The Wordpress administration UI improvements are a welcome and refreshing change but there are still some confusing parts with quite different background colors behind some of the buttons. I can understand why they did it, but for some reason I didn’t even see some of the buttons first time round “where is the Publish button?” Generally the important stuff is much more accessible so great job!

As expected since there is no plug-in management to speak of in Wordpress all of the plug-ins I had were well out of date. I’d really appreciate some form of management for these (similar to the package management on Linux) so I can just be told when there is new stuff and say “yes, please download and update to the latest version, thank-you”. Trawling around the internet to get the latest versions is a bit painful.

Anyway, watch this space for a slowly updating Wordpress theme based on Deliciously Blue, which was curiously based on the previous theme I was using (Glossy Blue). I’m going to try for a strictly gray-scale theme with a splash of two contrasting colors to see what I’ve learned from my typography reading.

Download Photeon Backgrounds version 1.1

If you download and use the backgrounds please leave a comment. I’d love to know what people think of them or what could be improved!

Movies - original by Jean-Luc ST-Hilaire (clasixart) of Quebec, Canada.

TV Shows - original by Miroslav Sárička (v_hujer) of Prievidza, Slovakia.

Clips - original by Melanie Kuipers ** (yum) of Germany.

Pictures - original by Piotr Lewandowski ** (LeWy2005) of Gdynia, Pomorskie, Poland.

Music - original by Bart Noszka (noszki) of Dabrowa, Slaskie, Poland.

Games - original by Stephen Davies (steved_np3) of the UK.

Arcade - original by Sas Van Veen ** (xtrapink) of the Netherlands.

Apps - original by Brian Lary (blary54) of the United States.

Weather - original by G Schouten de Jel (gabriel77) of Den Haag, Z-H, Netherlands.

Settings - original by Giovanni Miniato (desmox) of Italy.

Extras - originals by GLS (glspro5) of Argentina, and Laura Shreck (Columbine) of the United States.

The backgrounds are all 720p BMP images so will work with both original XBox hardware and Linux/Windows HTPC solutions without any rescaling.

Legal Stuff

All images in the Photeon series of backgrounds were obtained from stock.xchng, a free stock photo site, and then modified as necessary by David Teirney.

All images remain protected by the original terms and conditions of stock.xchng. Please respect the original license conditions as also noted in the enclosed License.txt file.

Changes from 1.0

• Added “Apps” image.
• Added “Arcade” image.
• Added “Clips” image.
• Added “Extras” images.
• Added “Games” image.
• Changed “Settings” image.
• Removed the “TV Shows” image and replaced with the old “Live TV” image.
• Repositioned the existing version 1.0 images to better work with the Showcase view and the AEON menu bar.
• Cleaned the close-up images to remove unsightly artifacts like small hairs and other imperfections that were blatantly obvious when blown up to 46+ inches on an HD TV.
• Altered the color curves for most images so they are more consistent across the set of images.

Installation

Download the photeon-backgrounds-1.1.zip file (18.2 MB) and follow the instructions within the enclosed Readme.txt file.

The download is hosted by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) so tell all your friends as it’s hardly costing anything to host and share this with everyone.

Today I tested a 720p H264 movie that is freely available for download called Big Buck Bunny.

With debug information turned on there was still plenty of memory free (~20Mb) but the CPU spiked to 100% and playback was a miserable 17fps. The sound was playing fine, but the video was very laggy.

In the debug log I was very amused to see the following:

16:39:31 M: 18128896 DEBUG: msg:
************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************
Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
- Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
- Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts, e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
- Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
- Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
- Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

It’s very saddening to see that the Xbox has almost come to the end of it’s usefulness.

I could look at hooking in some of the mplayer options to try and help the CPU out but it really looks like its time to start putting together a new Linux HTPC now that HD TV is available in New Zealand via DVB-T.

To workaround this you can configure the XBox remote to perform PageUp and PageDown actions by altering the Keymap.xml file in the UserData folder.

UPDATE: This no longer seems to work on later versions of XBMC. I will post another article that contains details on the changes necessary.

Change the existing buttons mapped to the PageUp and PageDown actions for the remote.

Change them to be and as shown below (at the top of the Keymap.xml file).

