Much has been written about the “plays-it-all” Popcorn Hour A-110 media player. After digging through a lot of mostly very positive reviews I decided to get one too. My movie collection mainly consists of ripped DVDs (VIDEO_TS), .M4V H.264 MPEG4 files, lots and lots of MPEG2-TS files from my Dreambox DM800 HD cable tuner and a few .FLV and .XVID files. All these video formats play instantly and with no problems on my XBMC-enhanced Apple TV including digital audio passthrough to my A/V receiver. Read more »

Today, I was looking for a simple WordPress widget that allows me to statically display links to certain posts in the sidebar. I could have used the links widget but it wasn’t flexible enough for me. My idea was to use a certain custom field of a post or page as a trigger to display it in a widget. I searched for almost an hour but I just couldn’t find any simple, widget-capable WordPress plugins that could do this?! 

In the end, I ended up writing my own widget-capable plugin. I decided to publish it so anyone else can use it on her/his blog too. The plugin’s name is “Must Read Posts”. It shows your most recommended posts and pages in a sidebar widget or in a page. As the widget’s title is editable in the WordPress Dashboard you could change it to something like “Recommended Posts”, “Important information”, “Tips & Tricks” or whatever you like. Read more »

After installing the latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 update my Mac refused to play any sound. It took me quite some time to find the problem: for some reason the update set the sound output to “Headphones” instead of “Internal speakers”. Once I set it back to “Internal speakers” the sound was back.

Here’s a review of iPhone and iPod touch apps that can be very useful to DSLR photographers. On one hand I was looking for iPhone apps which calculate sunrise and sunset times for a given location or even calculate the so called “blue hour”. On the other hand I was looking for apps that calculate depth of field, hyperfocal distance and flash exposure. I also had a look at some GPS coordinate tracker apps but due to (deliberate) limitations in the iPhone OS most of these apps don’t really work great. More on that later on. Read more »