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Via Adam Curry. There is a new version of iPodder lemon edition. Its in beta but looks like a massive improvement on the old classic ipodder 1.14. There are some screenshots of the windows and mac versions here. I have downloaded the beta which is a 10.5 meg by the way… I dont know if I will try it out because I have recently switched over to using blogmatrix jager for both my rss reading and podcasting. I was tempted with Sparks! too but I installed it at work and got fed up with the lack of rss reading at the time. Now maybe a good time to upgrade?

Anyway, I may see what new in ipodder 2.0 and compare the features with Jager, if Jager wins I'll donate some money for sure, specially if the delicious linkage is going to do something like AmphetaRate, smartmobs sums it up. Maybe this could kill Digg which I like but dont have time to mess with, plus I'm using del.icio.us all the time now, so I'm glad to hear blogmatrix are using del.icio.us. Talking of Blogmatrix heres somethings which i'm crying out for in rss readers generally.

Ok subscriptions! What on earth are developers thinking about? Yes you can import and export OPML 1.1 great but what about synchronisation? Jager does sync subscriptions but you only have 2 options. FTP and bloglines. I dont have a FTP server running and really really dont want to go down that route just to keep my ipaq, laptop plus workstation at home and work all sync'ed but it looks like I may have to. The other option of using bloglines is good and I'm at the moment trying to remember my password for my old bloglines account. I really dont want to loose the cubicgarden username. Anyway back to jager, please please include a webdav option so anyone with a mac and idisk can use that for storage of opml. Another thing which my pocketRSS and RSSOwl do which I have not yet found is a real subscription method. All my OPML is online and I usually add RSS feeds to the OPML directly using Webdav or locally then get pocketRSS to update the subscription which pulls in all the new RSS feeds without effecting the others already in place. This also works in RSSOWL if you set it up correctly however there thinking of removing the feature in favour of the jager ideas. Updating the OPML in Jager seems to involve unsubscribing to all the feeds which is easy but then dragging the OPML back in again. Yuk!
Another ignoying thing for me, is there any podcast software which supports RSS 1.0 enclosures? I kinda of expect with Danny Ayers post it would start to happen.

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Ok another post to the xbmc forums, this time for podcasting on the xbox media centre.

How come no one it seems has picked up on podcasting for xbmc? If you do not know what podcasting is please read this wikipedia defination – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting. The basic idea is, that a RSS feed has an enclosure element which points to a location where to download media (typically a Mpeg3 or Torrent file). There are already 100's of podcasts from radio stations to homebrew broadcasters. But theres no douht that its a great resource of media and video wont be that far behind in the near future.

Usually a little program like ipodder or doppler reads the RSS feeds every few hours and collects the content from the enclosure element when it comes across one. I can imagine this being very easy to do as a python script in xbmc, maybe as a background task while you watch films or listen to music not from the internet. Actually I believe ipodder is actually written in python already!!! I've already seen two python scripts which can do pretty much what i've said they just need to be put together. YaRSSr.py and download apleasure_zip.py. Its just a shame i'm not a python programmer…

Seriously if I had the time, I would hack it together myself, I've looked at the source python scripts which I mentioned and I think its possible even for me. Right now I have ipodder running on a machine which dumps all the podcasts media into a shared directory which the xbox reads when loading up, then I'm using the script startplaylist.py to automaticly play a the engadget and daily source code podcasts. Not ideal because I have to add them to the playlist myself, hence why I turned it off and just navigate to the podcats share now. Anyway I hope so one picks up on the idea and takes it somewhere I wasnt even thinking.

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Yes so recently I upgraded my xbox media centre to a november cvs version and found some interesting new features. The biggest change comes in the way of apple itunes support. Using the daap which is used by itunes 4.x, xbmc is able to not only play everything in the library but also all the different playlists. Which I have to say is pretty awesome and has prompted me into downloading itunes on to my tabletpc. If only winamp had support for this too, i would consider switching because itunes is a beast on cpu usage and does not have the plugin support like winamp. Anyway some more screen shots are here and here.

Some other interesting things have also been better intergrated and updated. The great xlink kai client has been updated so now you can type in a chat room using the onscreen keyboard or if your like me, you can use an usb adapter and a real keyboard. So pretty much now the xbmc xlink client is equal to the win32 client. You still need to run the kai engine on a pc or another device but hey you cant have it all.

