Thanks to a friendly WordPress member I now have the blog address that I wanted, so this place will become (even more) dormant and my new home will be furtive.wordpress.com
Running SqueezeCenter on a Viglen MPC-L
February 20, 2009After I had removed Xubuntu from my tiny Viglen MPC-L and installed Windows XP onto it I started to think about what I could use it for.
It’s already running the CurrentCost software to monitor electricity usage in my house and my next plan was to install SqueezeCenter and AlienBBC on it to see how it coped with feeding my Squeezebox Boom.
I wasn’t expecting it to work very well, as the MPC-L isn’t all that powerful, but to my surprise it is running perfectly well and is playing regional BBC radio stations via AlienBBC with no issues.
Accessing the SqueezeCenter web interface directly on the MPC-L is painfully and in reality unusable slow. However accessing it on a more powerful machine (my Samsung NC10 netbook in this case) over my WLAN is much better and perfectly usable.
I’ve only got two MP3’s installed on the MPC-L at the moment but they both play fine. I’m not sure how it will cope with my large music collection – especially if I run it from an external USB hard drive. That’s my next test…
UPDATE: Ok so I copied my entire music collection (about 40Gb worth of mp3’s) to the Viglen and got SqueezeCenter to do a rescan. And it’s still working great. So good in fact that I have uninstalled SqueezeCenter from my main PC and am just using the Viglen now to run my Squeezebox Boom.
Installing Windows XP on a Viglen MPC-L
February 10, 2009I bought a teeny tiny Viglen MPC-L PC after a friend told me about them. I’m going to use it for the same reason he does – to connect my CurrentCost to so I can collect electricity usage data (I’m currently using an old Dell laptop which isn’t ideal).
Teeny tiny Viglen PC
The little Viglens are normally £99, but can be currently bought for £77 including VAT and Delivery – details are available by listening to the Ubuntu UK Podcast. Mine was delivered today as promised by Viglen but sadly didn’t come in a box that is far too big for it like most people’s have. Also in the box was a Microsoft mouse, a really cheap and nasty Viglen-branded keyboard, and something of a nice unexpected surprise – a 2Gb memory stick! There are plenty of other blogs detailing the size of the box and also the specs of these things, but basically they are a silent fanless very low-power (10W) PC with a 400MHz AMD Geode CPU, an 80Gb hard drive and 512Mb of memory.
They come with some sort of Ubuntu installed on them by default, but I wanted to run Windows XP on mine as I’m not quite nerdy enough to use Linux.
Installing Windows XP on one of these poses some interesting challenges, as the device obviously has no optical drive to stick a CD into. They can be booted from a USB stick though (providing you use one of the two USB1.0 ports on the rear rather than one of the four USB2.0 ports on the front)
After some very brief googling, I found this excellent guide to installing XP from a USB stick. I used a 256Mb memory stick to create the boot drive, and copied the i386 folder from the XP installation CD to a USB hard drive I had laying around.
The installation was much easier than I was expecting. The steps I performed are as follows:
- Follow these instructions for creating a BartPE bootable memory stick using a separate PC
- Connect an external USB hard drive to the other PC and copy the i386 folder from the XP installation CD onto it
- Plug the keyboard and bootable memory stick into the USB1.0 ports on the rear of the Viglen
- Power up the Viglen and press F1 to enter the BIOS
- Change the boot order so that the USB memory stick is first in the list
- Power the Viglen down, plug the external USB hard drive into one of the USB2.0 ports on the front of the unit and power it all back up again
- The Viglen should boot into BartPE from the memory stick
- Follow the rest of the instructions to kick off the XP installation
And that’s it. Pretty simple.
Performance-wise, this thing isn’t going to win any awards when running XP, but it’s more than usable. I’ve got it connected to my 37″ LCD telly running at a resolution of 1600×1200 quite happily
Next steps are to get the CurrentCost connected to it and see how it performs with that…
Watch catch-up TV on your MediaCenter
February 6, 2009A friend pointed me in the direction of TunerFree MCE which is a great Vista MediaCenter plug-in that allows you to watch streaming watch-again TV shows from all the BBC iPlayer channels as well as all the ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 watch again stations. It also shows live streaming of BBC and ITV channels if you don’t have a TV card in your MediaPC.
It only works if you are running a Vista (there is no XP version sadly), and you need to have Microsoft Net Framework 3.5 installed. Oh, and it only works if you are in the UK
It’s fairly seamlessly integrates with MediaCenter and the menu appears next to the other TV viewing options.
I had a bit of trouble getting the BBC and Channel 4 channels working so asked the developer and he replied straight away saying I probably didn’t have the latest version of Flash installed under Internet Explorer. This turned out to be the case – I normally use Firefox where iPlayer was working fine, but when I tried to use it in IE it advised me to upgrade Flash. Once done, the application worked great.
