On that note, I was mildly amused (and at the same time mildly annoyed) by a couple of friends giving a running commentary on Twitter as the most recent England match was being played.  I wondered who exactly those tweets were for the benefit of.  If I had actually been interested in the football, I would have been watching, and wouldn’t have needed the commentary.  As it is, I chose not to watch the football, because I’m not interested.  So you give me a running commentary anyway.  Is there no escape??

As it happens, my natural tendency to shun all popular sports stems from years of denial, conscious and sub-conscious decisions not to follow the crowd, and embarrassment.

To explain, let me share with you a particularly memorable incident at primary school.  I think it was year 5, or thereabouts. Back then the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were in full swing, and everyone had the action figures.  Everyone except me.  I pestered my mum endlessly to get me one, and eventually she relented and bought me the orange one, whatever he was called.  Actually, she bought two, one for me and one for my younger brother, so that we didn’t fight over them (I think he got the red one).  It was such am amazing feeling of justification and self-worth, and I proudly took my Turtle into school the next day.

That day, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles went out of fashion.  No one had them but me.  No one was interested in my new toy.  After all that fuss, it was essentially worthless, both in monetary terms and also (arguably more importantly) in terms of what would then have been called “street cred”.  I wasn’t cool for having a Turtle.  I was “gay” for having such a childish toy that everyone else had grown out of.  I must stress that it wasn’t as if months or years had passed – the day before they had been all the rage.

My pride deflated, I resolved never again to be a sheep, never again to follow the crowd, never again to do or have anything at all that was ‘popular’.  If it was truly special, it would last long enough for me to be able to get one the following year when the hype had died down.  In all honesty I still have that opinion when it comes to technology, but that’s another story.

So, back to sport.  You see, I wasn’t actually particularly terrible at football.  True, I wasn’t the best, because I didn’t really have a passion for it as a sport, but I was small and light and nimble and could very easily weave in and out of other people to get to the ball.  I played at Boys’ Brigade quite frequently, in fact.  But I made a point of hating it, out of principle.  If it was something everyone else enjoyed, I’d enjoy something else.  The other boys liked to play football, but I liked unihoc.  Just to spite them.

In secondary school, I got in with a crowd of other misfits (apologies to any of those friends of mine who are reading this and never saw themselves as a misfit).  We were clever without being outstanding boffins.  We were mildly naughty at times without being out-right rebels.  We were immature without getting into trouble.  We were a team of friends without actually being popular.  And when it came to P.E. and games, on the whole we were totally unsuited for physical activity.  If we could have got out of playing rugby in the freezing cold, we would have done.  If we could stand by the sides of the pitch and avoid the football completely, it was a good day.  In cricket, fielding was much more favourable than batting because you got to stand around and not run.  As a group, we were all like-minded in our resistance to popular culture.

And then, one day when we were running our weekly cross country route, a revelation hit me.  I had become a sheep again, this time for the other side.  All my friends expected me to be just as unenthused by sport as they were.  They expected me to be rubbish at football.  They expected me to stay with them at the back of the cross country pack, walking wherever we could get away with it, claiming to be critically unfit.  The trouble was, I cycled to school every day, I had good strong leg muscles and a fair dose of stamina.  So I left my friends behind, ran a bit faster, a bit harder.  I ran until I was out of breath, and then carried on some more.  I ran until my legs shouted for mercy, and then ran some more.  I ran until my throat was dry, until my breathing was painful and wheezy, until the sweat poured from my face, until my vision was blurred by dehydration, and then ran some more.  I got a personal best that week.  And the following week I did even better, because I ran like that right from the start.  It was my act of defiance, spitting in the face of the new popular culture I had become a part of, rejecting the expectation of lethargy, and stepping out on my own for once.  Turns out I was pretty good at physical exertion after all.

So when it comes to the World Cup, or the tennis for that matter, part of me refuses to take any interest solely because everyone else is.  It’s not so much that I don’t like football, it’s more that I don’t like that everyone likes it.  If it fell from popularity, I might be more inclined to take an interest.  I think that’s unlikely, somehow.  I would much rather watch the World Rally Championship than the Formula One.  I would much rather watch a short documentary on opera singers than watch The X-Factor.  I would much rather watch videos of people doing clever stuff on YouTube than watch Britain’s Got Talent.  I would much rather sit and look out the window at the beautiful countryside than watch the World Cup.

