JPJones.co.uk

So one use I’ve wanted from my iPad since I bought it has been to use it as an extra screen for my PC Laptop.

My setup at work is pretty decent already – a large 24″ monitor and my Vaio Z11 laptop, but being a major Internet user + coder, no matter how much screen real estate you’ve got, you always want more.

I’ve been a big fan (and long time user – since 2005 in fact) of MaxiVista - a utility which allows you to use the screens of several networked PCs and combine them into one huuuuge desktop. It’s worked fantastically well for pure desktop-based applications, but has sort of got lost a little these days since the introduction of multiple graphics cards support multiple monitors per card..

Well, yesterday, MaxiVista for iPad was approved by Apple and released into the App Store. What does it do? Converts your iPad into an extra monitor. How? Well, keeping it to the basics, you install a display driver on your PC, reboot, download the app onto your iPad, and then hook the two up to the same network. There’s a taskbar app which runs on the PC which auto-detects the iPad instance, and then gives you your extra monitor.

Performance isn’t amazing, at least not in my office where I’ve been using it extensively for the last couple of days, and so screen refreshes can be a little slow, but I’ve yet to play with the settings to find the best performance. What settings are available? You can alter the packet size, graphics tile szle, compression method and jpg compression level – thats right, jpg. It works similar to VNC – breaks up the screen into tiles, compresses the individual tiles and then sends them over the network to the iPad, where its decompressed and put into the correct tile position.

The other downside is that it running on an iPad – you’d half expect to be able to interact with the contents of the screen through the power of touch. Not yet, although MaxiVista have stated on their FAQ that they are planning to add remote control capabilities in the future.

So what do I run on my extra display? I’ve found it really useful to put my IM windows on there whilst working away, to use it as a display for my servers’ status report graphs, and I’ve found Spotify on the iPad display really looks great in full screen mode (as can be seen below).

What does this great utility cost? £5.99 – direct from the App Store.

I’ve had a Sony Vaio Z11 V/N for about 16 months, having upgraded from a Vaio TZ which was my daily workhorse for over a year beforehand. They’re fairly sturdy, well made, with great technology inside, and everything. just. works.

However, one bugbear of mine, which I’ve had ever since buying the Z11, is the lack of support in the BIOS for the virtualization which the Intel Core Duo processor installed in my Vaio offers. I’m not the only one! A quick search will find lots of posts going back since the day of launch complaining about this feature lack. Its also angered some users enough to try and hack the BIOS (of which they did a good job on, but its rather technical and not for the masses).

Today, whilst I was looking for drivers for my newly-upgraded Windows 7 OS, I was on the Vaio site, and stumbled across this BIOS upgrade page, proclaiming that as of the 14th October 2009, a BIOS upgrade was available that allowed you to switch on VT Support. Wohooo!

Why is this important? Well, I’m a developer (working primarily on the LAMP platform), and a tinkerer, and I run various other OS’s in a Virtualised Environment through VMWare. Virtualization support allows me to run the virtualised OS at full performance. In addition, Windows 7 now provides backward compatibility with XP programs through a virtualized XP environment, but requires VT support in order to do so.

There’s also the fact that now I have my hardware doing exactly what its supposed to – not being feature locked any longer by a poor Sony implementation.

However, that said, Kudos to Sony for finally getting this feature live – the question is – why did it take so long?

Since 2004 I’ve been a user of the rather excellent MythTV software – its open-source Personal Video Recorder (PVR) softare which runs on commodity PC hardware and is highly configurable. I originally ran it in dual front-end and back-end mode in the lounge, using Fedora running off of an ABIT BP6 (Dual Celeron), with it connected to the TV. A Hauppauge PVR-350 was installed, which was used to record Analogue TV as MPG files, and used to display the MythTV interface and video. Back then it took a couple of days fiddling around with settings to get a stable and working system – the PVR-350 causing most of the issues.

Fast forward 5 years to the present, and I’ve been through upgrades, re-installs due to the boxes dying (one was a blown motherboard through a dodgy power supply).

I’m now running MythTV in back-end only mode, using a low power VIA PC1500 Platform Motherboard, with 1.5TB of disk space, 2GB Ram, and a Hauppauge Nova-T-500 (Dual Digital Tuners). This box sits in the spare room, with an internal ariel providing the feed for Freeview. I have the box connected to my home network via a pair of ZyXEL PLA 400‘s, which connects nodes via the electricity wires already in my flat.
I’m stilling running MythTV, but instead of spending hours upon hours building and configuring MythTV from scratch, I now use a purpose-built distribution of MythTV called MythDora. This distribution is based on Fedora (Current Version is 10), and after doing everything manually from the command line, I have to say this distribution is outstanding – configuration was straightforward and painless, and one I easily recommend.