The quality of the images on my 37″ LCD telly are pretty good for streamed content, although it’s obviously not as sharp as broadcast telly.
Monitoring Electricity usage with a CurrentCost monitor
January 23, 2009A couple of friends of mine have recently been playing with CurrentCost monitor, which is a nifty little home energy usage device. It has an induction loop that you clip onto one of the wires coming out of your electricity meter and that wirelessly transmits electricity usage to the display, which looks like this:
The display shows you how much electricity your house is currently using, how much that is costing you (you can change the electricity cost depending on what your supplier charges you), and cleverly if you turn something on or off it will tell you how much your consumption has gone up or down, so you can see exactly how much power that device was using.
I got mine from the eco gadget shop although they are available direct from CurrentCost’s own ebay shop for more money. The eco gadget shop seems to be part of Scottish and Southern Energy so I guess they are subsidising the cost of these things a bit. One thing to be aware of though is delivery can take some time. They took my credit card payment when I ordered, but the device took almost 3 weeks to arrive as they were out of stock, and was sent standard 2nd class post!
But the best bit about these devices is that they have a port on them that allows them to be connected to a PC via a cable that can be purchased from the CurrentCost ebay shop, and collect the data it spits out every few seconds. There have been various IBM people writing little applications to plot this data onto graphs, and also one of the friends who originally pointed me in the direction of the CurrentCost device has been creating a great little bit of software:
Techtoniq Ltd's Current Cost Agent in action
As you can see it plots both electicity usage (green bars) and temperature (pink line).
In order to connect the device to a USB port on my PC I had to download a USB to Serial port driver. The Windows XP one can be downloaded from the Prolific website and I found a Vista version from here, although having read a bit more I think Vista might have found a driver for it automatically when I plugged the device in. Unfortunately either this driver or the CurrentCost software I’m trying doesn’t like Vista, which keeps BSODing so I’ve temporarily enlisted the use of an old Dell laptop that has got Windows XP on it
I can see this energy usage worry gauge coming in very handy when trying to reduce the amount of electricity we use. And it’s also perfectly geeky for me to play with.
This is the current LIVE power usage and temperature in my house:
CurrentCostAgent
Running Windows 7 Beta under Vista’s Virtual PC
January 22, 2009I was interested to see what Windows 7 was like, so downloaded a copy of the beta, but didn’t have a spare PC to install it on.
However, I have a MediaCentre PC under my telly that is running Vista Home Premium and wondered if I could install Windows 7 using the built-in Virtual PC application.
So I fired the application up and created a new Virtual PC of type Other with 1024Mb of memory, catpured the ISO image of Windows 7 Beta that I had saved to my Desktop and started the installation.
And it worked perfectly. I now have Windows 7 working happily in a Virtual PC window on my Vista machine. And I must say Windows 7 looks pretty funky, and it seems to be fairly quick even running in this configuration.
Tilt-shift your photos online
January 13, 2009I discovered a nifty little tool that creates tilt-shift-looking photos quickly and easily online. Not everyone is a fan of this look (it’s the new HDR), which makes (some) photos look like they are of models rather than of the real thing but I really like it.
In the great Blue Peter tradition, here’s one I made earlier of some Sumo wrestlers taken in Tokyo:
Sumo Tilt-shift
It’s not quiet perfect as I did it on my little Netbook screen and I’ve blurred the top of the fighters heads a bit, but it’s not bad. And it’s now my 2nd most “interesting” photo on Flickr after my Camera Obscura photo.
I’ve re-done it on a proper-sized screen now and have fixed the blurry heads.
The original un-tiltshifted photo can be found here
Getting a MediaCenter PC to go to sleep
January 13, 2009I’ve got a nice little MediaPC that I bought from these guys which is running MediaCenter under Vista Home Premium and is turned on 24×7
In these days of Climate Change economic doom and gloom it thought I would look into getting it to standby when not in use, but come back to life when I needed to use it, or it needed to record something off the telly for me.
Setting the power settings in Vista didn’t work so I googled for some answers and found this little application, the MCE Standby Tool which promises to “make all the required power management settings, even some which are normally inaccessible” and make my machine sleep soundly.
It’s a small nifty looking app and seems well written:
It didn’t seem to work at first but with a bit of tinkering I discovered that the LogMeIn client was causing the machine to come out of standby as soon as it activated.
And then I remembered that the PC runs SqueezeCentre that my Squeezebox Boom connects to. So the next thing to test is getting Wake on LAN to work…
So, I’ve got a blog
January 12, 2009It’s my first one. Not sure why I’ve got it or what I’ll use it for though. We shall see. Well I say “we”, but I guess I mean “I” as who else would be interested in reading it?…
