Bug with streaming audio to Apple TV

So it appears that there is a occasionally a problem in streaming music to the Apple TV from the Mac. The symptom is that you can see the "Audio TV" device in your Sound -> Output window, but every time you try to select it, the selection reverts to the "Internal Speakers" line.

The easiest way to reset this, is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and switch off your Wifi Network, leave it off for a second, then switch it back on. When you reconnect to your wifi network you should be able to select the "Apple TV" device in your Sound/Output pane in the System Preferences.

Reflections on 2012

Well, it's been ages since I posted last. Not terribly good, seeing as one of my New Year's resolution was to write a lot more. To be fair, I have actually been writing. Just not on my blog.

Reflections on 2012

2012 was a pretty good year for Helen and I. Probably the highlight of the year was going over to the Emmy Awards in New York. Helen was one of the people nominated for an award for her work on a TV documentary episode with Adam Savage "Curiosity - Can you live forever?". We had an absolute blast in New York.

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Restarting Fitbit on the Mac

I seem to have a problem with my Fitbit Ultra and my Mac Air running OS/X 10.8. What happens is the fitbit daemon doesn't seem to work properly if I suspend the notebook by closing the lid. After awakening, my Fitbit profile never seems to update with the latest data from the device. A solution to this problem is to restart the fitbit daemon. You can use launchctl to stop and restart the daemon, which should mean that your data then gets transferred from the device properly.

sudo launchctl stop com.fitbit.fitbitd sudo launchctl start com.fitbit.fitbitd

A Do-It-Yourself Book Scanner

I found an instructable for a DIY book scanner. There seems to be a thriving online community based around building DIY book scanners as well. I have a lot of books I'd like to scan into electronic format. There's a startup called One Dollar Scan that will scan your books for a dollar. Unfortunately it's based in the US. It would cost me a fortune to send my books over there to be scanned. A DIY book scanner sounds like the ideal solution for me.

My Evolving Media Setup

My media centre for the past 7 years has been a Mac Mini with an external hard disk. I've been playing music through iTunes and either watching movies from DVDs I've ripped to the hard-drive, or renting movies from iTunes. I've decided that this setup is antediluvian. I am slowly moving to a media setup for the 21st century. I've decided that everything needs to be stored on the cloud. No local storage. This means I use Spotify for music and Netflix for movies/tv. I also don't want to have to go over to a computer in order to search for movies or music. I want to be able to search for media on my iPad and stream it to the TV/stereo. In order to accomplish this, I've bought an Apple TV. This is connected to my TV via HDMI, and will shortly be connected to my stereo (once the Optical Digital to Stereo converter arrives). I set it up last night, and everything seems to be working well.

Working on the iPad

For the last month I've been doing a contract at Canary Wharf for HSBC. In an effort to minimise the amount of stuff I carry, I've just been taking my iPad into work with me. I've really missed having my home emacs environment available. Last night I was thinking about this and I decided to get a bluetooth keyboard I could leave at the office. I can ssh from my iPad to one of my Amazon cloud instances, and have an emacs / development environment set up there. Consequently I bought a Cerulian Technology Mini Wireless Keyboard. It was really easy to connect to my iPad, but the keyboard is quite cramped to type on. The tab key especially is miniscule, so not great for Python coding. It's still the first few hours of use, but I'll keep using this and see how well it works over the long term.

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Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac

Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.

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Top TV Series on IMDB as of 2011

Here is a list of the top 100 TV series on IMDB as of today. I have ordered them based on year produced, and then sorted them within each year based on 60% IMDB score and 40% the number of people who voted for each title. I am personally more interested in the newer stuff that is being produced that people are liking, so this was my query to data-mine the results.

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