zerolight

I was fairly excited about this new firmware update for the PS3, but it turns out to be a bit of a let down. Sure, Blu-Ray playback now supports 720p saving me switching resolutions betweem games and movies. Sure, it upscales DVDs (my Xbox360 has been doing that since day one). But what of the media streaming?

DNLA? I’d never heard of that until yesterday. UPnP? Yep, you need that too… shame it clashes with my NAT settings for Xbox360 and PS3 online gaming. So I enabled UPnP on my PS3 and router, then installed and configured TwonkyMedia’s UPnP Media Server on the Mac, because you need some form of DNLA/UPnP Media Server on your PC or Mac to make it work. Finally, I tried to stream media from the Mac to the PS3 – simple stuff like photos, mp3s, the odd movie. Did it work? Nope, but as expected, UPnP fudged up my NAT settings on the Xbox360. And I’m pretty tech-savvy. This is for the masses?

Hopefully Nullriver will update Connect360, to work with the PS3. Should we really have to buy additional software to make these “connected” consoles connect? XBMC, a homebrew application for the old Xbox, is still the best option for streaming content from a PC or Mac to the TV. Is there really anything wrong with plain old Windows or Samba File Sharing?

Ali loves to play on the slides at the park. The big ones. He’s also got a thing for climbing, crossing rope bridges, and anything else that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. He’s fearless, I’m not. Zee filmed him playing at the park recently using her Nokia Phone.

You may have noticed I’ve brightened things up a little bit on the website now with this heavily modified rockettheme, a combination of Mobius and Colormatic.

I just switched from my previous host when it became apparent that they didn’t know what they were doing. Shame as they were very cheap. Basically, thought they said they supported PHP, but it turned out only really PHP installed via cPanel which was owned by user “nobody”, the server. Anything I uploaded myself could not access the file as system my PHP scripts run under my user had no file permissions. Their solution was to change the file permissions on my site to 777… letting every hacker, their dog, and even the village idiot, have free access to my domain. Nice one. I canceled my account on the spot… good job I was on a monthly plan.

The transition to Lunar Pages was easy, it’s also clear that they are very professional, know what they are doing, and have a massive and loyal user base. Support forums are a nice touch, and it’s nice to have a free 0800 number in the UK for a USA based hosting firm.

From my end, moving my website and email over took minutes, unfortunately, getting my JD-WordPress/OpenWP component in Joomla to function (such that I could edit and create posts) on the new host wasn’t so easy and swallowed up a couple of hours – sorry Z. In the end I got it working by re-ftp’ing the component onto my site (so I assume some permissions got mangled first time around or something). Which tool minutes… go figure!

One clever feature in OSX is Smart Folders. This little nugget hidden away in the Finder is something I’ve overlooked this past year, but it’s actually very useful. Think of them as automated Spotlight searches displayed within a Finder window. I’m currently using this one to parse through my downloads folder and pull out a single PAR file for each download, saving me trawling through folders hunting for, and double clicking on, one per download in order on repair and un-rar files. I have this one which displays a list of all unrared media in my downloads folder which makes locating and organising said downloads easier. Very handy if you’ve got loads of downloads to work through.