But here’s the rub – am I falling into the same trap as when I was at secondary school?  Am I following a different crowd now, of people who don’t like football out of principle, without considering whether I do actually like it?  And can I be true to myself and recognise my own genuine interests without then putting myself into another box with another bunch of people?  It is a pickle.

Maybe I should just take up knitting.

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

The operating system and other software

I have Mac OS X Tiger installed on the little box, which actually gives me all the basics I need.  In addition to the basic install I have iLife (for sharing my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on my primary computer) and Firefox 3.  Yes, I could have used Safari, but Firefox comes with some cool plugins that will come in useful, and I’ll come onto that a bit later.

The internal hardware

The Mac Mini is running on a 1.42Ghz G4 PPC chip with only 512MB RAM, which is pretty pathetic by modern standards, and it really struggled when I was using it as my primary machine for work – browsing the web is no problem, but running a dozen large programs all at once really was asking too much from that amount of memory.  However, in this particular situation it should be plenty, and the onboard graphics chip handles video well enough.  And since I’m not going to be downloading massive media like films to play on it I don’t need much in the way of hard disk space either.  iPlayer and YouTube both stream their data so I’ve not had to clear out any space on the hard disk yet.  And if I do find myself needing more space later I can always delete some unwanted programs that I don’t use any more (Adobe Creative Suite isn’t really needed on a media centre).

Control freak

So, how do you control a computer from a sofa?  The immediate answer is an Apple Remote, but I don’t have one.  Neither do I have a spare keyboard to plug into it.  However, I did happen to have a wireless mouse knocking around.  Of course, there is only so much you can do with just a mouse – a keyboard is a necessity for typing stuff.  At least, that was until I discovered that Mac OS X actually comes with a virtual keyboard, which they cunningly call Keyboard Viewer.  Now I can bring up an on-screen keyboard and type with the mouse!

If you want to find it, you’ll need to go into System Preferences > International > Input Menu, and select the Keyboard Viewer from the list, and make sure you tick  “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom of the window.  You’ll get a little icon in your menu bar showing your country’s flag, and in that menu you’ll be able to bring up the Keyboard Viewer.  By default I think it comes up in the small mode; if that’s too small for you to see from the other side of the room you can click the little green expand button in the top left corner and it’ll expand to a bigger size.

DVI to S-video

A TV is not a monitor.  They speak very different languages, and display images in different ways (at least if you have a traditional CRT TV, if you have a flat screen TV it might be different).  However, a search around the net showed that all I needed was a DVI to S-video converter, provided by Apple, and I’d be in business.  I found one at a good price on eBay, and it arrived in the post yesterday.  So that plugs into the DVI connector on the back of the Mac Mini (Macs use DVI instead of VGA, don’t ask me why, but they effectively do pretty much the same thing), and the other end of the adapter provides a phono socket.  Yes, all you need is a standard phono cable like you’d use for your speakers and you can connect the adapter to a scart adapter.  Lots of adapters, yes, but it works.  OS X recognises what sort of display you’re using and adjusts its settings automatically when it boots up, so that makes it nice and straightforward.

So, that’s a lot of adapters, but it basically follows this sequence of connections:

Mac Mini DVI port > DVI to S-video adapter > phono cable > scart adapter > scart splitter > scart socket on TV

You might not need the scart splitter, but we’ve got too many devices and not enough built-in scart sockets.

Sounding good

The scart adapter I bought (from Tesco) actually has four sockets – video, s-video, left audio and right audio – but at the moment I’m only using one of them.  I’m sending the video to the TV but sending the audio straight to my sound system courtesy of a 2.5mm jack to twin phono cable, plugged into the headphones socket on the Mac Mini.  Sounds fantastic.  As long as the sound system speakers are turned on.