My current box runs in Backend-mode only. This is accessed via web interface which allows me to select what programs to record. It also allows me to download recorded programs to my PC to view locally. MythTV also has UPnP AV MediaServer built into it, which means the recorded content can be shared on a network with any devices which can understand this protocol. In my case, this means to view the recorded content on my TV in the lounge, I’ve a choice of either AppleTV, which I’ve hacked to run Boxee, or Playstation 3, which natively shows the content on MythTV.

I’ve also got PHP installed on this box, and have built a Twitter interface for MythTV (Coded in PHP), so it Tweets completed recordings to a special account I have setup. If anyone wants a copy of this, just let me know.

Having recently installed a Sky HD box at home (Amstrad model number DRX780UK), I quickly decided that the default hard drive that comes with the box (320Gb, with 160Gb devoted to Sky Anytime) was far too small for the household viewing habits, especially when recording HD programming which eats up Hard Drive space like no tomorrow.

Therefore, I decided to upgrade it to 1TB, which should be more than adequate for our households’ recorded viewing needs.

The box uses a SATA interface, therefore any low power HDD model should suffice (though I take no responsibility if you follow this guide and it doesn’t work).  I used a Western Digital HD103UJ (1000GB/7,200 RPM) and it worked without problem.

Here’s a guide detailing what to do, should you wish to do the same.
Note:   There are no warranty stickers to peel off / break through, therefore if the box dies you could (in theory) replace the HDD with the original,  and then call Sky to sort it out.

What you’ll need:

• Philips Head Screwdriver
• Replacement Hard Drive
• A PC with a spare SATA header and free disc space

Dismantle The Box

So, to start, unplug the box, and look at the back of it. You’ll see a single screw in the middle top, which holds the cover onto the back.  Unscrew this.

Turn the box upside down.  Within the outer black strip (for the cover), there are 6 recessed holes, with screws at the bottom of the holes.  Remove all of these.

To take the cover off, you need to lift up the three tabs towards the front of the box and pull the cover forward slightly away from the box.  As you can see in the picture, I’ve placed some knives and a screwdriver under the tabs to lift them away from the retaining bumps.

With the tabs clear of the bumps, you are now free to pull the box out of the cover.  Turn the box over and this.  You may find it a little easier if you also pull the two sides of the cover away from the box slightly as you pull.

With the cover removed from the box, you’ll see a controller daughterboard on top, a circuitboard on the front which holds the indicators and other controls, and three screws on the left hand side of the box.

Remove these three screws first, and then turn your attention to the daughterboard.  This is held in place by four screws, and has a ribbon cable linking it to the circuit board at the front of the box.  Remove these screws, and move the daughterboard so its hanging by the cable over the front of the front circuitboard.

You can now lift the metal cover off of the top of the box, exposing the motherboard, power supply, and hard drive in the bracket.

Swapping the Hard Drive

Unplug the red SATA cable and the power cable with four wires from the hard drive.

Remove the screw at the right back of the bracket which holds the hard drive bracket to the motherboard.

Then remove the screw at the front right of the hard drive bracket.

You can then pull the hard drive up and away from the case.

Remove the three screws on the side of the bracket which hold it to the hard drive.

Remove the foam triangle from the top of the hard drive.

Plug the removed drive into your PC and boot up. You’ll need to use Sky Copy+ to clone the old drive onto your new hard drive. I recommend you follow these instructions. I would use suggest you do not copy the Sky Anytime files, as this process can take a long time; even longer if you include the Anytime programming.

Once finished, reverse the process listed above, starting with attaching the all-important foam triangle!

The Sky box will always reserve 140GB for the Anytime programming, but the rest of the hard drive space is yours for recording purposes.
Enjoy!

Spotify have made no secret recently at the fact they are working on mobile versions of their service.  Lets face it, having access to millions of tracks on your handheld device whilst on the move has to be one of THE killer apps of all time.  They’ve previously released a video of Spotify running in an iPhone emulator to get the public’s mouth watering, and yesterday provided some more exciting news.

At the Google I/O conference yesterday, they showed off their work-in-progress demo of Spotify for Android. Yes, it’s coming! It’s a great looking app; it’s responsive, it syncs playlists between handset and desktop in seconds, and it can search the whole of the Spotify library just like you’re on your desktop. One much needed feature which they’ve given though to is the ability to cache tracks offline, so you can carry on in your listening pleasure without a Wifi or 3G/GPRS signal, i.e. on the underground tube here in London.

Take a look at the shiny new Spotify for Android application below. Exciting times!