Lawrence Ingraham’s Blog

I was planning to get into more detail of my setup, but I came across this great looking app called Mira. It enables the great Apple Remote to be used with any Mac, not just the ones it came with. I have an Apple Remote laying around, it came with my MacBook, and I’d love to make good use of it. Mira also provides an on screen menu for switching applications with the remote,very cool.

Unfortunately, there’s no support for Keyspan IR receivers as of this posting only their proprietary IR receiver (price unknown) or a Media Center Edition receiver. I don’t know why anyone with a Mac would have an MCE IR Receiver, but oh well. The developer says there’s something in the works to support Keyspan remotes at a future date.

The app is shareware with a 30 day trial, then $16 after the trial period is over. Looks to be a winner if they can expand the compatability.

http://twistedmelon.com/

No Comments »

With the exception of the display and the amplifier/speakers, my Mac Mini is running the show. It’s got a built in DVD player, connects to the network to stream media from my office and connects to the Internet for downloading podcasts and video. The only thing it doesn’t do out of the box is live television, but my wife insists on her Tivo with DirecTV so I haven’t crossed that bridge. However, there are some great options in that area if I ever needed it.

Here’s a list of the software I’ve installed that help things work smoothly.

VLC
The best video player in the world. VLC is awesome. It supports just about every codec you can think of, plays in full screen and best of all it’s free. This is what I use for all video files that aren’t iTunes protected or are DVD rips in Video TS folders. Although I don’t use it, it also supports control over http, so you can run an app or a widget on your laptop that controls it. I’m sure there’s a ton of features I don’t even know about. I don’t have anything negative to say about this, except there are some WMV files that won’t open sometimes.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Transmission
There isn’t a perfect Bit Torrent app for OSX yet, but Transmission is by far the best I’ve found. It’s made by the same guy that wrote HandBrake, the excellent DVD rip to DivX/H.264 convertor. Transmission leaves a small footprint and gets great speed downloading torrents. What I like best is the ability to cap upload speeds so I can still use the internet while seeding and the way it deletes torrent files after they’re done and seeded. I wish speeds were improved though, I’ve found I get better speed with uTorrent on my PC. Would also be nice if it supported RSS. It’s also free.
http://transmission.m0k.org/

Chicken of the VNC
While I usually control the system with a wireless keyboard or the Keyspan Remote, sometimes I need to get in there and do maintanence. CotV is by far the best VNC client I’ve used, and I’ve used a bunch. For those of you not familiar, VNC stands for Virtual Network Computer and allows you to control your computer from across the network. I have it installed on my G4 tower in the office as well as my wife’s MacBook that lives on the couch. I usually just fire up the MacBook and pop up a VNC window of the Mac Mini. All the keys work fine including key combinations and two finger scrolling. Open source, free, awesome.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/

SwitchRes
I’m connected to my display through a VGA cable. Sure I could have gone with DVI, but it would require an additional module installed in the plasma which runs a few hundred bucks. Plus, since the display maxes out at 848×480, I can’t display HD and didn’t see the point in spending the money. SwitchRes is a great little utility which sets the resolution of the Mini to the perfect 848×480 pixels and 60Hz required by my display. I don’t think this was an option with the Displays : System Preference when I bought the Mini, it might be now. The only bad part of SwitchRes is that it doesn’t remember my resolution, so every time I have to restart it goes back to some random resolution I don’t want. There might be an update for it that allows this, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it on my version. $17
http://www.madrau.com/

Front Row
Yes, I know, Front Row isn’t supposed to come on a G4 Mac Mini. Since the day it was cracked I’ve been running Front Row on my Mini. It’s just such a great app, I really don’t understand why Apple hasn’t released it. Granted it’s a bit slow on my G4, the video previews really slow down my system, but I’m fine with that if I get a great user interface from the couch. I’d no doubt pay up to $40 for this app if Apple would let me, but since they won’t, I’ll continue to run the cracked, sketchy version.
http://www.apple.com/imac/frontrow.html

No Comments »

My setup has improved and evolved over the last year. Here’s a list of what hardware I’m running.

Mac Mini – G4 1.25 ghz
I bought my Mac Mini a few weeks after they came out. It’s the 512mb one, 40 gig HDD I think. I’m also running a 120gig external drive through Firewire for short term storage. Then the media is stored on my G4 tower in the office, all running over ethernet. I’d like to upgrade to an Intel based one but this is working fine for now. I’ll get into more details on the apps I use and how I optimized it at a later date.

Panasonic Plasma Display – TH42PD60U 42″ EDTV
EDTV is really all I needed, and the Panny gave the best picture for the money. I’ve had an old oshiba HDTV for years and almost never used it any higher than DVDs. Sure, times have changed and now there’s more HD content, and in a year I might change my tune, but 480p is good enough for me.