Getting online

My broadband router is upstairs in my study, where my old PC is connected to it via a traditional CAT5 cable, while my G5 and my wife’s laptop both connect wirelessly.  I do have another wireless dongle, a US Robotics USR805422 54Mbps USB adapter, which I used to use on the PC back when it was my primary computer.  Unfortunately no one has seen fit to make a Mac-compatible driver for it, so that presented a bit of a hurdle for my Mac Mini.  I didn’t really want to fork out for a new wireless dongle unless I really needed to.  And that was when my next brainwave hit – I could use my wife’s wireless dongle instead (she was out at the time so couldn’t argue).  Some Googling revealed that there was indeed a Mac driver for the Asus WL-167g.  I found a link on someone’s blog to the right software, downloaded it and installed it on the Mac Mini, and after a little tinkering around I got it working – hoorah!!  Unfortunately rebooting the computer meant that the software revealed its flaw – it wasn’t remembering connection profiles so you had to enter the network password every time you logged in, which wasn’t quite what I wanted.  Eventually I found a link to the official driver on the Asus web site, which appeared to be exactly the same software, but I installed it anyway and that seemed to solve the problem.  The Mac Mini now boots up, automatically logs in and connects to the internet.  Nice one.

A few little touches to make things easier

Of course, controlling a computer from the other side of a room has its difficulties – reading what’s on the screen is a bit of a nightmare.  I’ve set the resolution to 1024×768 for now to allow enough room for everything to fit on the screen, but it does tend to make the writing rather tiny.  I know my way around the OS well enough that I can get around without needing to be able to read everything, but there are a couple of things I’ve done to make it a bit easier for other people.

The dock is on the left hand side of the screen to allow for the keyboard viewer which sits at the bottom of the screen, and is set to be pretty big so you can see the icons nice and clearly.  Magnification is on too, so the icons get even bigger when you need them to be.

I’ve also set the mouse cursor to be bigger too, courtesy of the Universal Access options.  Not too big, just a little bit larger so it’s easier to find.  Unfortunately the Universal Access options don’t appear to provide a way to make all the text bigger in the OS, like you get in Windows, but you can zoom in by pressing Control and using the mouse’s scroll wheel.  And yes, that does work if you’re using the Control button on the Keyboard Viewer.

In Firefox, I’ve installed the Fast Dial plugin to give me nine big links when you open a new tab, like Opera does, which I’ve set to go to YouTube, iPlayer and RadioTimes.  Saves typing them in each time or going through a menu of bookmarks that’s too small to see.  This plugin even gives you a screenshot of the site so you can see where you’re going before you get there.  I’ve also installed the Zoom Toolbar which gives me three handy buttons in the toolbar for zooming in and out of web pages – useful if you want to actually read what’s on the web page.

In use

Now that it’s all set up, I’m really pleased with it.  It plays DVDs nicely (and with less interference than with our actual DVD player), plays all the music shared by my G5 computer upstairs, and iPlayer quality looks fantastic on the TV – I’m not using the uber-high-quality version either.  It’s only a 21″ TV and it’s not HD, so I guess any more quality than that would be wasted anyway.

Using a mouse as a remote is a little odd, but I’d get used to it.  It does give more control than a normal remote, but of course it does lack those instant control buttons that would make pausing and skipping chapters a little quicker – with the mouse I have to move it around (to wake it up) and then find the right button the on-screen controls before I can do anything.  Still, that’s a price I’m willing to pay for now.  I could invest in a wireless trackball mouse with programmeable buttons, but I doubt I’d be able to graft those buttons into the functionality of both iPlayer and YouTube.  So, a mouse it is, for now at least.

In conclusion

I only paid around £250 for the Mac Mini in the first place (second hand on eBay), and the only additional hardware I’ve needed to buy is the DVI to S-video converter and a few more cables.  My wife has graciously allowed me to use her wireless dongle with it, on the condition that I set up her laptop to use my old USR wireless dongle while she’s at work so that she doesn’t need to worry about it.  The fruit of my labour is that this morning I sat eating breakfast watching Top Gear on iPlayer from the comfort of my sofa.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

To my surprise, I found it was a clever invention that was recently on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, and which looked to be an amazing piece of brilliance.  The Standby-Saver looks much like an ordinary multi-way extension block, with six sockets and a white plastic case.  What wasn’t quite so familiar was the infra-red receiver and its claim to be ‘green’.  So I bought it, and installed it, and set it up, and found myself unable to contain my delight, hence this post.

