For the adventurous, you might want to explore XBMC semi-nightly builds. There are no new features but sometimes bugs are fixed. Certainly not for the faint hearted. For those who are on iOS 4.3, you might want to explore nighties as it fixed hardware decoding on iOS 4.3.

Before you proceed, ensure that you have installed the XBMC Official Build. Once you get the official build up and running, do the following:

1. SSH to your Apple TV2
   Hint: use “root” and “alpine” for the username and password respectively
2. Type “cd /private/var/tmp” without the quotes
3. Type “apt-get install wget” without the quotes
4. Type “wget http://hadm.net/xbmc/latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes
5. Type “dpkg -i latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes
6. Type “rm latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes

You have successfully upgraded the XBMC, reboot both the XBMC and Apple TV2 and you are good to go!

Chinese characters appearing as squares in XBMC for Apple TV (ATV2)? This is because ATV2 does not come with unicode fonts hence unicode characters like Chinese cannot be shown properly. By following this guide, you will be able to view unicode characters on your XBMC for ATV2.

Pre-requisites

1. Before we proceed, you will need a particular Unicode font – arialuni.ttf (size: 23560KB). You can easily locate this file on your Windows (C:\Windows\Fonts) or search online for alternative (hint: Google). If it appears as ARIALUNI.TTF, simply rename it to arialuni.ttf.
2. You will need to hook up the Apple TV2 (ATV2) to your network and know your ATV2′s IP address.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good things come in small packages

Finally got the Apple TV2 (ATV2) after much deliberation. Always wanted to watch online videos on the big screen as the A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD lack the online video playing feature.

What is the Apple TV?

The Apple TV is a media player  that is well integrated with iOS devices. You can use AirPlay to stream from your iOS devices over the wireless N. You can also play HD movies, rent TV shows (Netflix), watch YouTube and even stream iTunes music and photos from your computer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Time Machine

Enabling Time Machine support on the D-Link DNS-320 is, surprisingly, a straight-forward task. Yes, you can use your own NAS (Network Attached Storage) for Time Machine backups instead of Apple Time Capsule. However, Time Machine seems to use all the available space (on the NAS) for backup purposes. So I started to explore how can I limit the amount of disk space used for Time Machine.

Read the rest of this entry »

iMac 27" with my wireless keyboard, magic mouse and magic Trackpad

Finally got myself a decent computer from the recent PC Show 2011 (9 June to 12 June 2011). In fact, I got myself the ultimate all-in-one desktop computer and I am using it to compose this entry you are seeing now.

This Apple iMac 27-Inch is the mid 2011 model that comes with the following configuration:

• 27-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen TFT display (resolution: 2560 by 1440 pixels)
• 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with 6MB on-chip shared L3 cache
• 8GB (two 4GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 memory (upgradable to 16GB although some have pushed it successfully to 32GB)
• 1TB (7200 rpm) harddrive  (upgradable to 2TB or 256GB SSD)
• AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics processor with 512MB DDR5 memory
• Two Thunderbolt ports
• One FireWire 800 port
• Four USB 2.0 ports
• SDXC card slot

Check out the Apple iMac page.

Interested to get a iMac 27-inch? Check out the Apple iMac 27-Inch Desktop deals on Amazon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using the ESR9850 with my M1 Fibre broadband

Got my paws hands on the EnGenius ESR9850 to replace the D-Link DIR-300 4-Port Wireless-G 54Mbps Router at mum’s place. Others are getting it to replace their D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Gigabit Wireless Router. The EnGenius ESR9850 is a 300Mbps Wireless N router with Gigabit switch.

So theoretically for internal LAN transfers, you can transfer a 700MB file wirelessly in 19 seconds instead of 2 minutes on Wireless G. The same file transfers over wired Gigabit interface under 6 seconds while it will take close to 1 minute on routers with 100Mbps interface.

Read the rest of this entry »