Streaming is the new Downloading!

10 January, 2012 3:46 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Many of us, most without even noticing, have switched to accessing their content via streaming rather than downloading. For music, this is either via YouTube, Spotify, Last.fm, Grooveshark or a similar service, because it’s a time and cost effective method. Not only that, but it’s easy and reliable.

For TV Shows, you may be a fan of the BBC iPlayer, ITVplayer or 4OD? The content that you have missed can be watched again online, at your convenience via the Internet.

So, what about Movies? Usually, with the introduction of Blu-Ray or HDTV, people prefer to see their Movies in Hi-Definition, something that Streaming usually struggles with due to bandwidth/speed limitations. To counter this, many (rogue) movie streaming sites over sub standard quality releases of movies – some of which don’t play correctly or require some obscure flash player that you wouldn’t even install on your worst enemies PC. So what’s available for online Movies? Netflix? Or how about using XMBC??

Step in Ice Films plugin for XMBC!

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Installing Mac OS X Lion – Hackintosh

2 January, 2012 9:20 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Firstly – what is a Hackintosh?  

It is a standard PC running Mac OS

Why do it?

Well it will save you a heap of money amongst other things (fancy a £2500 Mac Pro for £500?) – and you get to try something new…

What will I need?

Really you need an Intel based recent PC (such as Core 2 Duo/Quad or i3/i5/i7 CPU)

What else is important?

You should have a good idea of how computers work – this will require you to change some settings on your PC’s BIOS (system board software) and also risks losing your Windows installation if you haven’t got the knowledge to place the install in the right place.

Still interested? Read on… Read More

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Mapping Windows Shares in Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

2 January, 2012 2:08 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Well having upgraded my MacBook/MacPro to OS X 10.7 I did notice one thing immediately. I was unable to access my Windows shares on my NAS box (a ReadyNAS Duo by Netgear)

Annoyed, been as all my install apps I needed were on the NAS and my main laptop and desktop both run MacOS now….

I kept getting the error below…

I didn’t really know what was causing it – so I decided that I would do some digging – turns out Apple disabled a certain type of access to Windows shares – namely used on NAS boxes people use a home – due to a security issue (however this does not stop you connecting using this work around)…

You can begin to get round the issue by opening up the Connect to Server box in Finder (Apple + K) or as shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next your should be presented with a connection options screen – this will allow you to connect to the server you used to be able to before you installed OS X Lion.

Simply use the format of:

smb://SERVERNAME/SHARENAME

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also add the connection to your favourites using the + button to the right of the text field…

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