The principle of the Standby-Saver is this: using your existing remote controls it can physically turn off up to six devices that would ordinarily be on standby, with the option of having two of those six on permanently instead.  So, to take our example, we have the TV, aerial, VCR and DVD player plugged into the Standby-Saver.  All but the TV would ordinarily stay on standby because they don’t have physical off buttons, so unless you pull the TV out and go fumbling around amongst the mass of cables to try to unplug them they all stay on standby, their little red LEDs lighting up the corner of the room at night.  I have programmed the Standby-Saver to respond to the power button on the TV’s remote.  When I press that button, the TV goes on standby, as you’d expect, but the signal is also picked up by the Standby-Saver, and a few seconds later it turns off everything plugged into it.  Press it again, and everything powers back on again.  Genius.

I wouldn’t call myself a green-freak, but I do my bit where I can, and this has been something that’s been bugging me for ages.  Leaving all those devices on standby every night is a shameful waste of electricity, and now the Standby-Saver has solved my problem by making it quick and easy to turn them off completely.  I think it’s a fantastic idea, well executed, great value for money (currently £20 at Tesco), and an enormous weight off my mind.

And no, I’m not being paid by Standby-Saver to say all this.  I just think it’s a marvellous invention, the creator needs a medal, and you should all go out and buy one.  Or two.  Or several.

For a slightly more complete description of the above title, allow me to elucidate.  This weekend started on Friday, which was a little odd, with Phil and Esther’s wedding.  That was followed by a fairly taxing drive back home, and very little sleep that night on account of my cold.  On a lighter note, I picked up my new computer on Saturday (on which I am writing this very post), and in the evening I had a house full of people to watch the final of I’d Do Anything, Doctor Who and Pushing Daisies.  All in all, quite a busy weekend, and most of that happened without my wife – Ellie was helping out at a church weekend away, so I haven’t actually seen her since Friday afternoon.

Phil and Esther’s wedding

This one has been a long time coming.  Phil and Esther got engaged way back when they were both at uni, so it was such a delight to be able to be at their wedding on Friday.  It was in Cromer, which is north Norfolk, in the big Anglican church there.  You can’t miss it, in fact.  As you come into the town, down the hill, it’s right there looming over the rest of the small seaside town, visible from pretty much everywhere.  Unsurprisingly, we didn’t get lost, and as far as I know no one else did either.

What was most amazing though was how ‘them’ the service was.  Phil wasn’t dressed up to the nines like a traditional groom, he was just wearing a suit.  His shirt wasn’t even tucked in all day.  Very him.  I think he would have felt uncomfortable if it had been any other way.  The entrance music was an odd choice, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a very moody, tense, almost sinister piece of organ music.  Still, it seemed to work, just about, and set the tone for a totally untraditional wedding.  There wasn’t much in the way of liturgy, there were only three hymns, but it was all very relaxed and friendly, and there was even a bit of cheesy music played over the PA while they were signing the register.

The two funnies moments were both down to Phil, no surprise there.  The first was when the vicar said “Phil, will you take Esther to be your wife…” and Phil jumped in with “I will” before the vicar could finish the rest of the passage!  Hilarious.  The vicar, poor chap, couldn’t keep a straight face through that whole section.  The other funny bit was when the vicar asked Phil and Esther to hold each others’ right hands, at which point Phil held up both and looked at them to try and work out which was his right hand.  Again, typical Phil.

The reception was held at a hotel down the road, which was very pleasant.  After a photo session and the throwing of confetti we were all ushered into a conservatory where we were served cups of tea and the wedding cake.  Yes, going against all the traditions once again, we had the wedding cake before the meal.  It worked well though, giving us something to do while we waited for stuff to happen.  And the cake came in three flavours (fruit, sponge and chocolate), and was adorned with dolly mixtures.  Nice touch.

The meal was in a big tent (posher than it sounds), and was very nice.  Not overly complicated, nothing fancy or wild, just something simple to keep us happy.  Pie and chips was an interesting choice for a main course, but it seemed to go down well.  After that came the speeches, which in Phil’s case was more like stand-up comedy.  It’s been a while since I’ve heard Phil talking in public – I’d forgotten just how funny he is.

I have plenty of photos, which I shall no doubt put online in due course.  [EDIT: photos are now online, see Media page or log onto Facebook]

More miles on the clock

Unfortunately we couldn’t stay too long into the evening, as we had a long journey back to Colchester.  Having left Ellie to go off to look after someone else’s church’s creche for the weekend, I was given the task of taking PhilB (yes, another Phil) to his parents’ house in Norwich.  That added on an extra hour to our journey time, what with the detour and a short break and a cup of tea.  Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been a problem, but unfortunately the driving was made harder by the fact that I had a cold.

