Sunday, November 08, 2009
Monday, November 02, 2009
Top Apps That Boost Your Media Centre
Streaming video, digital DVD backups, DVR recording—it’s all possible from your TV-connected media centre, and you don’t need a system administrator to pull it off. These apps make filling and controlling your media centre PC even easier.
Photo by William Hook.
Give your tunes the covers they deserve
Your favourite band, assuming it’s not Motörhead, probably spend a good bit of time thinking about their album art. Pay credit to their creative indulgences, and give your media centre something to show when their tracks are playing, by embedding album art in your MP3 collection. I ran through the best sources and tools for Windows, Mac and Linux systems in a 2008 album art guide. Whatever tool you use, having album art consistent across your library might feel a bit obsessive, and it is—but there’s a certain reassuring payoff when your TV displays the same art as your iPod.
Remove ads automatically from recorded TV
Some commercials are worth their short time commitment, but sometimes you just want to watch exactly 24 minutes of condensed television. Windows Media centre plug-in Lifextender does the job inside your hooked-up PC, while DVRMSToolbox runs through Media-Center-recorded files independently, and can then export them to more generally usable formats than Windows’ somewhat locked-down system. (Original posts: Lifextender, DVRMSToolbox)
Boost Boxee with repositories and feeds
Boxee is basically the XBMC media centre app with a different look and a more social flair. It also supports a lot of independent content creators and independent developers, whether through the official App Box, through adding repositories of new apps, or through stand-alone RSS feeds.
Rename files for easier detection
Media player apps try their best to figure out exactly what TV shows and movies you’ve got loaded into storage, but they often have a hard time keeping up with the naming schemes used by a variety of applications and fallible humans. Grab an app like MediaRenamer (for movies and television) or TVrename (for shows alone) and whip your files into a shape that XBMC, Boxee, Windows, Plex, or any other media centre can easily figure out. For a quick read on what media centre apps like to see—XBMC in particular—read Jason’s guide halfway through his XMBC add-on guide.
Rip DVDs the easy way
Rather than find out halfway through the final disc of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that your disc is scratched beyond repair, you could rip the suspect DVD to a digital file and play it from there, with just a minor skip. Adam’s built a tool called DVD Rip to make it a dead-simple process in Windows, but it’s fairly easy to pull off with HandBrake or VLC Media Player on Windows, Mac or Linux systems.
Media centre remotes for your phone (or iPod touch)
Sure, you could go the easy route and buy an infrared-based, media-center-friendly physical remote for your TV-attached setup, but if you’d like a bit more functionality—and, more importantly, actual typing input—there’s probably a free or cheap remote for your Wi-Fi powered phone or iPod. Gmote turns an Android phone into a multi-system remote, assuming you don’t mind a quick software installation. iPod/iPhone owners have their pick of many XBMC-compatible remotes in the App Store, the free Boxee remote, and MediaMote (iTunes direct link) ably handles your Windows Media centre remote.
Make your router more media-friendly
Your standard off-the-shelf router treats all net traffic the same, can’t tell you exactly how much you’ve downloaded this month, and is fairly difficult to turn into anything other than an agent of your modem. Install DD-WRT or Tomato on your little antenna box, however, and it can be a wireless bridge for your entertainment center (Installation guide: Tomato)
Convert and transfer tracks to your portable player
The best media centres can play just about any video or audio format out there, but even the coolest phones and media devices have a fairly limited format range, and only so much space. Among the five best media converters we rounded up, Super and Format Factory can match most devices and file types, while MediaCoder and HandBrake get the job done on any platform. Need help getting the file onto your phone or device? The doubleTwist media manager is the easiest drag & drop solution we’ve seen.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
New supermarket
When you pass the milk cases, you hear cows mooing and you experience the scent of fresh mown hay.
In the meat department there is the aroma of charcoal grilled steaks with onions.
When you approach the egg case, you hear hens cluck and cackle, and the air is filled with the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs frying.
The bread department features the tantalizing smell of fresh baked bread & cookies.
I don't buy toilet paper there anymore.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Austar & Foxtel plans 28 new channels
Under the banner of “the biggest thing to happen to TV in years”, its magazine reveals that amongst the 15 standard definition channels there will be four new movie channels, four new sports channels, three more news and documentary channels, a murder mystery channel, two ad-free, educational kids channels and a new lifestyle channel.
There will be 13 HD channels offerings will be four sport channels, six movie channels and three channels devoted to drama, comedy and classics.
Austar is also heavily promoting its new MyStar HD box, which can record up to 90 hours of SD programming or 30 hours of HD programming.
There will also be improvements to the red button interactive application, with eight more timeshift channels being added to the mix. Austar also indicated “more news next month”.