<keymap>
  <global>
    <remote>
      <three>VolumeUp</three>
      <six>VolumeDown</six>
      <nine>Mute</nine>
      <play>Play</play>
      <pause>Pause</pause>
      <stop>Stop</stop>
      <forward>FastForward</forward>
      <reverse>Rewind</reverse>
      <left>Left</left>
      <right>Right</right>
      <up>Up</up>
      <down>Down</down>
      <select>Select</select>
      <!-- Alteration for PageUp/PageDown starts -->
      <skipplus>PageDown</skipplus>
      <skipminus>PageUp</skipminus>
      <!-- Ends -->
      <back>ParentDir</back>
      <menu>PreviousMenu</menu>
      <title>ContextMenu</title>
      <info>Info</info>
      <skipplus>SkipNext</skipplus>
      <skipminus>SkipPrevious</skipminus>
      <display>FullScreen</display>
      <start>PreviousMenu</start>
      <record>Screenshot</record>
      <volumeplus>VolumeUp</volumeplus>
      <volumeminus>VolumeDown</volumeminus>
      <mute>Mute</mute>
      <power>XBMC.ShutDown()</power>
      <myvideo>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyVideos)</myvideo>
      <mymusic>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyMusic)</mymusic>
      <mypictures>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyPictures)</mypictures>
      <mytv>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Home)</mytv>
    </remote>
  </global>
</keymap>

The XBMC wiki has more information about the Keymap.xml file.

UPDATE: An updated Version 1.1. of the Photeon Backgrounds for the XBMC AEON skin have been released!

Download Photeon Backdrops Version 1.0. If you download and use them please leave a comment. I’d love to know what people think of them!

All images in this Photeon series of backdrops for the Aeon skin were obtained from stock.xchng and then modified as necessary. All images are still protected by the original terms and conditions of that web site. Please respect the original license conditions as noted within the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip file.

Special thanks to each of the image authors for giving permission to redistribute the modified versions of the images:

• TV Shows - Jayson Gatdula (jaylopez)
• Movies - Jean-Luc ST-Hilaire (clasixart)
• Pictures - Piotr Lewandowski (LeWy2005) - no response after a week so I hope it’s OK
• Music - Bart Noszka (noszki)
• Weather - Gabriel Schouten de Jel (gabriel77)
• Live TV - Viktor Hujer (v_hujer)
• Settings - Kalyana Sundaram (kavitha)

TV Shows

Movies

Pictures

Music

Weather

Live TV (courtesy of the aeonmod by Rand Al Thor)

Settings

To install:

1. Download the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip (9.8Mb)
2. Unzip the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip file and transfer to the skin directory of your XBMC installation. This will created a series of named folders within XBMC/skin/Aeon/backdrops/photeon/720p. Each named folder corresponds to Live TV, Movies, Music etc. and contains a single 720p BMP backdrop image.
3. Open Settings for XBMC (press Up from the main menu while using the Aeon skin)
4. Choose Aeon from the Settings menu and then configure the backdrop folders for each of the main menu items to point to the appropriate folder under .../photeon/720p.
5. Configure the Settings backdrop image to point to the image within the .../photeon/720p/Settings folder. If this is not done, the existing Settings image will be used when a Setting menu item is chosen.

The download is hosted by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) so tell all your friends, it’s hardly costing anything to host and share this with everyone.

Sample photos of the backdrops using the Aeon skin are shown below.

TV Shows

Movies

Pictures

Music

Weather

Live TV (part of the Rand Al Thor Aeonmod)

Live TV recordings listing

Live TV channel listing

Settings

All of the images were sourced from stock.xchng which is a stock image library with free content. I still need to contact the authors of the images that were manipulated to get their permission to redistribute to anyone else that would like to use them.

I purposefully chose images that were crisp and not colored. I wanted the actual colored content in each menu, such movies and pictures, to pop out of the screen yet still have some level of eye candy for the menus. There could still be some improvements to align better with the Aeon menu overlay and perhaps refining of each image, but these will do for the moment.

If you are interested in using these backdrops with your Aeon skin please leave a comment below (might help convince the photo owners to allow redistribution).

