1. Go to your itunes store on PC/Mac and go to the user account (top right hand corner – usually your email address)
   
2. Enter your account password when prompted
   
3. Next thing you see is your account overview. From here we’ll select “Edit Payment Information” (second from top right)
   
4. You’ll notice a message in red at the top of this page. In my screenshot you will not see anything other than a normal screen though.
   
5. Scroll to the bottom and press “Done”.
   
6. You are back at the account overview. Press “Done” once more to exit.
   
7. Now reboot your Apple TV (don’t do “Standby”) – unplug the power cable and plug it back in again.
8. Now try logging on to your iTunes account on the Apple TV again and purchase something!

This worked for my client and I hope it will work for you too. Let me know.

Enter the Amahi Home Server – a free, Open Source alternative to WHS.

The Amahi team have pooled the best of what the Open Source Software community has to offer and wrapped it up in an easy to install, configure and maintain package. I don’t know why it is available freely as no doubt a lot of time has been invested developing it. It puts other paid efforts to shame in my opinion.

The cornerstone of Amahi Home Server for me is the sleek integration of Greyhole, which is the Open Source counterpart to Microsoft’s WHS Folder Duplication. Instead of RAID it forms a very fast, reliable and more over efficient way to keep your data save by copying it (mirroring) across available hard drives, which can be of any size and flavour (i.e. USB mixed with internal SATA drives can form a pool).

I now have a DHCP, VPN, (redundant) file server, IRC proxy, UPNP media server, and bit torrent client all in one easy to manage package.

Thank you to the Amahi team for providing a well supported, documented and developed solution.

My set-up: Asus P5B-Plus motherboard with Intel Core2Duo CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 4x 1.5TB Samsung F3 hard drives (storage pool), 2x 250GB Samsung SpinPoint hard drives (RAID1; operating system)

A further 4x 1TB hard drives will be moved from the Drobo to the new server soon.

Related: http://www.amahi.org/features/testimonials

All links and prices as of 26 July 2010 and provided by www.overclockers.co.uk; Prices exclusive of VAT and shipping; I am not affiliated with Overclockers UK and nor receive remuneration for referring readers to their website.

CPU

First, we need to determine a suitable processor and the only one that currently offers the best performance at an affordable price is the Intel i7 930 2.8Ghz CPU.

Cost: £184.99 excl.

In case you wonder, the next one up from the 930 is the 960 which currently runs you a cool £385.52 exclusive of VAT. Alternatively you could go with Xeon but I find the i7 gives me better all-round performance.

Motherboard

The motherboard (mainboard) needs to not only give me room to upgrade to a faster processor but also provide the bulk of features my new workhorse needs. We want SATA3 which offers us a staggering 6Gbit/s of bandwidth to connect our hard drives with. We also need a decent sound card and room for at least three PCIe x16 cards for expansion. Since we also need fast external storage connected to our rig, we should look for brand new and super fast USB3 ports.

I have picked the Asus P6X58D-E which offers us everything that we need and more. 2x SATA3, 2x USB3 ports, 3x PCIe 16, support for tripple channel RAM with up to 1600mhz. It also has 6x SATA2 ports (RAID0,1,5,10) and 8x USB2 ports.

Cost: £127.65

Main System Hard Drive

Speaking of speed, I really love my Crucial C300 256GB SSD drive in the Sony Vaio workstation laptop but for the desktop a smaller version will suffice as we can add another drive for our work files. So the C300 64GB 2.5″ SSD SATA3 drive it is

In case you wonder, it is one of the fastest drives out there and combined with the 6Gbit/s interface… it just flies! You wouldn’t want it for your work files though. We are simply going to use it for Windows 7 and our apps. If you really wanted more space and performance (who could resist?), just add two of these puppies and you’ll be breaking every sensible speed barrier.