Like the daap:// protocal there is now a shoutcast:// protocal too which basiclly goes to shoutcast.com and cache's the top 500 shoutcast broadcasts. Another screenshot at 500. Shoutcast being intergrated into xbmc is great and I'm hoping to see more intergration with some of the new scripts poping up. Oh by the way its good to see someone else in the bloggerosphere is keeping up with xbmc. Oh by the way we play here

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The feature freeze looks to be over for the xbox media centre team. Recently there seems to lots of changes around the core featues of plaing media.

First up, Apple QuickTime.com Browser is now Fixed using a version 4 python script. For those who are unsure of what this is, please check out the screen shot which should make some sense of my futher descrption. Using AQT Browser, it is possible to browse Apple's http://www.quicktime.com movie trailer site and stream the trailer straight to the xbox. Its simple and very effective for watching the latest trailes. In the future, I'm sure other sites like http://www.ifilm.com will also be treated to the same type of browsing method.

I made the choice along time ago to replace evoX which is the default mod dashboard with xbmc its self, and its doing a very good job. I only have to turn the xbox on and I know I can hit my browser to play music without turning on the TV. But there are things which need to be changed. The filemanager is one of those things. In xbmc 1.0 and betas, it was ok. But if you wanted to really copy something to HD quickly, you were always better off using another application as the button control in xbmc was awarked at best. Now things have improved, xbmc users will see the screenshot and know exactly what I mean.

The most exciting feature for me is the new and improved Xlink client which was always a poor relation to the full client on a pc. Now you can do so much more…

Amongst many new features, it has a voice chat function (using Team-Avalaunch's port of SPEEX). Players can use voice chat within XBMC to communicate directly or chat in “groups” with other players on XBOX's and PCs that also support XLink Kai.
Auto-Play from harddrive, Kai Toast notifications, My Avatar, network status dialogs, plus a number of bug-fixes.

XBMC now supports private arenas, creating arenas, avatars, invites and lots of other KaiUI features. XBMC is also your friend if you intend to use a Linux-router like the WRT54G to run your Kai Engine – you could get a really nice setup, with XBMC and kaid – so no computer would be needed

Other things to mention on this sleepless night. Theres a super sweet skin from http://www.critikill.net which produced the orginal project mayhem skin. But honestly version 2 of the skin is slick. Theres a really nice skin and general shake up in the webfront end gui. Its now using CSS instead of insane Tables and Frames. I have not yet tried it on my PocketPC, but it should fair better than the old web front end, which has silly amounts of javascript to really trip up the pocketpc. Talking about using the phone as a remote control, it would be interesting to see if it works on my smartphone too? Generally, xbmc 1.1 is a good upgrade and worthy of the effort. Now if only I could turn the xbox on remotely, embrace the bittorrent and podcasting scene…
Lots of screenshots of new features.

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Its so good to hear that the Kai team are now working on a Linux version of the Xlink Kai engine shame they feel the need to keep it closed sourced. With my move to Linux, I lost the ability to play xbox games over the internet xbox live style. Which is a real shame because I would love to play Burnout 3 full screen and online against some serious players. Been feeling the old wipeout experience while playing it at work recently.

The announcement also drawed my attention to the latest xbox media centre cvs builds. See I've got rather use to using xbmc 1.0 day in day out, and cant really imagine what else they could put in it to make it better (for me). I mean iTunes compatability would be nice for alot of people but certainly not for me. Saying all that actually, I do have some requests but there much more higher level things, generally its all good. Which reminds me I still need to sort out CCXstream or the SMB server on my linux box. I got a huge partition on my linux box but I share stuff on my server which has about 20 percent of the storage. Crazy!

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In my previous blog I made alot of reference to RSS for discovery and Torrents for delivery. Well I was reading my feeds and came across this. It details some interesting developments like Buttress and sorry I have to shout this… how glad am I changed to Linux. Makes me want to install Azureus.

Its a shame the Salon arcticle is locked behind a wall but this eweek arcticle says a lot about the BitRSS idea, made up the name myself.
Very good to see a UK student posting RSS feeds for torrents.

