Apple Tv + Boxee = Media Centre Solution

I have been looking at a media centre for a long time and when we purchased a 40" LCD Television recently I bought and AppleTV. I must say I liked the AppleTv interface as it was easy to use but, I had to convert every movie I wanted to watch with Handbrake which takes a couple of hours for a 720P movie.

So I installed Boxee on the AppleTV. Boxee was the best choice because it does not interfere with the normal AppleTv functionality, It just adds a laucher to the apple tv interface.

It took me a couple of hours to get everything working fine, These are the steps I used. So I plugged in my portable USB Harddrive and I added it to Boxee. Boxee indexed nearly all of my movies within 5 minutes and I was able to watch movies in every format without a problem.

The biggest reason to install Boxee for me was the ability to play .mkv files which all of my 720P movies are. Boxee has a great interface too!

The Boxee home screen.

So now I can:

• Play all my movies and Tv shows on my AppleTv
• Copy movies to the AppleTv wireless using SSH
• Access all my photos from Iphoto using the normal AppleTv interface

I would like to thank all the people involved in the Boxee project for creating such a great solution in the Alpha stage of their software.

Textpattern Template | Clean Sky

Textpattern has been my CMS of choice in the last 4 years and KingsDesign has been running Textpattern from the day we started. So it is only fair that I have now designed a template to give something back to the textpattern community. Clean SKy template is the name I came up with.

The template was inspired by an image I have recently taken on a trip around Asutralia. I have developed the template without installing any plugins to make sure this template is an easy start for the beginning textpattern user but it is also very easy to customize for the experienced user. The template has been developed on Textpattern 4.0.8 but it will work on previous versions as well as it is nog using any of the most recent txp tags to keep things easy.

Take a look at Textpattern Template | Clean Sky.

and if you like it you can download it (96 Kb ZIP file).
Installation instructions are included with the template.

There is also a Textpattern forum thread.

The template has been tested in the following browsers:
Internet explorer 6, Internet explorer 7, Firefox 3(mac), Opera(mac).

In the next release I might add some functionality like a contact form and more extensive blogging tools.

Enjoy this clean and fresh template!

Australia Trip

Best Wishes for 2009!
Long time no post.
I have been traveling Australia for over a month and I have not spend much time on the computer at all.
It was very surprising that I did not need a computer at all because there were so many nice experiences on the way.
I traveled from Hobart to Melbourne and from there we drove to Adelaide and all the way to Alice Springs.
After that I spend two weeks in Perth for some real holiday.
I bought a new Ricoh r7 digital camera and below are some of the pictures that I took.