Newstocks

Apple TV

Picked up a 40GB Apple TV when I was in Atlanta.

It's a sweet little device, that lets you stream your iTunes audio and video content from your PC to your TV. We often buy episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store (usually when our DVR fails to record them for whatever reason, or we miss the start of a new series), so now we'll be able to watch them on the big screen in the comfort of the living room. It also makes it easy to play all our music on the living room stereo, and even internet radio too. There are a bunch of other nice features too, like the ability to browse photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube directly on the TV, and easy access to movie trailers.

Setting it up hasn't been plain sailing, however. When iTunes tried to sync the first episode of Heroes to the Apple TV, it crashed iTunes and blue-screened the PC. Not good. I had to work around this by disabling automatic synchronisation, and manually excluding Heroes from the list of TV shows to sync. I can live with this, but it's irritating.

The other problem was with Radiohead's In Rainbows. For some reason it synced the album metadata over OK, but when I tried to play any of the tracks on the Apple TV, I got an error message, even though they all played fine in iTunes. While trying to fix the problem, the Apple TV back-synced the album to iTunes, rendering the album unplayable there too. So I deleted it from iTunes and plugged my iPod in, expecting it to copy the album back into iTunes from the iPod. Instead it just deleted the content from the iPod. That was when I discovered I didn't have a backup of the album anywhere. In the end I had to download a new copy of the album from BitTorrent, import that into iTunes, then resync the Apple TV and my iPod.

The other issue is that video content doesn't play back properly on our 4:3 TV (it gets stretched vertically to fill the screen). I knew this would probably be a problem when I bought the Apple TV, however. The solution? A trip to M&M tomorrow morning to buy a large, flat-panel widescreen HDTV. I've been looking for an excuse to buy such a beast for a while, and I'm happy that the Apple TV has furnished me with one!

Atlanta

Last week we took a short trip to Atlanta.

It was my first time on an airplane with Aidan, and I hadn't been looking forward to it. Aidan's currently going through a stage where he likes to scream, especially if he's made to do anything he doesn't want to do, and I was dreading trying to entertain him for the three hour flight.

It actually turned out to be a lot easier than I was expecting. On the way out we were seated at a bulkhead, and the third seat in our row was unoccupied. That gave Aidan a lot more space to play in, and he only felt the need to race up and down the aisle a couple of times.

We met Mandy's parents in Atlanta, who flew in from a hardware trade show in Florida just an hour after our plane touched down. Together we took a cab to our hotel, a self-catering suite near the Lenox Square mall (better suited to a toddler than a regular hotel room).

We were only in Atlanta for three days, which really wasn't long enough. We spent two days shopping in and around the mall, and the other day visiting the Georgia aquarium. In addition, we managed to squeeze in breakfast with an old schoolfriend of mine whom I hadn't seen in years. I picked up an Apple TV in the Apple Store and a bunch of video games in Target, which I was amazed to discover had a better selection of PC games than the mall's specialist video game store.

Travelling with Aidan may have been easier than I was expecting, but the days were actually harder than I had anticipated. With so many new things to take in, Aidan was often tired and crabby in the afternoon and early evenings, even on those days when he did nap in his stroller. Dealing with that could get a little stressful.

On the flight back, we couldn't get the bulkhead. However, as soon as the plane took off, Aidan rolled over and fell asleep in my lap for an hour, which was a huge bonus. In addition, this time we were travelling with Mandy's parents, so we were able to share the burden of entertaining Aidan with them too.

All in all, it was a welcome break from Bermuda. Nevertheless, I'm still not keen to do much travelling with Aidan until he's a little older.

You can see more pictures from our trip here.

Gaming on a shoestring

In games, as in movies, you have the blockbusters and the arthouse titles. Most of the time, I just play the blockbusters: the likes of Bioshock, Portal, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and so on. But in the last couple of days I've been enjoying a couple of considerably lower budget titles.

The first is Audiosurf, a sort of driving game where the track is generated from any of the music you have on your computer (DRM-protected purchases from the iTunes store excepted, annoyingly). The aim is to hit coloured blocks on the track and score as highly as you can. It doesn't sound like much, but there's several different game modes, and it's a lot of fun. The high score tables are online, so you can compare your paltry scores with those racked up by everyone else. Available for only $9.95 from Steam.

Even Mandy loves it and insisted that we buy a second copy for her laptop. It's the first game of mine that she's taken an interest in since Unreal Tournament 2003!

The second game is Space Hulk, a faithful reproduction of an old Games Workshop board game I used to play when I was a kid. It only runs at a resolution of 640x480, so I had to drop the resolution on my monitor so I didn't need a magnifying glass to play. But despite that, it's still an enjoyable turn-based strategy game which made me feel very nostalgic. And best of all, it's free.

Leaving Azeroth

I've just cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

Truth is, I'm bored of WoW now. I've been playing since the beginning of 2005, however, the longest I have played any game, and there's just not enough to hold my interest any more. I don't participate in raiding because I'm not prepared to give the commitment that requires, and I've done so much PvP that that just isn't fun anymore. Running the 5 man instances is still fun, but it's difficult to find a group for them these days.

As I paid three months in advance, I can actually keep playing until April 16 (so the server transfer won't be a complete waste of money). And even after that, since all characters are retained indefinitely, I can return to the game at any time and pick up where I left off. I don't think that's going to happen, however.

Time for something new.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Just watched the pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I wasn't going to bother with this series, pegging it as a lame attempt to squeeze some extra cash out of the Terminator franchise. However, some positive reviews persuaded me to give it a go.

Overall, it was fine. But I couldn't help feeling that we'd seen it all before. The "come with me if you want to live line" made me laugh, but it felt like the show was trying a little too hard to be self-referential.

I'll give the series a bit longer, but I really hope that the writers take it in some fresh directions. The Terminator movies were enjoyable (I even enjoyed T3), but that doesn't mean turning them into a TV series is a good idea. George Lucas, are you listening?