And on the subject of rolling your own reruns, the other day I was watching The 100 Greatest TV Ads on Channel4 and had to change to Spy on BBC 3. Now I wasnt that bothered about the Greatest TV Ads but it would have been nice because Sarah hasnt seen classic ads like the you've been Tango'ed advert. However I wasnt that bothered because I knew someone would post it onto UKNova. And sure enough 2 days later I have the whole 3 hours of The 100 Greatest TV Ads. Roll your own indeed!

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Just incase you dont know what an aibo is…

“AIBO” is the name given to the Sony entertainment robot. Developed to encourage human and robot
interaction, AIBO creates and introduces you to new pleasures and lifestyles.

The name “AIBO” is coined from the words “A.I. (Artificial Intelligence),” “eye” and “robot.” In Japanese, the word “aibou” means “partner” or “pal.”

First up I have to say a great thanks to John's great girlfriend Hanna from the Twin cities. I will paypal you what I agreed and a little more soon as you email me back. Thanks for John and Sarah for being go betweens, my mother in-law Thelma and her friend (?) who actually brought it with her to London this week, i wish i could have met you in person to thank you again…

I'm already checking out the aibo hacking scene. Control my aibo via my ipaq? Humm I wonder if this will work via a smartphone too? And dont get me thinking about Bluetooth and a aibo! Generation5 looks very up to date and not so spooky as the others. The official guides are also useful of course.

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Yes its very much like the Apple Airport Express but have you seen the price of this Asus Wireless AP? 27 pounds compared to 90 plus pounds. Yes it doesnt have airtunes and it isnt 802.11g, but who cares? It does everything else I'm after. I'm specially interested in its,

But, Ethernet Adapter mode looks pretty useful if I do move to a larger house.

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Things are looking great on the Torrent scene recently. Dave pointed me at UKNova which is a torrent site just for UK programmes. And its seriously a great torrent site, always full and well updated. Its so good I am considering upgrading my broadband just so I can stuff quicker. The linux change over has put my ati all in wonder card out of order just recently (seems very tempermental, even though the tv feature works now and then). So I cant record my usual uk stuff easily. But theres almost no need with UKNova. In the short period of time I've been using UKNova, I was able to get the new series of Derren Brown all the Spy's up to this date. Theres also Hollyoaks on there but I've kind of given it up recently.

Anyway I'm thinking rather than get TopupTV or Cable TV, I could spend the extra money on a higher bandwidth connection or a second one (cable and adsl into the smoothwall firewall will do the trick). A higher bandwidth connection would also mean I could leave torrents running longer and when I get my all in wonder working again, I could even host my own torrents for shows I've recorded.
All this thinking has made me think about an extra element for xmltv to point at torrents. Which reminds me I need to learn or at least get to grips with Python so I can mess with xbox media centre's more advanced features. I mean I've seen scripts to do everything from email, rss and tv listings to irc download, itunes and webbrowsing. Some sites to pickup scripts from. http://www.gueux.net/xbmc-scripts/index.html | http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.pl | http://www.xbmc.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=15

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Been meaning to put this up for a while now. Dave got his Airport Express a few days ago and intergrated it into his setup at home. Thought I would do the same and compare the difference.

How to: Set up WDS like normal (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107454), then stop the Extreme/Main Basestation from doing NAT and set the Express/Remote Basestation to a manual IP address on the same subnet as the rest of the network.

Resultn my PCs I run Windows/iTunes and GNU/daapd so I can listen to any and all of my illegal bounty throughout the house, and the xbox connects to the net for leet-o thumbnails and weather data, and streams films from a SMB share on said Win/GNU boxen.

Best of all: No holes and cables snaking across the length of the house

My setup is based around my hub which is a simple 10/100 8port hub. The smoothwall firewall protects the network just like in Daves network, but I also put personal firewalls on each workstation and laptop inside the network. I dont have to worry so much about wires because most of my setup is in one room except the wireless access point which sits in the middle of the house, so theres wireless in the garden. The xbox is my main mediaplayer, while I could use the video output on any of my workstations. Xbox mediacentre is too good specially teamed with SMB and XBMS shares on all machines in the network.

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