Found at http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/09/austar-plans-28-new-channels.html
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The Cow Turns Green
Found at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214110
Few creatures would seem as beneficent as the cow. Properly grazed and groomed, it gives us burgers and brie, boot leather and fertilizer. Lately, however, radical green groups and celebrity vegans like Paul McCartney have made cows out to be weapons of mass destruction: not only has their meat caused an epidemic of hypertension and heart disease, but they also trample rainforests, trash the soil, and foul the air with greenhouse gases. Scientists say that every year the average Holstein produces up to 180 kilos of methane, which traps 25 times more heat than does carbon dioxide. All told, bringing meat from the pasture to the griddle produces 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the United Nations. Last year, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called upon everyone to give up eating meat at least one day a week, giving birth to the global meatless Monday. "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat," McCartney famously said.
Perhaps. But since 1960, worldwide production of meat has quadrupled to more than 280 million tons a year. Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, driven by the protein-hungry rising middle classes of China, Brazil, and other developing nations. For this reason, serious environmental planners have recently focused not on eliminating the meat industry but on turning it green.
It's a tall order. Making beef, pork, or chicken can be an environmentally devastating process, from felling forests for pastures to the fossil fuel required to produce fertilizer for feed crops. Compared with tofu production, meat-making gobbles up 17 times as much land, 26 times as much water, 20 times the fossil fuels, and 6 times as many chemicals, according to Plenty magazine. And among animal proteins, beef is the real hog; producing a kilo of beef takes up seven times more farmland than it does to produce a kilo of chicken and 15 times the area needed for a kilo of pork. Yet scientists, herders, and green groups are convinced they can curb the damage by making adjustments all along the supply chain, changing the way we farm and feed livestock and building a cleaner cow through modern genetics. Suddenly, the search for what food activist and author Michael Pollan calls "green meat" has become a worldwide effort.
The effort starts with the beast itself. When a cow eats, its stomach produces methane as a byproduct. Cows are pretty efficient at eating grass, but the soybeans and corn that most industrial livestock farms feed them make the bovine stomach rumble with excess gas. To fight this, some farms in Vermont and France have begun to roll back the clock. The owners of the Stonyfield Farm in Vermont found they could improve health and boost milk production in the herds, and reduce methane emissions, by eliminating the soybean- and corn-based feed that became popular during the bumper harvests of the Green Revolution. Instead, they give their cows old-fashioned flax and alfalfa, which are packed with nutrients and benign fatty acids. This tactic, widely used in France, is now being replicated elsewhere in the U.S. In Canada, where cattle grazing accounts for 72 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, scientists are tinkering with the chemistry of feed—adjusting the balance of key nutrients such as cellulose, ash, fat, sugar, and starch—as another way of lowering the cow's carbon footprint.
The more ambitious projects involve tinkering with the cow's genetic code. Researchers at the University of Alberta are examining the DNA in cows' four stomachs to identify the genes responsible for making them burp and regulating how much gas they produce. In time, they hope to be able to breed cleaner cows, which could reduce emissions from cows by 25 percent, says Stephen Moore, professor of beef-cattle genomics at Alberta. Researchers at Colorado State University have identified DNA markers that they believe will help them selectively breed animals to digest their food more efficiently and so produce less methane.
Cutting down forests to make room for livestock farms is another big reason meat is environmentally unsound. Brazil has in recent years risen as an agricultural power-house, but it now ranks as the fourth—biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, thanks mainly to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Though the pace of felling has dropped, 12,900 square kilometers of rainforest (an area larger than Jamaica) were destroyed last year, releasing 160 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. As national leaders prepare to make a new pact in Copenhagen for curbing climate change this December, international green groups have criticized Brasília for its plans to build roads through the Amazon and for bowing to the farm lobby, which has expanded its frontier to the lip of the rainforest.
Many leaders in business and government are embracing the green agenda. Brazilian meatpackers like Marfrig, food sellers like Wal-Mart, footwear companies such as Timberland, and thousands of ranchers have signed on to a moratorium on using beef from recently deforested areas. "For years, the way to produce cattle was to chop down the forest to plant pastures," says Ocimar Vilela, head of environmental sustainability at Marfrig. "Now customers are demanding we change, and these demands are here to stay."
Still, the livestock industry has a long way to go. Many of the reforms are just getting started and are only being tried at a few farms, and many advances are still in the testing phase. No matter how green the business gets, meat will still weigh heavily on the planet. But going green seems to be the only realistic path. Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, thanks to the burgeoning middle classes of China, Brazil, and other nations. Brazilians today eat 89 kilos of red meat and poultry a year, nearly triple the per capita consumption of 15 years ago, while the average Chinese citizen consumes close to two and a half times more meat than he did in 1990. Even India is getting a taste for red meat—its beef consumption jumped 36 percent in the past decade. Overall meat consumption in poorer countries is growing by more than 5 percent a year, twice the world rate, making meat the most coveted agricultural commodity in recent history. The global recession has surely slowed the trend, but appetites once whetted are hard to blunt. Although meat is a health problem in the West, to many poor nations it's a boon. "Even small additional amounts of meat and milk can provide the same level of nutrients, protein, and calories to the poor that a large and diverse amount of vegetables and cereals could provide," concludes a study by the International Food Policy Research Center in Washington. "Who is going to tell the developing world's new consumers, 'Sorry, you can't eat beef'?" says Paulo Adário, an expert in the livestock industry at Greenpeace. Of course, with green beef, you might not have to.
