Birthday List - It's my birthday again already!?

It has really snuck up on me this year.... OMG It's only two weeks until my birthday.... WHERE IS MY BIRTHDAY LIST!

It's probably going to be no surprise that there are going to be a few cycling things in here... and lots of other assorted geekerieUNION U-Shackle Lock  (note there are going to be some crazy things in here that I want but don't ever to expect to get as a present... you've been warned!)

First off though... I really don't need anything (being a weapon of mass consumption) so instead of a present you could always help me raise money for cancer.

Secondly... because I'm still really a kid... here's the list!

Liberator Bomber Jacket / Black & Cyan
Anything from this list Creux T-shirts
Tailored Jacket
Rapha Trousers
Gios Frame
UNION U-Shackle 
captain america cycling jersey
green lantern jersey

LED Light Pots
Apple TV
Xbox 360 Limited Edition Kinect Star Wars Bundle

Ghost Lamps
Super Mario Snerdles Question Box
Doctor Who Ride-in Dalek
Doctor Who Save the Universe Board Game

iPhone Brick Case
Donkey Kong Jenga
Nintendo Reversible Messenger Bag

Mage Knight: Board Game
Munchkin Deluxe
Munchkin Quest: The Munchkin Boardgame
Talisman Revised 4th Edition
LEGO® Games 3835 Robo Champ

Philips AD7000W AirPlay Speaker
iTunes Credit (let's face it I've sold my soul to the iTunes store)

EyeTV Netstream DTT: A first look

With my parents moving into the house there have been some rethinks around how my media is distributed around the house (something I've talked about at length here over and over and over again).

The biggest thing was trying to get commercial TV everywhere (not that I really watch that much) with only one antenna point in our master bedroom. With so many iDevices and two AppleTVs in the house the logical solution looked like the EyeTV Netstream DTT.

In reality is hasn't been so perfect though. The setup was quite easy although it failed to work on my G5 iMac (not a show stopper I know but a little annoying) and the installer disk didn't actually work with the Netstream, you had to download a different EyeTV app from the web. Once those hurdles were done though it wasn't all smooth sailing.

I've had nothing but reception issues with the unit. First off I must say that my current Panasonic plasma is running on a $5 set of bunnies ears without a hiccup. The Netstream by contrast can't seem to get more than about 29% even plugged into an external antenna.

One thing that has helped was moving it a long way from my time-capsule with which it doesn't seem to have a good working relationship.

To be fair when I can get enough reception to get a picture it works brilliantly streaming wonderfully to my iPhone/iPad and laptops. I can even airplay it to the AppleTV and the ability to convert to iTunes is very handy. With that said though, with so many receptions issues I'd have some serious second thoughts about adding this as a DVR solution.

Almost a completely apple household

I've been having a few networking issues at home, partly due to my existing router getting on a bit and some new rules it randomly decided to implement to block most of my iTunes streaming and syncing traffic only over the Wireless Network. As a result I had some elaborate system to get ethernet to all of the devices that really needed to talk, ie the iMac iTunes Server and the AppleTV. This still meant that all of the iDevices were blocked out from being used as remotes etc.

This week I finally bit the bullet and got an Airport Extreme and a Time Capsule and put them into play. I have to say it was probably one of the easiest setups I've every had to implement (even for apple products). I picked up both the items from ebay and if the Time Capsule had come up first I probably wouldn't have bothered with the Airport Extreme but the solution is markedly better with both devices. Adding the Time Capsule wirelessly to the Airport Extreme extends the wireless network (genius) and acts as an ethernet bridge.

The only real problem is it now has me thinking about getting an Airport Express so I can Stream to the nicely wired Tivoli Setup.

Brain dump mid flight

It's a strange thing my blogging habits, the more and more I have on (like at the moment) the less and less time I have to blog. I'm actually using the time on my flight to Townsville this morning to blog.

There is one nice aspect of the flying at the moment, I do it so infrequently that it's turned in to a nice time for me to catch up on my huge backlog of iTunes downloads and frivolous stuff like blogging. It's now a bit of a guilty pleasure not only for the catch up time but also because I'm also leaving the littleone and Vanessa to fend for themselves.

First of all on iTunes, I'm loving the whole Genius concept. A while ago a setup a few favourites Smart Playlists so I could easily managed all my music using ratings and genres on the iPod/iPhone/AppleTV. The downside is that I've not got over 500 songs in my "top favourites" and this means that if I'm in the mood something it's always followed by something I'm really not interested in. I threw on a genius playlist the other day and it was pretty much spot on although I've discovered that it seems to "like" some songs more than others. But on the whole it's become the way I listen to the songs on the iPhone. I love the fact that you can save them and even refresh them.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy, stressful and exciting. I'm sorry if I've been not much of a conversationalist while I've been musing about things and life in general. There were some pretty big decisions to come to in the end which was pretty tough, especially over the weekend. In the end I've taken a bit of a risk but I'm pretty confident that it's the right move and will pay off in the end. I think I might make a few people unhappy in the process but I'm hoping that they understand that's not my intention. Well that's probably enough soul searching for one post.

I've been slowly but surely doing a few upgrades to my arcade table. Nothing major but the CRT that was in it was starting to go in the corners and I was also looking for a way to solve the side by side game problem with the cocktail style cabinet. In the end it was a disaster of viewing angles that generated the solution. I had a couple of 19" LCDs around that I wasn't using any longer (with my nice new shiny 24" in the house) and I put one in to replace the 19" CRT. The issue was it was unusable at the flat angle of the table top. To solve the problem I managed to slot the monitor in the table at the right viewing angle for player 1 but it completely obscured from player 2. Then it dawned on me I could dual mount the monitors one for each player. Result : Instant dual screen cabinet that still looks like and is every bit a cocktail cabinet but Aliens Vs Predator multiplayer is a reality. It's almost complete I've just got to source the VGA splitter to run the dual monitors and it's done. The Littleone already loves the cabinet and this way I'll be able to train him up as a wing man for double dragon.

and here's the descent... Well that's the end of this blog.... until the flight home.