Blowing a Raspberry at my media centre

Not long before Christmas, as part of a new AV system, I installed an Acer Aspire Revo as a frontend for my now well established MythTV setup. This works great, but it did set me back a fair amount.

Today I took a look at the Rasberry PI website and found this video:

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SqueezeBox on a budget

The SqueezeBox series of devices from Logitech has got to be one of the best media streamer ranges out there. Not long after I moved into my flat I bought a SqueezeBox Boom and it is awesome. Fantastic audio quality with an almost impossible amount of bass from a small single-unit stereo now sat next to my bed.

The downside to the SqueezeBox devices is that the quality comes at a price, one which is impossible to justify at the moment. However, it happened that the following year O2 were having a fire sale of their Joggler device. I snapped one up for the bargain amount of £50 with the intention of using it as a home automation controller.

Well, the automation dream also comes at an even less justifiable cost and so the Joggler has been sitting idle in a drawer waiting for a project to bring it back to life. Thanks to the UKHA mailing list it now has a purpose. My Joggler has been reborn as a budget SqueezePlayer having followed some really easy steps.

With it connected to my surround amp, I can now stream music from my existing SqueezeBox Server and even control it remotely with a web browser. One less bit of idle kit, one new feature, and at £100 less than it would otherwise cost.

The Joggler is a popular device for customising, and there are Ubuntu builds available for it (rather than the onboard O2 OS). If you want to play with one, they are no longer available for sale from O2, so you will need to look on eBay or similar.

KillerLight v2 is here!

Yep, after far too much procrastination, the successor to my first WordPress theme is here.

It has taken a week of evenings to convert it from a layered Photoshop design into HTML and CSS. The previous version of KillerLight was based on the code of the K2 theme, and ended up being heavily customised. This time around, version 2 is based upon Thematic and very little in the way of HTML changes has been made – just a few more wrapping divs here and there. This should lead to a very robust theme.

Gone is the animated header background, at least in this version. It caused far too many complaints and confusion, although I still think the idea is sound provided the animation is subtle.

I’m going to submit the theme to WordPress.org’s themes directory soon, and once approved (fingers crossed) it should be easy for people to find and install into their WordPress v3 site.

More information can be found on the Idea Cog website, where information about the theme is being hosted.

EDIT: Until the theme is available on wordpress.org, you can find a download link on this post.