I did an in-place upgrade of our living room media centre to the Windows 7 RC last weekend. I was a bit hesitant, not least because it’s our main TV and therefore has to have a high wife-acceptance-factor (WAF>90). I had updated to Vista TV Pack a few weeks ago and found some issues with reception of a few channels (C4 mostly) so I felt that things probably couldn’t be any worse.

The upgrade went amazingly smoothly and things pretty much "just worked". I had to update my network card drivers as they blue screened on standby, but they were 2 years old. The iMon LCD display also doesn’t work as their app crashes on startup. I presume an updated version will emerge sooner or later.

But, down to the good bits:

– If you hadn’t already gone to Vista TV Pack, then you’ll get interactive ("red button") on DVB-T and subtitles.
– Speaking of subs, when you mute media centre, subs get turned on automatically. Neat.
– TV quality looks better, a bit sharper perhaps.
– I love the new screensaver of your favourite pics / cover art when TV is paused or stopped.
– In the guide, hold down the arrow keys and you’ll super-speed through the days.
– The now/next mini guide is much improved for browsing around channels.
– The new movies section automatically categorises and grabs cover art for any movies you record from TV or play back via DVD.

The only thing I don’t like is the media centre startup noise. It sounds like Fox News’ jingle or some American anthem. At least you don’t have to hear it that often.

I’ve just finished building a media centre PC. I’ve wanted to be able to do timeshifting and simultaneous recording of TV for a while and the added benefit of using a Vista box to do this is that I can play all my music and HD content too.

A quick overview of the components I used:

Zalman HD160+ HTPC Case
Zalman ZM600 600W PSU
Zalman CNPS9500 CPU cooler
Samsung Writemaster DVD
Gigabyte Radeon HD4550 graphics
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4 motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint
4GB DDR2 RAM
Hauppuage Nova-T 500 PCI dual tuner
Acoustipack soundproofing material

It’s not quite the ultra silent PC I was after, but it’s not too bad. The only noise is a small bit of CPU fan noise. At the moment it doesn’t fit into my AV cabinet under the TV (the case is pretty big.) but if I get another one in the future then that should really help cut down on the audible noise.

I wrote a small case study for Microsoft and it’s now been published. Hope it’s of use :)

Using the fabulous ping.fm? Want to use your own Custom URL? Want to use Perl? Use this!

The attached script takes only status updates from ping.fm and writes it out to a file. In my case, this file is then "included" by apache dynamically on the front page of my site.

Bit rough and ready, but hey, it only took 60 seconds :)

   1: #!/usr/bin/perl

   2:  

   3: use strict;

   4: use warnings;

   5:  

   6: use CGI qw/:standard/;

   7: use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';

   8:  

   9: my $file = '/path/to/my/file.include';

  10:  

  11: open my $FH, '>', $file or die "Unable to open $file\n";

  12:  

  13: if ( param() ) {

  14:  

  15:        print header;

  16:        my $method = param('method');

  17:        my $title = param('title');

  18:        my $message = param('message');

  19:        

  20:        print $FH "$message";

  21:        

  22: }

  23:  

  24: else {

  25:  

  26:     print header;

  27:     #Do nothing

  28:     

  29: }

  30:  

  31: close $FH;