I really need to make sure this blog doesn’t turn into one of those 1 post a year wonders that always starts with “I haven’t blogged in a while”. They give me the irrits.

So anyway, I haven’t blogged in a while, I think Twitter may be taking up a lot of the time that I would/should spend on this site. This post is going to be a bit of a catch up rant.

I’m seriously backed up with web dev stuff to do, and I really want to get them all done and get a decent portfolio up and running, it’s looking rather stale at the moment, I tend to be a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to web dev, sometimes I can find my creative side and quickly whip up a nice wordpress concept design, then I have a brain fart and struggle with making that concept into a theme, or vise versa, I think it depends on the music I’m listening to at the time, it has a big effect on the way my brain works. I might need to look at tagging songs for creative and for coding, I’m convinced it has an effect.

I recently bought a new toy to take my attention away from my iPhone, a nice Samsung 46″ LCD TV, it’s big and beautiful, and looks perty as hell, the purchase of this TV has given my xbox new life, through the HDMI cable I can finally play the games how they’re supposed to look, and since buying the TV I’ve bought 3 games for the thing; Guitar Hero III, which I already have on the Wii, but I wanted downloadable content and HD niceness. Project Gotham Racing 4, having heaps of fun with this one, haven’t got into a console racer in years, probably since the first Gran Turismo. The third game I’ve bought is Mass Effect, which is ok, only just bought it, not overly impressed.

I’m currently looking at Blu-Ray player prices, they are going for around $400 in the places I’ve looked, definitely a future purchase.

On to other Gadget goodness and me and my housemate have decked out the house with 2 airport expresses for streaming music, we’ve had one for a while but the things really shine with two, perfect synced streaming music throughout the whole house, one in the lounge, and one in the outside stereo with our recently partified deck, which proved to be awesome on Grand Final Day.

And Finally, just a bit of iPhone stuff, even though I’ve saturated this blog with it, I’ve finally hacked my iPhone, it was a breeze and the stuff I can do now is fantastic, live last.fm scrobbing, direct to device podcasting, themes, soundsets and video recording, particularly Qik.com streaming, which streams live video to my Qik profile, I’ve always been impressed with this service and now that I use it, I’m super impressed, check out my profile for some of the vids I’ve made.

I think I’ve rambled on enough, what a stupidly long post, oh well, kudos to you if you actually read it all!

Not much more to say than the headline - the Australian iTunes store finally has TV downloads just like the USA and UK. There isn’t a whole lot of content up there right now, but I am sure it will grow. Episodes seem to be $2.99 ea - season prices vary from show to show. Some series are not complete and some just have the latest season.

read more | digg story

Coolies! Not heaps of really good content on there, a bit of South Park, my fav would be all scrubs episodes up to season 6.

Since I bought the Xbox I’ve been sitting on a couch a whole lot, playing GTAIV, Uno and others, as well as watching movies streaming from a my PC to my TV, works great, all wirelessly (sucked it up and bought the AU$169 adapter). Before the Xbox I use to watch most of my TV shows and movies on my PC, along with gaming on the PC, was perfectly comfortable, in fact I seem to feel more confortable there than on the couch, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ve still usually got my laptop sitting next to me on the couch, so I’m not missing anything in terms of the casual browsing of the Internets, so what is it? I can only assume it’s due to the fact that I’ve spent so  much time in front of the PC that I feel more at home with it. I’m also beginning to think that I get much more immersed in PC games than console games. headphones on, nice and close to the screen, it all seems more intense. Don’t get me wrong I’m loving GTAIV in front of the TV, but I’m wondering if I’d be enjoying it more if I was playing it at my computer desk. Maybe I should invest in a HDMI to DVI adapter and plug my Xbox into my PC monitor.

On another note, I’ve got a nice new widget in my sidebar that displays my Gamertag details, it’s simply called the Xbox 360 Gamercard Wordpress plugin. It doesn’t come as a widget, so I’m using another plugin to use it as a widget, that’s called the Custom Function Widget, nice!

So here’s the first thing, the TV tuner driver installation. This page is a godsend and according to the article, the latest firmware from linuxtv.org gets rid of the hanging problem.

(fast forward 3 hours)

And I’ve found out that it seems to have done just that, I’ve had it going for about 3 hours now and it hasn’t frozen at all, awesome stuff. installing the tv tuner driver was a breeze with the above site and I didn’t hit a single glitch. I’ll probably get stuck back into it tomorrow and sort out the VFD, which doesn’t work at all, and configure the remote. Which it does recognise, but the buttons are just all wrong. But it’s starting to look pretty good considering I’ve really only spent an hour or so on it.