The Apple Airport Express. What is it? Well, simply put, it’s a WiFi access point with two additional features. First, it has a built in printer server (and USB port), so you can plug a printer in and run it off that. Secondly, and this is why I purchased it, it has a 3.5mm audio output.

Now this may seem quite odd to you that a WiFi access point has a 3.5mm audio output, but it’s not. Because, once you setup the Airport Express from within OS X (or Windows…if there’s a compatible utility, which there should be):

You then get a new option in iTunes:

So now, you can choose where you want to send your music. It’s as easy as that. You just plug the Airport into an ethernet cable, and into your speakers, or in my case, AV Receiver, then run the setup, and you’re done! You can use either an analogue connection, or, an optical cable.

It’s really easy to setup, and awesome if you want to pipe your music to another room in the house. Plus you can add as many Airport Express’es to your home network as you like, and they’ll all show up in iTunes. And if running an ethernet cable to the back of your garden so you can listen to music while having a BBQ isn’t convienent, you can set it up to connect via WiFi - it’ll then connect to your current WiFi network, and does the same thing. Actually, you have several options:

• Connect via ethernet and create a brand new WiFi network.
• Connect via ethernet and merge with your existing WiFi network, to extend the range.
• Connect via WiFi to your existing WiFi network, and extend the range.

Overall, if you already use iTunes and need a way to send your music somewhere else in your house, the Airport is a very useful device, and it’s nice and small too. If you don’t want to spend the whole £65 that Apple charges for it, pick one up on eBay - I got the older 802.11b/g model for a mere £35 (the new ones have 802.11b/g/n).

Now all I have to do if I want to listen to music downstairs, is send it to the Living Room speakers, go downstairs, and hit “AirTunes” on the Logitech Harmony remote.

The interconnected home. I has it. It’s brilliant.

Crave has seen all manner of sadistic alarm clocks, from models that emit sonic booms and electrical shocks to those that fly and roll away. But the appropriately named “Tyrant” from Taiwanese designer Alice Wang takes sleep disruption to a disturbing new level.

If you don’t turn it off, this little monster will randomly dial numbers programmed in your mobile phone every three minutes, according to SlashGear. That’s right–not calls to yourself, but to others who surely won’t be amused. Mercifully, this is only a concept so far (we hope).

Source: c|net Crave

*do want*

What I hate about Digital TV, in this case, a DVB-T signal, is that it either works or it doesn’t. When I was in London I purchased an EyeTV for DTT stick, which is a small USB based TV tuner for Mac. It comes with a very nice software package called EyeTV.

Next up, where I live. I’m around 30 miles from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, which, according to a couple of sites I searched for, is 1) uber powerful, spitting out 1000kW of analogue power (and I think about 50kW of digital power), and 2) services a ton of people, including the whole of Birmingham.

Except that doesn’t help. Because annoyingly, our house can’t even pick it up. Basically, we get average analogue reception, and really crap digital reception. Both the TV and an old Freeview box I had manages to lock onto most of the BBC channels, and some of ITV, plus a few others, but that’s it. Channel 4 and 5 and a lot of the other channels were extremely dodgy and dropped out wayyy too much to be watchable. Still, I only really wanted to watch the channels that we do get, so I got the EyeTV thing anyway.

I bring it home, plug it into both the upstairs and downstairs jacks, and, nothing. Not even the BBC which works fine downstairs.

So our antenna is either broken, not plugged in, pointing at the wrong place, or not big enough. I wonder if that means I need to get one of those ultra high antennas that are 10 meters high and need to be attatched with long steel cables so they don’t blow away?

Otherwise, I basically have a spare EyeTV here now doing nothing.

Two blog posts within an hour(ish), a record!

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to let readers of my blog in on a little secret, and it helps if you’re a regular on TVF as well.

So basically, two bits of news, first of all, TVF v3. I made a very simple small banner for advertising it, and, as much as I would like to say what it is, I’m not allowed to, bahaha. But I will say that it’s something that should make the whole site quite a bit better, and more intergrated, but that’s all I’m saying. So, just enjoy the banner for now:

Secondly, and I can talk about this more openly, is that we’re planning on giving away an Xbox 360 (and possibly some games, too) in the coming months, so look out for that too. I’m not sure exactly which model it will be yet, but it’ll most likely be the Elite or the one below that, the Premium. First prize will probably also get a free game too, but don’t hold me on that, as we’re still discussing the specifics.