Cost: £99.99

Work Files Hard Drive

The drive to pick to do work on needs to be big but also damn fast. Since we only have 2x SATA3 ports we have to make a choice as to whether we can afford to add a SATA3 PCIe adapter card and more SSD drives but reduce the usable space (unless you have a _big_ budget) or get both sufficient speeds and more than enough space for several HD video projects to work on at the same time.

We will go the tried and tested route with two Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB drives, providing us with around 270MB/sec sustained write speeds in RAID0 (striped).

Cost: £41.27 x2 (£82.54)

Just for fun: Samsung F3 RAID 0 benchmarks and a comparison with a Corsair Nova 32GB SSD (not even that fast an SSD when compared with a C300 I might add). A review and benchmarks for the C300 can be found at www.benchmarkreviews.com.

Memory

Hard drive speed is meaningless if your workstation cannot serve data to the processor quickly. Thanks to triple channel DDR3 running at 1600mhz that shouldn’t be a problem. However, we want loads of it so we might need to compromise again as that type of RAM is very dear.

OCZ Gold LV 6GB (3x 2GB) memory can be had for £136.16 and provides us with an excuse to buy two sets for just a little under £300 excluding VAT. Considering that RAM is probably the most important component apart we need, it is money well invested.

Cost: £136.16 per 6GB set (x2 £272.32)

Graphics Card

If you are working in graphics or video you need to look at the right graphics card for your editing workstation. Back in the good old days it was easy: just pick whatever model Nvidia Quadro FX you could afford.

Nowadays, especially with CS5′s CUDA support, any of the new graphics cards will do nicely and allow you to relax with a good game at a fantastic resolution

My choice is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB vRAM and factory overclocked. Hardware support is build-in to support the latest video codecs and provide smooth scrubbing as well as prompt rendering.

Cost: £179.99

Power Supply

Our new workstation is nearly complete now. Just time to finish it off by picking the last vital component: the power supply. Choose the wrong one and your system won’t even boot. Or it will crash a lot.

Make mine a Corsair TX750W ATX and rest assured to have enough grunt even for two graphics cards (SLI) and another big, fast hard drive.

Cost: £89.35

CPU Cooler

Since noise is a major concern, especially when editing videos or trying to concentrate while removing spots and red-eyes in Lightroom, I have selected a Corsair H50-1 high performance CPU watercooler to help run the i7 CPU quietly. This is a pre-build cooler and only needs attaching to the CPU. It’s self-contained so you don’t need to worry about maintaining it either.

Cost: £51.05

eSATA

Lastly, I need something to hook up my eSATA RAID1 workbench that I use to offload and edit on-location as well as my BluRay writer which uses eSATA too. And my backup hard drives… . Since I have more than enough ports on the motherboard, all I need is a LianLi BZ-U05B USB2 and eSATA 5.25″ converter which fits into a spare drive slot in my case. It’s a nice, unobtrusive black to match the case and combined USB/eSATA ports.

For good measure I will get an Akasa SATA to eSATA adapter for the rear of the case, to which my BluRay writer will mostly likely remain connected permanently.

Monitor

Although I already own a very nice Dell 24″ LCD monitor – the 2407WFP-HC – I cannot help but noticing that it is a very crowed workspace! Even at 1920x1200px resolution I can barely write this article without gasping for air

Suffice to say that it is barely a suitable size for editing 1080HD videos, hence my eyes and heart are set on the bigger brother – Dell’s excellent 3008WFP with a screen resolution of 2560x1600px. More than enough room for previewing a clip in its proper resolution and yet have space for various bits like a time line or bins! And I can always use the 24″ for further palettes.

Summing Up

Before you ask, I already have a suitable Sharkoon Rebel 9 case which I intend to use for this system. The grand total of the above parts will run to £2,059.24 exclusive of VAT (plus £16.85 shipping). That’s for one heck of a fast system and includes a brand new 30″ monitor! Not bad for just over £2,000 (excl).

Of course, I do already own software and have a big bad NAS on which I store my media, as well as a fantastic BluRay writer with which to back them up. If you were to add a case, NAS and BluRay you would be just short of £3,000 (excl) depending on how big a data store you want to have.

