Tag: TV & Film

I had decided well before it all kicked off (ahem) that I wouldn’t be watching the World Cup matches this year.  In fact, I could have told you that this time last year.  It’s not that I despise my country, it’s not that want to bring down popular culture, I just have absolutely no interest in football.  However, much to my disappointment, the footie is somewhat unavoidable.  It’s on the news.  It’s in my RSS feeds.  It’s being talked about in church during communion.  And it’s on Twitter.

On that note, I was mildly amused (and at the same time mildly annoyed) by a couple of friends giving a running commentary on Twitter as the most recent England match was being played.  I wondered who exactly those tweets were for the benefit of.  If I had actually been interested in the football, I would have been watching, and wouldn’t have needed the commentary.  As it is, I chose not to watch the football, because I’m not interested.  So you give me a running commentary anyway.  Is there no escape??

As it happens, my natural tendency to shun all popular sports stems from years of denial, conscious and sub-conscious decisions not to follow the crowd, and embarrassment.

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About a year ago I bought myself a cute little Mac mini to replace my Blue&White G3 that had died.  Around six months later I ditched the Mac Mini in favour of a more powerful and capable G5 tower which now acts as my primary computer.  Since then I’ve been at a loss to know what to do with my Mac Mini; I tried selling it to people I know, but no one was interested – I had bought it second hand and it just wasn’t new enough or powerful enough to be of interest to anyone.  So it sat in a bag on the floor in the study, feeling sorry for itself.  Until yesterday.

Having bought my wife a new mobile phone I found myself thinking about technical things (to try to quash the feelings of jealousy at her having a nicer phone than me), and after much research I found I could actually make use of the Mac Mini for very little additional cost.  We don’t watch much TV, so it wouldn’t actually be of any benefit to us for me to install a funky internet TV system, but watching iPlayer and YouTube on the telly sounded like a cool idea – much more comfortable than several people trying to cram into the study to watch stuff on my computer.

This, then, is not a detailed tutorial on how to create a media centre, but rather an explanation of what I have done to create my particular system.  It might not be what you need, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to every question you could possibly have on media centres.  But I will be including screenshots to explain stuff, and hopefully someone will find at least some of this useful, or vaguely interesting.

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We were in Tesco the other day, doing our weekly food shop, and a power extension block caught my eye.  Not because it had a million sockets on it or because it had flashy packaging, but because it seemed to be in the wrong place.  The shelf monkeys at Tesco had displayed them opposite the yoghurts.  So, I thought to myself, what’s so special about these extension blocks that warrants them being put so blatantly on show?

To my surprise, I found it was a clever invention that was recently on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, and which looked to be an amazing piece of brilliance.  The Standby-Saver looks much like an ordinary multi-way extension block, with six sockets and a white plastic case.  What wasn’t quite so familiar was the infra-red receiver and its claim to be ‘green’.  So I bought it, and installed it, and set it up, and found myself unable to contain my delight, hence this post.

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Well, that’s quite possibly the longest blog post title I’ve ever written.  But with good reason – I have a lot to say in this post.  So feel free to skip bits that you find boring, I won’t be offended.  Just don’t expect me to mow your lawn for free unless you’ve read every word.

For a slightly more complete description of the above title, allow me to elucidate.  This weekend started on Friday, which was a little odd, with Phil and Esther’s wedding.  That was followed by a fairly taxing drive back home, and very little sleep that night on account of my cold.  On a lighter note, I picked up my new computer on Saturday (on which I am writing this very post), and in the evening I had a house full of people to watch the final of I’d Do Anything, Doctor Who and Pushing Daisies.  All in all, quite a busy weekend, and most of that happened without my wife – Ellie was helping out at a church weekend away, so I haven’t actually seen her since Friday afternoon. (more…)