You will need to do a little work to be able to win it, but, for a free 360 it’s worth it, yes?

I’ve been playing GTAIV since the release day, and I just passed 50% this weekend, so I thought it would be a good idea to summarise it in a bit more detail since my last (rather short) post about it.

It still remains my favourite game of all time, for sure. The look and feel of Liberty City is absolutley fantastic, and it actually feels like a real city. The hundreds, if not thousands of little touches to the game make it a superb environment to play in, and the story line so far is also very good. It does get a little confusing because there are so many characters, but it’s still an incredible game.

The fact that Rockstar also have not only thought about the game, but the out-of-game experence, is superb. Case in point, if I like a song on the radio, I simply pull up my phone, go to the phonebook, and call “ZiT”, the music service. Just like in real life, it’ll “listen” to the track you’re playing and then a moment later, you get a text message. But thats’s not all. You also get an email from Rockstar, so you can download the song yourself on your PC. Now that’s clever. Here it is, for those who don’t have the game:

However, as good as GTAIV is, I do have one complaint. The in-game phone. First of all, it’s too small, even on a 40 inch HDTV. Second of all, why are the multiplayer options there? Honestly, Rockstar, the phone is a very good tool, but it would be a whole lot better if it was bigger. I’m talking Blackberry. Niko can get the horrible standard phone at the start of the game, but then give us an option to upgrade or something!

Anyway, apart from that, and a few other minor issues, it’s still a fantastic game, and if you haven’t yet played it, get out from under your rock and go buy it!

Best.

Game.

Ever.

Period.

Pictures of the Special Edition.

Image from Wikipedia.

It’s a pretty sweet film, I saw it today at the cinema, pretty good plot, good acting, and some rather good camerawork too.

I recommend it. Now, off you go to the cinema.

I ordered 5 HDDVDs off Amazon US. Why? They’re only $11 now, so why not? I’m not paying £24 for Terminator 3 at my local HMV when I can get it imported for $11 plus a bit of postage.

So…all very well. Placed the order on the 20th March, and they finally arrived today. Almost. See, Royal Mail, being the bastards they are, decided to charge me almost £20 in customs fees. So they put a “you owe us money!1!!!11!!1!” card through our door, which says “come and pay us”…so I had to go and get £20 out the ATM in town, then come all the way back to their depot, get the box from Amazon, and come home.

This is the second time I’ve become extremely annoyed with them, as in December they decided to lose my BluRay burner off eBay which I sold - that was a £100 mistake.

I don’t like them anymore.

Picture This. It’s one of those things that goes into the “I’ve never heard of it and probably would never watch it but it’s actually awesome” categories. Mark pointed it out to me.

Now, generally, you’d immediately see that it’s a short film (around half and hour long) about snowboarding and think “yawn!”, but don’t. It’s actually one of the best productions I’ve seen in a long time. The photography is simply stunning, and the soundtrack fits in really well, and it’s actually superb if you listen to it seperatly. A lot of it is filmed with a fisheye lens, which, usually, would make it rather rubbish if you overuse it, but they got it just right - not too much, but not too little either.

In fact, I can’t express how much of a good thing it is….you just have to see it. Seriously. Go and see it right now. And listen to the soundtrack. It’s brilliant.

(Click to enlarge)

The amazing soundtrack:
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - 26
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - The Descent
The Ark - One of Us Is Gonna Die Young
Ratatat - Wildcat
Ming & Ping - Beautiful Things
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - Kiss The Sky
Men Without Hats - Pop Goes the World
Junior Boys - In The Morning
Awol One & Daddy Kev - Rhythm
Royksopp - Circuit Breaker
Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra - Prog Punk

I had a good weekend.

First of all, I went on Saturday to see Cirque Du Soleil’s Delirium, at the Birmingham Indoor Arena. Basically, Delirium is a 2-hour-long show that is basically a music show. It’s a series of acts backed to a soundtrack, and, simply put, it’s amazing. The music is actually very good, and the performance is very good. My favourite part in the whole show was during the song “Cold Flame”, and featured one very talanted performer - she managed to keep about 7 hula-hoops spinning for the whole track, on her arm, foot, body, legs…you name it.