Mine is running on a Linux box with 4x 1.5TB drives and there’s another with 4x 1TB drives = gross total of 10TB. I don’t use RAID, I use simple, fast duplication so I get the most from it too and it creates redundant copies

Enough of the geekery already. Time to flex the plastic and take a deep breath…

My test results: xBench Comparison Site

Machine Specifications:
- MacBook Pro 17″ 3.06Ghz (mid-2009)
- 8GB 1067Mhz DDR3 RAM
- OCZ Vertex 256GB SSD Hard Drive (latest firmware)
- Mac OS X 10.6.2
- NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GT 512MB PCIe x16 Graphics Card

PS: Don’t forget to donate to keep xBench free and the developers in food and cloths!

As djlosh at TapTheHive.com points out, Google retains all rights of content usage published through its browser:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Source: Google Chrome EULA

Update: Apparently their EULA was in beta too and the offending text has been changed!

Alexander Stigse from Denmark has made it happen and almost entirely by accident whilst creating an advanced version control system and demo app to show it off. When he got in touch with Allan Odgaard – the creator of TextMate – he found more synergy than he could have imagined.

Funnily enough they both studied at the same Uni and Allan’s parents have a summer house in the same village Alex lives! How’s that for a small World? Anyway, on with my impressions and a big “thank you” to Alex and Allan.

Although I have come not to expect too much of any Windows softwareware, I was extremely delighted to see how well Alexander’s version called “e” works. Starting with a small download, a very fast install and automatic fetching, installation and configuration of add-ons (like cygwin).

For me TextMate is life-blood, my craft now depends on it and seeing the same look-and-feel translated to something as gruesome as the Windows GUI I cannot help but being impressed.

The most important part right after the interface design (usability) is that Allan agreed to let Alex use the wonderful bundles that help making TextMate such a breeze to use. Although there is still some way to go (e is still in beta) it’s a usable replacement even now.

Don’t be scared or put off by the fact that it’s beta, it’s actually working nicely. Also, get a personal license key now! It will help support the development and you are actually getting quite a lot thrown in if you do it now rather than later. I suggest you read Alex’s post on licensing and what’s on offer for more details.

And now, go download the beta and find out why I’m actually happy using a text editor on Windows for once

Simple: Close the doors! brighterComputing.com is now by invite only and services are only available to those who demand simply the best and know they will pay for it. This way both sides are happy. The customer can rely on me as a service provider and I can concentrate on serving them without distraction.

The invite only idea isn’t new but I strongly believe that if you want to make something special, it can only be available to a selected few. Although most people want “special” things they are usually just made to feel like it is, without actually getting it. So they usually don’t pay much for it either (i.e. budget airlines). Those that get the real deal, don’t ask how, why or how much – they just put their demands on the table and expect it to get done. Somehow that sounds like a much better thing to do to me, than trying to fake happiness to my customers and give them barely anything for their 99cents. I’d rather not serve them, than serve them badly.

Please feel free to comment or email me if you want real “happiness”. Otherwise, take the blue pill and never mind the rabbit hole

To cut a long and interesting story short, people will be able to enjoy high quality TV content on their computers using established P2P technologies (like those of Kazaa, Limewire, etc and Skype) where users interconnect to share data quickly. Joost, as the project is now officially known, has already got backing from two major TV players in Endemol (producers of “Who wants to be a millionaire”, “Big Brother” and most of the shows on TV these days) as well as Warner Music.

I suggest you read more about it on their blog or on The Register. Also, why not give it a whirl to see it for yourself and register as a beta-tester? If you are a content producer it might be a good idea to talk to them now while they are still in beta and are looking for fresh new content too! Enjoy… .

Links:
- Joost Blog
- The Register article on Joost
- DV Guru post on Joost

Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDnIajyXDLs

Oh, the site is called http://www.meebo.com/ btw.