All posts by Ryan Cullen

TV on my TV

Tech

Ever since I started watching DIVX / XVID versions of my favourite TV shows from the States I’ve always wanted to run them through my TV, instead of watching them on my PC.
Media Centre PC’s have been available for some time, plus streaming set-top boxes that read the files from over the Wifi. However these require extra money.

I had noticed that my DVD player would play DIVX files from disc, however only from a CD and not a DVD which meant only 2 episodes per disc, and I had no choice over which one it picked first.

However today I’ve installed some stuff on my Wii which allows me to watch files from either a USB stick in the back, or on the SD card.
The software also makes it possible to stream files over Wifi, however at the moment it’s just running a bit too slow, and it doesn’t have a browser for this option, all files names need to be hard written into a config file.

So what do you need to start watching the files:

  • A Nintendo Wii
  • A copy of Zelda, Twilight Princess (you can borrow from a mate or rental store for a day)
  • An SD card (2gb max for some reason)
  • A PC to download files
  • A memory card reader to put files onto the memory card via your PC

Now once you have the above, visit this site to download all the Wii Homebrew Software.
The boxes you need to tick are:

  • Homebrew Channel
  • Twilight Hack (correct for your region)
  • MPlayerWii (a newer version although can be found here)

You may have noticed some emulators, I’m not talking about those here, but feel free to tick the boxes to download them as well.
Once you’ve ticked all the boxes you want, hit the Create my custom pack button.

You will now have a ZIP file on your PC. You will need to extract this to the ROOT of your SD card.

Now pop Zelda and the SD card into your Wii. If you have never played Zelda on this Wii, start it up, and exit as soon as possible.
Have a watch of this video to see how you install the HomeBrew channel on to your Wii.

Once installed you no longer need Zelda, so put it back on the shelf or return it to whoever was kind enough to lend it to you.

Now open up the HomeBrew channel, run the MPlayerWii app and you should be able to select the SD Card or the USB Stick.

Minor LibDemBlogs Outage

LibDemBlogs

Some of you may have noticed LibDemBlogs going down today. Turns out after two hours of code checking and finding nothing odd, I discovered that my webserver had run out of file space. This meant that the dump file of all the blog posts couldn’t be saved in full, and in turn made LDB look ugly.
Luckily for me I only needed to delete some rather large temp files to get my file space back to normal. Hopefully future service will be a bit more realiable.

LibDemBlogs Redesigned

LibDemBlogs

I’ve spent the last month working on a new version of LibDemBlogs, most likely you are now reading this on it.

The most obvious change is the new theme, which is modified version of the Rainbow theme from Theme Lab. The old theme has been around for two years now, and didn’t actually work in IE6, so it needed replacing.

The newest feature is the Mute function, this allows you to hide/silence blogs that you don’t want to read. More info about this feature can be found in the about pages.

Some of you may have already seen the new version of the mobile site which went silently live a few weeks ago. It’s moved url to m.libdemblogs.co.uk partly because mobile phone companies shouldn’t try to adjust the layout, and also because the url is easier to type. (No need to update bookmarks as you should be redirected automatically).

On top of these front end changes the whole back end has had a refit. When I first started LibDemBlogs the project was set up to allow others to use my code, since then so many changes have been made that it got in quite a mess. For example all the blogs were stored in a text file. With only 20 blogs to edit it was quick and simple, now with a list 285 bloggers it was clearly time to move to mySQL with lovely indexes.

Now whilst I’ve had the site running in beta for a few weeks, I’m certain that something will go wrong, so please do let me know.
I hope you like the new design, but if you don’t sorry, I’m not changing it again for another few years.

Somerfield, Co-op and the High Street

Lincoln

In the last month Somerfield opened a new store on the High Street in Lincoln. Today we hear that the company has been sold to the Co-operative Group.
The question I have is, “what will happen to the store on the High Street?”.
Lincolnshire is awash with Lincolnshire Co-op’s (different to the Co-operative Group, who are owned by the old Manchester Co-op), so I don’t think they will want to compete.
The BBC talk of stores being sold off, however the names being mentioned are:
– Waitrose (already one uphill)
– Morrisons (already one on Triton Road)
– Iceland (litterally opposite),
so I don’t think any of them will buy the site.
Hopefully the real media might get some answers in the next few days.

Council Tax Limitation – Lincolnshire police authority budget

Lincoln, Politics, ,

Last night when I got home, I discovered that Parliament were debating “Council Tax Limitation – Lincolnshire police authority budget”. The bill was to place a cap on the 78.9% increase that Lincolnshire police authority had made on the council tax bills. I blogged about this in March (Council Tax up by 11.1%).

So how did those Lincolnshire MPs vote?
Quentin Davies – Grantham & Stamford (Lab) – aye
John Hayes – South Holland & The Deepings (Con) – absent
Douglas Hogg – Sleaford and North Hykeham (Con) – absent
Edward Leigh – Gainsborough (Con) – absent
Gillian Merron – Lincoln (Lab) – absent
Mark Simmonds – Boston & Skegness (Con) – absent
Peter Tapsell – Louth & Horncastle (Con) – absent

Out of the 7 Lincolnshire MPs with consituents affected, only one went down the lobby.

However, at least unlike 44 LibDems, the Tories didn’t actually vote against it.

My twitter last night summed this up:
artesea disapointed to see the LibDems voting no on the Lincolnshire Police Council Tax cap on BBC Parliament.

Amazingly due to the magic of technology I got this response:
joswinson is voting against the unfair Council Tax system.

However I still can’t see how a “Local Income Tax” would have stopped the Lincolnshire Police from asking for more money than anyone would expect. Instead we now have it on record that the LibDems are “pro” 78.9% increase.

Maybe someone from the Parlimentary party would have like to have asked those who have been affected by the issue, and campaigned in elections last May what our views were first, or is that just a bit too hard?

* Voting records taken from PublicWhip.org.uk

David Davis and Nick Clegg

LibDems, Tories

I’ve been away, so sorry for this being a bit late. There seems to be a bit of an outcry on both LibDemBlogs and Facebook about the LibDems not standing in the Haltemprice & Howden by-election. However almost all of them have failed to realise that if Nick had said that we would stand against Davis during their private chat on Wednesday night, he would have shat himself and not resigned. Instead Clegg played a blinder making the Tories look weak, and Davis like a tax payers waste of money.

Ooops, blogger posts go missing on LibDemBlogs

LibDemBlogs

Sorry for all you Blogger bloggers. I upgraded my webserver to PHP5 and didn’t notice that one of the scripts used in LibDemBlogs no longer worked. What this meant was that the site thought all your posts were made on the 1st Jan 1970 and so didn’t bother to display them.
I’ve now found the offending piece of code and hopefully everything should be back to normal by now.
I did wonder why it was so quite on the site, but I just assumed that everyone was in Crewe or Henley.