First thing I did once I got broadband

XBMC on Linux hooked up to my LCD TV

Yes at long last I have reasonably stable broadband again. I say reasonable because it seems to discount every few hours, but I'm sure that will go soon. The rest is done at 4am before going to bed

Anyway, I'd had setup a couple of boxes with plain Ubuntu 8.04 on them. They were pretty useless without the internet, even Samba isn't included on the CD. So once I got online I was able to download all those updates and software packages. One of port of call was installing xbox media centre to see how well it ran on a slightly better machine that the xbox. Actually it as quickly discovered I'm going off buying/building a new machine. The CPU usage was always on 100% and the only way I could get it from 9fps to a more healthy 18fps (this is while in the menus still btw) was by installing EnvyNG. Envy basiclly instals the corret video driver. After that I could also watch video at about 20fps. The video I was seeing was slow and I had not attempted the AC3 or High Def ones yet. So my port of call is to go to the largest computer fairs in Europe? to pick up some hopefully 2nd hand computer parts. Should be fun, I'm aiming for something between a AMD 2800 and Quad Core chip. That should cope with the demands of XBMC. I'm also tempted to switch the Nvedia graphics card too as its a 4th generation card and the XBMC team are recommeding a 6th generation. But at this stage, the CPU is the most important thing to get right.

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Crawling the walls for broadband still

Before anything else, having no broadband internet access at home is driving me insane. I'm crawling the walls of my apartment. I am so close to cracking one of the neighbours WEP wireless points but everytime I load up Backtrack2 (security linux livecd) I rethink, hey I'm stronger that this and shouldn't be breaking someones poorly secured WEP point. And then I go for a walk or ride down to the BBC for some late night browsing. But when I get there, I end up doing work instead of my own personal stuff. My 3G phone isnt working at 3G speeds, so I'm actually restricted to GPRS/EDGE speeds, I'm also restricted to off peak for my 3g data plan, which means I can only dialup between 6pm – 8am.

Manchester is great what I see of it. I'm planning to spend way more time in the city

I know my blog was down for a while. Being offline there was little I could do to put it back online sometimes. So I've almost decided I'm going to make the jump from Blojsom to WordPress. Reasons will be explained later when i'm not so

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Pete Tong tries a Pacemaker

I also took my Pacemaker to Bristol on the weekend and got a chance to quickly flash my pacemaker past my cousins noses. My cousins were the ones which taught me how to mix and somewhat scratch all those years ago. So I was interested in showing them that my move to laptop djing hadn't gone to waste.

I've been thinking about doing a couple of sets in a few Manchester bars/clubs. Unlike London people don't mind a bit of trance while drinking, so I could I reckon convince a few managers to give me a spot. I mean the pacemaker is still rarely known by people and it uses up much less room that a dj box or even a laptop. I was actually mixing away in Kate's car the other day going up to Newcastle. All I needed was one ear phone in and I could comfitably do mixes while chatting away. Try doing a mix even on a laptop while in a moving car…

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