean

Hungry

2009-11-18T17:18:00.000Z

Sometimes, you get so hungry that only a 3 meter eclair can satisfy you

Asleep at the Wheel

2009-11-14T15:59:00.000Z

I'm going to get into trouble for letting her sleep like this but this is a cute photo!

From Aisling asleep

NY Hockey Night

2009-10-28T18:58:00.000Z

So I'm in NY at the moment for a big team sync up. Getting lots of good work done but on the social side we got a box suite for the Rangers V Phenix Ice Hockey game on Monday night in Madison Square Garden. It was a very strange event for me. Substitutions happened seemingly at random and play was stopped every few min at seemingly random intervals. Had a great time all the same. There was a great bit between periods where the "little rangers" came out for a quick game. Loads of kids came out and had a cool game of hockey on the ice.
Here are some photos and video of the night. There was a stern looking warning about not taking cameras with zoom lenses so I erred on the side of caution and stuck with the camera on my phone.

NY Hockey Night

The Apple Store is TOO efficient

2009-10-28T12:02:00.000Z

So I bought the wife a "surprise" christmas present of an iPod Nano from the NYC Apple store. "Oh you're such a good husband" I hear you cry. Well I used my credit card to buy the thing from the store, easy peasy. It turns out, the ever efficient apple, will look up the itunes account that your credit card is used on, and be very helpful and send a receipt to the associated email address. Unfortunately my wife used my credit card to set up HER iTunes account. So, with out asking, apple sent her the receipt for her now not a surprise christmas iPod.
I have a thing that if it's not a surprise then it's not a christmas present, so the hunt for the ideal christmas present for the wife must now start again ;)

Thanks Apple!

Breadcrumbs

2009-09-20T15:30:00.000+01:00

So I go away for a week and come back to these signs on the route home

From Open box

So, I understand that they have extra busses on this route 'cos of the rail collapse but surely there are better ways of teaching the new drivers the route other than putting these signs up all over the place. I mean if I was 15 (ish) years younger I would totally move these signs to bring the busses up some mad route where they'd get stuck...it would TOTALLY work! I'd be dropped straight to my door!

I'm calling the cops on you!

2009-09-15T19:31:00.000+01:00

Or textinf them anyway

Dude, Why is your bag so F'ing Heavy

2009-09-13T21:39:00.001+01:00

I get a lot of grief when I go anywhere (home or away) about how heavy my laptop bag is. I'm packing up for a trip to Zurich and getting my "tech" ready. So this is what goes into my bag.

From Open box

I admit, the books are big, but they are only there 'cos I'm going on a flight. The thing that makes the bag heavy is the Laptop. I'd be lost with out my old faithful Mac book pro but the bloody thing weighs a freakin' ton! And yes, maybe I'd get away with out a PSP and a DS but all this is the stuff I use when I'm on the road. Oh and Criminals...please refrain from robbing this shit from me please!

Sunny in September

2009-09-12T16:57:00.000+01:00

We finally got a garden gate on our new back garden...it was what we needed to stop little Seán from escaping while he was out playing. So we had some fun with his sand pit and managed to wrestle him into his thomas the tank engine hat and sun glasses :)

Sunny in September