3 years ago I bought the clever Roku Soundbridge gadget, that let us play any digital music stored on either the laptop or the home server, or found on internet radio. Apart from not understanding modern secure WiFi (forcing me to switch to ethernet-over-mains to connect it up), it was OK but not that special. Martha never used it, so I decided it should go.

But rather than just sell it and forget the idea, I pondered for a long while about replacing it with a decent media player for the TV. This is, after all, the age of YouTube, iPlayer and streaming movies on demand. More important for us than movies right now is playing music and showing pictures — and something that’s easy enough for us both to use often. Asking around the answer was either Apple TV or a MacMini. I went the cheaper route, and decided to buy a second-hand Apple TV on eBay, and have just finished upgrading its disk from the rather laughable 40GB up to a more sensible 250GB.

As you’d hope from Apple, it is dead simple to setup, and does the job well and rather stylishly. (The functionality is a little lacking, and clever people have found out how to add richer media centre software like Boxee or XMBC to it. I’ve not decided which of those to use yet … but when I do, the ATV USB Patchstick creator is the way to do it.) Recommended. (Though if you want lots of streaming video, without being tied to iTunes supported formats, then the advice was strongly for getting a Popcorn Hour Media Centre.)

If you have an inner geek, you might want to read on …

I followed Engadget’s instructions on how to do this, though they are 10.4-specific. But as MT pointed out to me, before you try to recreate the media partition, just delete the old one and bung it back in the apple tv (no need to reassemble it – it works fine open), do a factory reset and it should rebuild the missing partition at the new size. But it won’t if you don’t clear out the Spotlight files, which always get written when you mount the drive.

To enable the low-level bitcopy from the original ATV HDD to my external backup HDD, I was at first getting ‘Resource Busy’ errors. Reading this hint helped me round that: unmount but not eject the backup HDD’s partition. BTW, this dd command unhelpfully doesn’t give any progress as it works. (For info it took 194 mins for the full 40GB data (about 3.5MBps). Doing this before you put data on the system could be up to 30x quicker.)

One of the options is showing photo slideshows from Flickr; but unless you have a lot of photos, this isn’t very useful. However, someone has put together a special account that just shows photos voted as being ‘interesting’ that are also available under Creative Commons. Ask it show from ‘dailypool’ and see what emerges …

the disk drive and its packaging

As part of the Apple TV upgrade, I ordered a new laptop-style hard disk from dabs.com. It’s all of 9.5×70x100 mm big (according to Wikipedia). But it came in a box just slightly larger than necessary: 90×250x300 mm! That’s only 1% of the volume of the box. OK, there was a style of bubble-wrap around the drive, but even allowing for that, it would have been less than 10% full. What a waste of plastic and cardboard, dabs. Have you not heard of the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra?

(And, yes, I have now signed up to Freecycle locally, to make sure we have the best chance of reusing anything we don’t need. For some things, ebay is just too much work …)

Another weekend, another Festival in Cheltenham. This time the Food & Drink Festival held in stalls and marquees in Montpellier Gardens.

I didn’t have long to look around, and really needed more than 90 minutes. But I did get to sample quite a few cheeses, sweets, ales, stouts, teas, and other drinks. I could have sampled many more if I wanted to.

Here are the main things that caught my eye and taste buds:

• Golden Ale, Butty Bach and the 2008 Best Bottled Beer winner Wholesome Stout, all from the Wye Valley Brewery. Available direct, or recently from Tesco and Sainsburys in the West Midlands.
• some ground coffee flavours from the Real Team & Coffee Company
• fairtrade Early Grey tea from the enthusiastic and friendly people at Trumpers Tea
• Gloucester Hot cheese, which adds mustard and horseradish to Double Gloucester, from the Tewkesbury Delicatessen. They did lots of other great things, including an unusual-looking Tortilla.
• the buy-local “online local farm shop” delivery service soon coming to Gloucestershire

All are local or fairly local concerns, which I’m happy to support. Just a shame the rather wonderful Bristol-based Pie Minister weren’t present.

