Pride... firstly a small rant. I am proud to be British and I'm proud to be part-Spanish. Always. I'm not proud when we have unnecessary and violent riots in London but that doesn't mean I'm not proud to be British, I just don't like to be associated with the yobs in London... So it annoys me, when people say, "proud to be British right now" because we won a gold in the Olympics. I'M ALWAYS PROUD! Just say "I'm really proud to be British" and drop the "right now" part.
Done.
Anyway, been busy as usual lately. Week off complete and much Beach fun had. Went to a house party last night and I was very tame compared to my usual party self. Stayed at my friend Alex W's house afterwards and we spent some time with our Raspberry Pi's today.
Technical Part
We wanted to create ourselves a media centre client. Alex has ambitions of multiple Pi's linked up to multiple TV's. I might get there but initially I wanted a Pi to hook up to my HDMI switch so that I can play the output of it to either my living room TV or Office TV (or both simultaneously).
So we start with an install of RaspbMC to an SD card. A nice simple windows installer is available (had my netbook with me so I'm not sure about OSX but I'm sure that's easy as well).
Once that's installed (it doesn't take long). Start the Pi and the rest of the install completes. I then had XBMC installed. XBMC is a media centre solution which is free and has a fair few addons available for it. Those guys have worked really hard on it and have produced versions for Windows, Linux, OSX, Apple TV, Android (may not be released yet)...
Anyway, after hours of playing around, we had ourselves not only a media centre client which could stream content from the MacBook we were using for the experiment but also it could airplay from my iPad.
Came home and started setting mine up. I am now very pleased to say that I can AirPlay my iPad and iMac to either my living room or office (again, or both). Had Gavin and Stacey playing in iTunes on my iMac in the office but playing out via HDMI in my living room. I installed the XBMC remote app on my iPad and could control the output through my iPad back to my iMac... hope you're still with me!
I haven't configured all of the sharing I want to configure yet for the XBMC to be able to read any of the media files from my iMac without iTunes airplay but it's certainly getting there!
Does more than an Apple TV, at a third of the price and much more configurable. So I'm happy.
Great day.
If you know of any good ideas for things I can do with a or my current Pi, please let me know! I'm a geek and love geeking out!
Other Stuff
In other news, back to work tomorrow. It's been a good week off so I'm not dreading going back as much as I typically am on a Sunday night. Not that I hate work, but it's always nice to have a day off!
Watching the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics as I type this. It's incredible. We've done such a great job with the Olympics and the people responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies have done such a great job. Proud (but always proud!).
Yesterday, I spent far too much money on silly items such as clothes, trainers, shoes and a shirt. Came home and found myself sitting in my apartment thinking "It's a gorgeous summer day" so took myself out for a walk and a think for an hour and a half. Beautiful Hampshire countryside around here. After that, house party and too much cider.
That's all for now, signing off.