Now, I’m not one for succumbing to the so-called “man flu”.  I don’t say I’m ill unless I really am, or at least until it’s causing me problems.  I wouldn’t have said anything on Friday were it not for the fact that it was making me unusually tired, which clearly isn’t good when you’re driving any sort of distance along unfamiliar roads.  Thankfully the tea provided by Phil’s mum was much appreciated, and kept me going a little longer, and Anne-Marie (who I was also transporting back to Colchester) kept talking to me to keep me awake.  Not that you can really fall asleep in a Mini, bouncing along the road, but it helped to keep me alert.  Thankfully we all got home safely, after a 200 mile round trip, and I was in bed by about 1:30am.

No time for dreams

Unfortunately, sleep didn’t come easily that night.  With a blocked up nose I found that I couldn’t actually breath, which caused significant problems.  In order to maintain a steady air flow I was forced to breathe through my mouth instead of my nose, which for some reason doesn’t come naturally to me.  As such, the effort of keeping my mouth open kept me awake.  The moment I relaxed and was about to fall asleep my mouth would close, and then I would be wide awake again to avoid suffocation.  Not good.  If I got 2 hours sleep that night I would be impressed.

I got up at 5:30am to get a drink to whet my dried out mouth, and at 6:30 I gave up on the idea of sleep entirely and just got up.  Somehow I managed to get through the rest of the day on very little rest.

Welcoming the heavyweight

A consequence of being in Norfolk yesterday was that I wasn’t at home to take delivery of my new computer, so I had to go and pick it up from the DHL depot on Saturday morning.  I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near as heavy as it was, so that was my first surprise.  Other than a little cosmetic damage (it’s second hand) it looks in fine condition.  I lugged it upstairs to the study and plugged it in, and it booted into Mac OS X Leopard – lots of fun!  Actually it doesn’t look hugely different to my old Mac as far as the desktop goes.  Sure, there are some differences, like the funky dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, but on the whole it’s still the same operating system.  Just a lot more polished and significantly faster.

First impressions are good though.  The dock reflections are cool, even if they are an unnecessary bit of bling, but I expect the novelty will wear off eventually.  The stacks are pretty neat too, visually, though they don’t really provide any additional functionality that is going to change the way I work; I could easily live without that feature, but I’m not complaining now it’s there.

I did spend some time trying to get online though, but that wasn’t the fault of the computer, I just forgot the password for our wireless network.  And it’s not like I could find out what the password was by looking at the other computers, because they wouldn’t tell me – security, eh!  I remembered in the end, thankfully, so all’s well.

I’ll probably do a proper review at some point.

I’d do anything with a Doctor who brings people back to life

In the evening I had loads of people round to watch my TV, in light of Anne-Marie having family round and hence her living room having had a prior booking.  The final of I’d Do Anything was in two parts; at the end of the first the votes were counted and three were taken down to two.  Then there was a gap of a few hours before the final votes were counted and the winner declared.  I’m not saying who the winner was just in case anyone recorded it and has yet to see it for themselves, but let’s just say I was pleased with the result.  I was also pleased that the winner was the only one to pronounce the final three words of “As long as he needs me” with the right vowel sound.  All the others – without exception – sang something more akin to “As long as hay nayds may”, which always got on my nerves.  Well done to *the winner* for being able to sing a loud and clear note without having to show off her tonsils to everyone!

Also on TV that night was Doctor Who, in the library, with a packed lunch.  Suitably random.  I’m not going to bother with a full synopsis or write-up, as Anne-Marie will no doubt do a far better job than me!  Oh, and Pushing Daisies was also good.  As always.  Good clean fun.  As long as you don’t mind the dead bodies.

In conclusion

Yes… erm… I think that’s everything.  Apologies for the longevity of this post.  I won’t apologise for the length, because I’ll no doubt write equally long posts in the future at some point.  Still, if you’ve got time to read all of this then you’ve clearly not got any work to do right now, so reading a massive blog post will give you something to do, so don’t feel too guilty.  Unless of course you have actually got work to do and have just spent far longer than you should have done reading my blog, in which case… err… thanks.  I think.