I’ve been looking for some time to find a decent ‘10 foot UI‘, and from initial glances at the internet all fingers were point towards Apples FrontRow, however I didn’t want to sacrifice the Mac Mini to run as a media PC (although it would do a very good job – virtually silent!). I decided to go slightly off the beaten track and try XBMC (Xbox Media Centre as was).

I must say I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up and configure – within a few minutes I had a working interface that looked great, it was playing nicely with my network to drag videos off my main PC and download box (headless machine running get_iplayer and rtorrent in a cupboard, more on that in another post). My only major gripe is that the navigation is fairly awful – whether you’re using a keyboard or mouse (or a remote I presume), I can’t seem to figure out whether I’m needing to go forwards/backwards/up/down on the menus, and a lot of functionality seems to be duplicated.

The process of gathering TV and film information is pretty seamless, the scanner seems to run nicely in the background gathering data on my files, even though they’re sat on another machine. I’ve noticed a few false positives for TV shows, and you definitely need to do some config file editing to get TV files picked up.

I unfortunately don’t have the right kit at the moment to try and get live TV displayed through XBMC as well (from forum browsing it seems possible), although I have installed the iPlayer and YouTube extensions, both of which seem to be quite buggy. The iPlayer extension inparticular has some pretty major issues – trying to pause a video will cause the whole program to lock up!

Overall – I’m pretty happy with this solution for the meantime. Anyone who’s happy hacking around with setting files to get things working just how they want should be right at home, but I wouldn’t really recommend to anyone who’s after an ‘out of the box’ solution.

Over the last 3 months, I’ve watched said list grow and grow as my department shoved more and more assignment deadlines towards me, and watched the things I really want to do get moved gradually towards the bottom. This term has been a rather bumpy ride in terms of deadlines, assignments and exams – and I’m told it’s downhill from here! I’ll write some follow up posts soon showing off what I’ve achieved in creating recently (I’m actually proud of some of it!).

The happiest moment of my life occurred last week, when said list of ‘essentials’ finally reached zero, when the final assignment had been sent to the abyss that is known as ‘DUO’, and the end of term benchtest was over. I’m told that after spending a night out marking this occasion, I was heard celebrating in my room… Which involves me yelling a lot, before your minds jumped elsewhere!

Anyway – I get home, having promised myself a fortnight to enjoy Christmas before getting stuck down to work, and I find myself unable to even get started on that list of ‘want to do’ items. Congratulations to the CompSci department – they’ve killed my work ethic even for things that I enjoy!

Upon getting back from Hungary, I’d heard from Durham that I’d been accepted into Van Mildert College, which has been my home for the last term. I moved in on October 4th, was consistently drunk for 10 weeks, and then moved back home in mid-December, having learnt not a lot – but having had a bloody good time! You can see why I’ve not had time for blogging!

Hungary was awesome if you were wondering, as was Summer Camp the week after – a good preparation for the ensuing mayhem at university!

I’ll try to post more on here as and when I remember, including some updates from Durham!

P.S. – Happy belated Christmas and New Year!

Ah well… possibility of going into Macclesfield to get one tomorrow!!!

Anyway, I won’t be around much over the next week or so – managed to get myself into quite a lot of debt recently, and hence need to earn the money back!

Seasons greetings to everyone, hope you get everything you wish for and more!

2 Xmas concerts… needed a drink after that, and off to Nic’s tonight I believe!

Still looking forward to a weekend of actual work though

Anyway, Christmas concerts were as crap as usual. Last night had less than half the seats filled, I recon there were less in the audience than in the performers put together! Why do they make us suffer every year?!

Still nothing from UCAS, although Edinburgh and Durham have sent me correspondence saying they basically won’t give offers until January… keep me waiting why don’t you!!!

I vote we stop all adverts of a Christmas nature before the festive season is even here! I’m not being Scrooge, I’d just rather not be thinking about Xmas before my birthday in July!!!