If you can get hold of the soundtrack, it’s quite good too, plus you can hear it, albeit without the visuals and wirthout the awesome sound of the NIA.

The stage is quite large too, I managed to get a photo of it before they told us to turn our phones/cameras off:

I would rate the whole show a 9.5 out of 10, it was that good, and well worth the £55 ticket.

We (I went with dad) also went to Pizza Express before the show, however we timed it a bit badly and ended up getting into the NIA just moments before they started. And we missed desert. So when it finished, at 10pm, we went back to Pizza Express and had a coffee, and I had another garlic bread with mozzarella on it. I like them. They’re tasty.

So, that was Saturday. Sunday was quite fun too, I went to Alton Towers again and managed to get five rides on Air, and about seven rides on the Spinball Wizard. It also started to lightly snow at about 16:45, before we left, which was quite annoying, because for “safety reasons” they said only three people could go on the Spinball Wizard at a time (usually you can fit four people into the car thing). Also, a tip - don’t have a whole 600ml soft drink right before you go on. It’s a bad idea.

Also, they have a new part of the park which is basically a pirate ship type thing, and you have water cannons, so you can wet people who are watching you. One small problem, they have cannons too. It doesn’t seem to be that popular at the moment, because it’s cold, but once it gets warmer I think it’ll become more used.

(Click to enlarge)

So, that was my eventful weekend. Fun eh?

I saw it today. Worst movie ever. I want my £5.90 back.

I went to Crufts today. Saw lots of dogs and stuff, some of them are absolutely cute as anything, and I saw some of the judging of the Staffordshire Terriers. I also managed to see the mini BBC studio that was setup for their nightly broadcast, they’ve basically got two cameras on tripods, one handheld one (still quite big though), and one boom camera. Interestingly, they’re all fully HD compatible but the BBC aren’t broadcasting it in HD. Which is odd.

I’ll upload some photos to Flickr in a few hours.

After Crufts, I went to see Vantage Point, which is quite a good film - it’s similar in style to Deja Vu…basically, the movie is “replayed” a few times from the same period in time, but from the “vantage point” of different characters. Toward the end they slowly start to merge together though, and the story is pulled off quite well. Overall, I’d give it 7.5/10.

So, that’s pretty much it.

Well, at least my Christmas Present has a bit of a use. The Toshiba player I had came with two free HDDVDs in the box (300, and The Bourne Supremacy), but they also had a mail-in offer to get five free discs.

So, I got them in the post today - Children of Men, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Full Metal Jacket, Swordfish, and World Trade Centre. Free!

So I’ve now got around £175 worth of free discs (that is, if each disc was priced at £25 which most of them are at HMV), and the player cost £180, so…I basically got an HD DVD player for £5. Neat.

Got it on PS3. It’s pretty darn sweet actually, the graphics are awesome. I do feel it has some issues, but for the most part it’s a pretty darn good game. Well worth the £40 (ouch!) I paid for it.

If you’ve got a PS3 and want to play with me, my PSN ID is “WilliamTM”.

I woke up this morning to find that The Vista Forums had been hacked. Basically, one of the old moderators, “.Chris” (we’re 99% sure it’s him) got in using one of the admin’s passwords via SSH. So basically, we need to restore the backup from the previous night, however I don’t have access to that, so somehow I need to get in touch with iEntry (who own the site now). Anyway, here’s his address. It’s on his site’s WhoIs info anyway, so it’s not like it’s private. I think it’s his home phone number, so call him up and perhaps you can tell his parents what he did.

Chris Gonzales
1622 SE Dowery Lane,
Hillsboro, Oregon, 97123.
Phone: (503) 431-0877.

Anyway, onto other matters…we got a new AV receiver today. The Sony STR-DA1200ES, which has a huge wealth of inputs and finally means I don’t have to swap the optical audio cable around all the time, since this one has four optical inputs and two HDMI inputs (our old one had just one optical input, which meant I had to switch the cable between my PS3 and the Sky HD box). It’s a bit odd though - HDMI can carry both video and 7.1 audio, however the receiver will not decode the audio off the HDMI feed. I have no idea why, and I’m also a bit puzzled as to how I’m meant to get 7.1 audio into the damn thing in the first place. Other then that, so far it’s pretty good. The sound quality is excellent and it’s pretty easy to use.