Keyspan Express Remote
I’d love to grab one of those Apple Remotes, but since my Mac Mini doesn’t have that option, this is the best I can do. The software that comes with it is really easy to customize and I’ve never had a problem with responsiveness. I don’t like the way the remote feels in my hand though, the commonly used buttons are near the bottom half giving you very little room to hold the thing.

BTC 9019URF Wireless Keyboard
I searched for months to find a good wireless keyboard. Not only keyboard, but it needed to have a built-in trackpad or joystick. Either they didn’t work well on the Mac or the range was crappy and wouldn’t reach my couch. This one is great and only cost me $40 from Fry’s. Uses RF so there’s no line of sight issues. Even better, most of the buttons work with a Mac, including the Eject button and Volume buttons. I’ll get into more detail on this a little later, it’s that good.

Amphony 1520 Wireless Audio Transmitter
This was more of a locational requirement than anything else. My place has cement slab and tile for the floor and the roof is a little precarious to go crawling around in. The wife wouldn’t let me run speaker cable all over the place so I lived without surround speakers until a few months ago. For $99 at thinkgeek.com I got this two piece transmitter/receiver package which transmits the audio from my receiver 10 feet away to the couch. They use the 5.8 ghz band for uninterrupted signal. It needs line of sight, which took a little experimenting, but they work great now.

Harmon Kardon Receiver and Polk Audio Speakers
These don’t really matter to me anymore. They’re good enough to make things loud, they support DTS, DD5.1 and DPLII. I got them back when I first started getting into home theatre and upgraded the receiver when I bought my Gamecube. It can input a few different optical cables and that’s all I really need.

M-Audio Transit USB to Optical
The new Minis come with optical audio out, but since I have the original G4 style, I had to get creative. This M-Audio version isn’t the cheapest, but it workes great. Every now and then it’ll stop working requiring me to unplug and replug it in. That really pisses off the wife who cries “why can’t we have a normal DVD player like everyone else,” but it doesn’t happen that often. It works good, outputs AC-3 audio, just wish it were built in the the new ones.

No Comments »

I was watching the Apple Special Presentation today where they announced the new iPods and the cool looking iTV and figured now is as good as ever to write about my home theatre setup. My first real push into home theatre was in 2002 with a Toshiba 34″ CRT HDTV and using an old Xbox modded with Xbox Media Center, then Player, and playing videos I’d downloaded from Usenet. Legality aside, I knew the future of home theatre was in digital content, pushing my video through the network rather than with a DVD or grabbing a satellite feed.

When I got married and moved into a small space, 950 sq ft to be exact, I had a great opportunity to upgrade my system. My wife has always been supportive, read patient, with my geekyness and was actually the driver for the purchase of a new Panasonic plasma. Then when the mac mini was released, I knew I had to get one and make it my all in one media player.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to walk you through what I’ve got running in my system and how it all works. I’ve done a ton of research and found some great resources for making your home theatre expeirience as enjoyable as possible.

No Comments »

I’m really happy with the way the site came out. My mom has had her dance studio since 1964, 42 years if you can believe that. In all those years, she’s done everything “analog” with drawings, notebooks and xerox machines. Her first tech she ever got was using the old Apple IIe for her class directory. Then she jumped to an iMac in the late 90′s I think, one of the first slot loading ones, blue gumdrop style. Still, she used Appleworks as a spreadsheet and that’s about it.

She’s never had a website in her life. I mean, she still ahd her AOL account until, well I bet she still has it. At least she is running DSL at her house now, and using her gmail account we set up for her. So I really wanted to make this site easy for her to understand and to use. Really, she’s the target market, if she gets the site then the rest of the visitors will.

I wrote everything in TextMate, a great text editor that has now replaced BBedit on my G4. I was listening to the Inside the Net podcast with the guy who developed Ruby on Rails and he made a great comparison of BBedit to OS 9, whereas TextMate is OS X. Makes sense to me, I’m loving TextMate and I probably don’t even know half of the stuff it can do yet.

Anyway, the point was, this is the first full site I’ve done in a long time. Wrote it all in TextMate and used some javascript with a xhtml/css layout and a little php/mysql for the database. I really pushed for it to be bulletproof, you never know what the viewers will look at it with. It should look good from 800×600 all the way up to 1600×1200, though it’s designed for 1024×768 ideally.

Take a look if you have some time. I really like the way it flows, easy to navigate with everything you need at your fingertips. Be sure to check out the gallery where you’ll find some pics of me back in the days in my dancing outfit.

No Comments »