Kiwi-ise contains a number of packages that can be installed using Installer.app to provide:

• Caller ID
• Phone Number Formatting
• Voicemail button
• Call Forwarding Active Fix
• Alerts for Unread SMS messages and Missed Calls
• Kiwi-ised Google Maps application icon

It includes all of the great stuff that was in the XK72 repository plus some other goodies. I particularly look forward to seeing how the alerts for unread SMS messages and missed calls will work. I really missed that feature off my old Samsung phone.

It’s great to see so much effort being put into making using the iPhone as simple as possible here in New Zealand.

There’s also great reading about jailbreaking and unlocking in general.

1. Sync your iPhone to create a backup of the configuration within iTunes (just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore to 1.1.3).
2. Upgrade the iPhone to 1.1.3
3. Follow the instructions at iClarified to Unlock Your iPhone with ZiPhone GUI (Windows). I used ZiPhone 2.2 on Windows and didn’t have any problems with SMS or dialing crashing the iPhone after the unlock.
4. Open Installer and add the XK72 repository http://xk72.com/iphone/repos
5. Within Installer, open the Tweaks (XK72) category and install all 1.1.3 packages - Caller ID update (1.1.3), NZ Phone Formats (1.1.3)
6. Set the Region Format to New Zealand. Settings > General > International > Region Format
7. Set the APN for Edge to direct.vodafone.net.nz (leave Username and Password blank). Settings > General > Network > Edge > APN.
8. Change the Voicemail button so it dials 707 rather than nothing. Manually dial *5005*86*707#.

The iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error occurred. Error (1604)

My base configuration (which I ended up with after trying some of the weird potential solutions I ran across) is:

• MacBook Pro
• Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.1)
• iTunes 7.5

The solution that worked for me was:

1. Move the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework folder to the Trash
2. Update iTunes to 7.6 using Apple Software Update

Deleting the mentioned folder and re-installing iTunes may also rectify the problem.

This solution was found in the Independence Callback Error thread at ModMyIFone while trying to find a solution to another problem I was having when launching iNdependence. Hopefully this post will be more obvious to people searching for a solution.

After that change I managed to Restore the iPhone to firmware 1.1.1 without any problems. I’d spent over 4 hours a previous night trying all the silly permutations of ways to get around the problem that I found on the net. iNdependence 1.3.2 beta is also working without the callback reference error.

Previous attempts to resolve included everything I saw on the internet and installing just about every version of iTunes (7.6, 7.5, 7.4.3, 7.4.2, 7.3) onto a Parallels Windows VM to see if it was in fact some silly error with iTunes.

The Apple Support Forum - Error 1604 When restoring iPhone in iTunes mentions a number of hit and miss things to try:

1. Restart your computer
2. Remove extra USB devices
3. Try restoring on a different computer
4. Create a new user account and restore

These seemed like ridiculous things to try, but apparently some people have had luck using a different USB connection (particularly not from a USB hub attached to the computer) or removing the SIM card. Of course, none of them worked for me (except of course using someone else’s machine - not entirely that useful long term).

I started Linux life with an Kubuntu Live CD borrowed off a MythTV user from work over a year ago. Having been frustrated with how much configuration was necessary to do what seemed like sensible things I installed the ubunutu-desktop package about a week ago. I don’t think I’ll be going back.

Ubuntu works fantastically well with the default configuration. It has lots of the things I commonly do all out in the open

• The Applications menu works well and uses Fitt’s law to good effect in the top left hand corner
• The Places menu is way better than the similar analogy in KDE
• The System menu is also much better on it’s own than buried in the KDE menu
• Accessing Logout from the top right works well (again Fitt’s law comes into play)
• Configuration of the desktop just seems easier - a good choice of sensible defaults helps
• It has a great look and feel out of the box - after months of trying to get something consistently decent for KDE I gave up
• Putting shortcuts to commonly used applications and other useful things in the top bar is easy - also a great default setup
• A much easier way of switching users out-of-the-box
• Many others…

It’s a shame it was so hard getting rid of all the KDE related applications. A few hours tidying with Add/Remove Applications and Synaptic Package Manager seems to have cleaned out most things.

Overall it seems like a great improvement to the usability of the common things that I use Linux for. Awesome.

And, since Shelly hasn’t had any significant problems yet I guess it’s a thumbs up from her as well.