(And a note to self for next year: take plenty of cash, and don’t book up lunch straight afterwards, which stopped me having one of the many delicious lunch options there.)

Today we saw Noel Coward’s play Brief Encounter at the Everyman Theatre. The Kneehigh Company brought their usual inventiveness, wit and musicality to proceedings. It had the best use of video footage I’ve yet seen, and at times amazing well integrated, with several characters literally and figuratively moving from stage to screen. It had its serious moments, as you’d expect as it explored fidelity, affairs, and the pain it causes. Highly recommended.

Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS was released yesterday. People were saying it is only marginally useful for Touch owners, but is a no-brained for iPhone owners. I went ahead and upgraded anyway, knowing that soon enough new interesting apps would force me to upgrade at some point.

I’ve found it to be a bit quicker for some tasks, but there has been one addition that I’ve read about in any review. When playing a track in Music, you can now make it run at double or half speed. Neat. This will help me to clear the backlog of podcasts I’ve not got round to listening to.

I noticed a large shift in US Foreign Policy the other day, as I was hearing President Obama speaking. I suddenly rePosed that gone was Bush’s belligerent ‘EYERACK’, instead Obama’s much friendly-sounding ‘EERAAK’. In fact pretty much the way I pronounce it. So that must be good!

Yesterday we went to a presentation by holiday firm Club La Costa, bribed by some free M+S vouchers, and a possible cheap week’s holiday in Spain.

The pitch the company were making was relatively simple, and quite attractive. (The details of this pitch aren’t relevant for this post, but I’ll explain if interested.) But I was close to walking out at several points. And I probably should have done.

Unbelievably the salesman and his manager assigned to us dodged getting Martha a glass of water for 15 minutes, despite three pointed requests, and a water cooler being visible only 8 feet away. They were clearly under instruction not to leave the table we were sat at, and so had to wait until the ‘drinks person’ came round. Unbelievable. It was over an hour later that we were given drinks as a matter of course.

Second, they asked for 2 hours. In practice I don’t think any of the 10 couples left before 3 hours, and we were there nearly 4. They could easily have covered the material in just 2 hours. But despite pressing him to get to the point, the salesman wasted a lot of time at the beginning on his make-nice-pally shtick, which really wound me up. Particularly as any answer I gave to a question he then repeated parrot fashion. Said salesman then thought it was a good idea to challenge me that I was being unhelpful. Nice.

When asked how long various stages were going to take, they kept saying “2 minutes” or “10 minutes”, when they knew full well it was going to take longer, as they go through this routine up to 10 times a week. As a result we severely inconvenienced Simon and another friend we were going to be spending the evening with, both of whom really didn’t need us being late.

And finally Club La Costa it is wearying sitting through the childish need-to-get-the-Sales-Manager-over routines. If you don’t know your product or script, why are you still in the job?

I saw a great little part of Bristol for the first time yesterday – St.Nicholas’ Market down near Harbourside. Simon had taken Martha there before, but it was my first time, as we took him out for lunch. In feel its quite similar to Camden Lock market area in North London, with indoor and outdoor stalls. Being a Greenbelt Festival regular, spending time each year looking around the many stalls that pitch up there, many of these looked quite familiar.

Eating out with a dog in tow isn’t that easy, so its partly=outdoor food stalls were a big help. We had some good (but not cheap) Moroccan plates, washed down with mint tea. After eating we browsed around for a short while, focussing on a second-hand CD stall, where I took a chance on a Mingus jazz album.

The other find came from a piece on Channel 4 news on Friday: that there’s a Banksy exhibition on in Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery. We didn’t have time to visit it immediately, but we will before it closes on 31st August. Incidentally there’s a virtual tour of Banksy’s art in Bristol – his home town.

That’s the % of fat in the milk we’re now trying. And to be honest we can’t tell the difference. So depending on the dairy, we’ll now be mostly buying orange or purple milk, not green. I doubt it’s really going to make much health difference, but I suppose every little helps … ching ching …