James Andrews

Halloween this year was pretty “eh”. Rainy and windy, makes for not so many kids out, and a lot of left over candy. My brother being smart sometimes brought it up to the bar with him and got rid of it while drinking with friends. I spent much of the evening doing some fall cleaning. Putting things in truck bed to ready for next weekend’s trip to the transfer station at the old landfill. Moving electronics stuff into a cardboard box so I can bring it to the electronics recycle center. I have a LOT of electronics, and it’s $.25 a pound. Made a lot of headway.

I want to get a machine with a little more power than my itty bitty laptop. Something I can do my photo editing from. I am a Mac user, but I don’t want to shell out $2500 for a power mac. I spent some tie researching on “hackintosh” which is a project for using OS X on non apple hardware. For a fraction of the cost I should be able to get power mac equivalent running OS X. Found a great article the other night that shows you how to prepare an install thumb drive to be an installer of OS X Snow Leopard. I took care of that this morning, and put it in a place I won’t lose it.

Then in talking with a friend he told me about a neat OS X preference pane called Geek Tool. Allows you to display information from a script, image, or a file on your desktop. So you can have your error logs for your web local development web server. With an image you can watch your favorite comic, a security web cam, or even network statistic graphs. The most power comes from scripts. You can have scripts run every so often and the output will get displayed to the screen. You can use any kind of shell script you like, perl, bash, php python, whichever.

There are some great screen caps of what people are doing. A lot of it’s basic like stick the date, time, or calendar on your desktop, or even your to do list.

I’ll be playing a lot with this later this week.

The other day I went over to a friend’s house who I hadn’t seen for a while. During my visit he went to show me some video. He grabbed a keyboard and start media player application on the PC attached to his TV. The application was XMBC an open source media player. I am a mac user, and a while back XMBC forked and Plex was created for OS X. Yesterday I downloaded Plex and started looking at it’s potential to be my multimedia app, instead of buying an AppleTV.

If you have used XMBC you will be happy to hear that the interface is identical. You can add your movies, music, photos, pretty much whatever media you have you can play, and it does it well. One of the things about XMBC and Plex is the ability to add plugin bundles. These bundles allow you to play videos from Comedy Central, Hulu, BBC and a slew of other online video resources. There are even some questionable un-supported bundles for “mature materials”. I tried a few of the different bundles and they worked pretty good. I did have issue with Comedy Central’s pluggin. Some videos listed didn’t play at all, and I am not sure if it was my internet connection or something wrong with the content, but I was slightly disappointed with that.

Plex also allows you to change the skin of the media player, but most of them are piss poor at best. The Best of the bunch is called Mediastream and is the default one that loads with it. You can change the background images to be what ever you want. Images from your favorite TV show, pictures you took on your vacation, or video. It’s all very cool and customizable. Though there seems to be no way to fas tforward through video, It always seems rewind. If you get to the beginning it will go to the end and rewind. I’ll have to investigate more.

I have an XBox360 and some time ago I bought the Harmony Remote for it. It so happens to support Plex, so I also programmed Plex into the remote. I took a little figuring out, but you can easily navigate through the menu items. Though there is still a lot they could do better. For example the VCR controls could actually control the video properly. play, stop pause etc. They don’t act correctly with the remote. Same problem exists with fast forwarding. You click on the right arrow expecting it to fast forward, and it rewinds instead.

I also think it would be real neat if it played mp3+g media (mp3 based karaoke). I need to get a mac mini so I can create a dedicated machine, but that’ll have to wait until later this year. early next year. I would have used an old iBook G4 I have, but Plex only works on Intel based macs.

For more information you can check out http://www.plexapp.com/

I give Plex 4 out of 5 remotes.