strangely entangled

I’ve been watching Jeff MacArthur’s Decabled blog for awhile now – we canceled our cable connection a couple years back and have been subsisting entirely off of media downloaded from the Internet. Of course, getting this media to the television in an attractive, mother-in-law-friendly way has always been a challenge.

We were big fans of the AppleTV, mostly because of the easy UI, good podcast support, and its ability to rent movies from the iTunes store. My biggest complaint with the AppleTV was that I had to convert video to an AppleTV-friendly format from time to time. I also wasn’t a huge fan of having to have all my media entered into iTunes in order to play it on the AppleTV. Sure, I could hack the AppleTV to make it do what I want (and for awhile I did), but in the end it wasn’t quite the right solution.

Enter Plex, a OS X-specific fork of the XBox Media Center project. Plex gives me a very attractive user interface, the ability to index my media (with the nifty ability to download TV & movie artwork and music), an extensible plugin architecture, and streaming support for sites like Hulu (assuming you can work around their geographical detection system. Ahem.)

I’ve put together a quick review of Plex, which you can view below:

(thanks to Jeff for hosting the file!)

I switched my primary workstation from Linux to Mac OS X a long time ago, but there’s still a soft spot in my heart for Linux. There’s also a softer spot for ultra-tiny mobile gadgets … combine the two, and I can’t resist!

Fedora 10 running on my Sony Vaio-P

I picked up a Sony Vaio P-Series “Lifestyle PC” (er, netbook) a little while ago, and thought I’d try installing Linux on it. The standard Ubuntu 8.10 distro didn’t want to install. Then I tried Fedora. Also no luck. I began to lose hope.

Then I came across AdamW’s blog, where he described in general terms how he was able to do a network install of Fedora 10 on his Vaio-P. Determined to make it work, I followed in his footsteps and documented the process. The result? Fedora 10 running quite nicely on my Vaio-P. A lot of the onboard hardware just works out of the box (with the exception of the graphics chipset, which requires some tweaking).

Actually, I’m really quite surprised: ethernet, wireless, audio, bluetooth, webcam, cpu scaling, and power management (including suspend/resume!) just plain works.

Now if someone will only get around to fixing up the Intel GMA500/Poulson X drivers.

Update: Ubuntu 9.04 went on without any difficulty (and I also got 8.10 working – not sure why it gave me trouble the first time around). VESA video is working at the Vaio’s native resolution. Still no word on GMA500/Poulson native drivers yet. But overall, the Vaio-P makes a good little Linux netbook.

The honeymoon is over, and the shine has worn off my copy of Safari 4. This morning I tried to write a quick post on this blog using Apple’s latest Safari beta, and quickly ran into trouble.

It turns out that the Safari 4 beta has problems with the WordPress 2.7 administration theme. Specifically, with displaying the modal dialog that appears when you try and make a link. Normally, the rest of the admin page fades into the background and an “Insert/edit link” window opens in the foreground.

Under Safari 4 beta however, the link window also fades into the background and you can’t focus your mouse in any of its text fields.

Whoops. While it’s probably a quick fix (and possibly no fault of Safari either – I haven’t looked at the WordPress theme closely enough to see how standards-based it is), you would think that Apple would have tested their beta browser against one of the most popular blogging platforms out there.

Oh well. Until either Apple or WordPress fixes things, it’s back to Firefox for posting. Other than this little bug, I’ve been really pleased with Safari 4 overall.