When Mrs Facer and myself go out, we tend to enjoy the more obscure days out. Don’t get me wrong, alton towers and Lyme Park are both fun (in their own ways!), but how about visiting a tractor theme park or a crypt with hundreds of human skulls…. it’s all out there! Trouble is, there isn’t really anywhere to list them all!!

Hence the reason we created offbeat attractions, a directory for listing unusual days out in the UK.

We’re slowly building the directory as we come across places we’ve visited or have been recommended by visitors to the site.

Do you have an unusual attraction or place to visit? If so get in touch through the website and we’ll add it. The weirder the better!!

Visit: Offbeat Attractions – Unusual days out in the UK

• Cat5 network around the house
• Wireless available around the house
• NAS drive with music (UPNP enabled)

So – how to be in any room and listen to the music. I’ve looked at several options, but all require fairly significant investment. The response to all these is, “for the next house…”. So for this house, we need a temporary / cheapish solution.

Netgear MP101

I had one of these for a while and it worked nicely. It’s wireless, but way too slow for my liking and (as I remember) you had to have some media server running on a PC for it to work. Even when on the wired network it wasn’t terribly fast.

Browsing for artists and albums wasn’t great either. It was clunky and the response time from the remote was too slow.

So it was ebayed. Pretty sure I got a good price for it!

The current solution

I bought a few Veho wireless speakers. These are truly brilliant and are reasonably cheap (around £45 for a speaker with transmitter and £30 per speaker thereafter).

You plug the USB transmitter in to the PC/Mac you want to broadcast the music from (in my case it’s running my jukebox), then simply turn on as many speakers as you want. They connect and play the music. Each speaker has it’s own power source (rechargeable batter) and volume control.

The only downside is the actual quality of the sound. They are fine for background sound, but they have no life when turned right up, producing a rather tinny sound.

It got me thinking…. surely the internal parts can be ripped out and I can hook up to bigger speakers? The simple answer is YES. It does work. I wrote it up on my other site: http://www.touchscreenjukeboxes.co.uk/modified-veho-wireless-speakers

The future

I’d love to have speakers wired to the Cat5 sockets which can be controlled BY room. Ideally controlled by iPhone or iPad. I’d like click on a room then select which music I want to listen to in that room. I know there are solutions out there which do this…. I just need to save the cash!!

The actual product which I wrote (TextArea Rich) hasn’t been updated since 2004 or 2005 (it’s that long ago)… yet the website lived on and thousands of people downloaded it.

I’ve now closed the site and am offering the domain name for sale. It’s got a good monthly hit rate – so if you are developing a web based WYSIWYG editor (or just want to increase your hits), take a look and make me an offer.

http://www.textarearich.com/index.php

The first thing now was to update the bloody wordpress software. It was ancient and as a result, constantly being hacked. Now it’s brand spanking new and looking pretty sexy. Gone is the pink/red colour scheme of the old.

Not going to write loads now as it’s late and I need to crack on with getting an iPhone app moving. Keep an eye out for it – it’s an app version of the [very] popular dress up Lucy!

If you’ve got a minute, be sure to check out the current cooking timer application I have created, CookIt. Only 59p and it *could* save your dinner!

Nice and cheesy valentines day message. Special thanks to Dave Jennings for creating the music.

Send your own Valentine’s Day message

Enter a message and press “Save Message”. The page will then reload and you will be given a unique web address to give to your friends/loved ones. Your message will appear at the end of the video.

I’m not a bath person really, I much prefer taking a shower. This however, is bound to change my mind! The TV arrived along with the waterproof speakers so I started work straight away. A quick test showed it was working nicely and picking up my sky signal along with terrestrial TV. (I also found that it has Tetris on!)

I’d already put a power cable and TV aerial inside the wall cavity. All I needed now was to wire in the speaker cable to the loft for the ceiling speakers.

One hole in the plaster board later and I have a TV in my wall! You’ll notice there are no tiles around the bath – this is the next thing to do. (eventually!)

The sound from the 4″ speakers is actually quite good. I was worried they may be a little tinny, but so far so good. Hopefully we’ll get around to plastering around the bath soon, so I’ll post some updated pics shortly.

Update: 16-11-06

The tiling has now been done around the screen…

simple as that! (It just took a little longer than anticipated to get the site moved)

Then Jan from the albumplayer forums got in touch suggesting I use an MS DOS Batch file to copy the files over! Great idea – and so simple!!

I’ve now got the files all working – so thought I’d post them here for others to use – should they so wish to!

I decided the best way to approach this would be to call a batch file which will copy the userdata folder when I shut down windows – that way I can be sure all my updates will be transferred. The problem is, I don’t want to copy this data EVERY time windows shuts down – so I made use of a nifty program called [PsShutdown (freeware). This can be called from a batch file AFTER I have copied the files. Here’s what I have now…

1. Create a batch file called “to_shared.bat” with the following code:

   :: TRANSFER FROM LOCAL TO SHARED
   
   	@echo off
   	echo ===========================
   	echo Matt's PC JukeBox Sync Tool
   	echo ===========================
   	echo.
   
   :: COPY FROM LOCAL TO SHARED DEVICE
   
   	echo Copying Jukebox folder from source to shared...
   	echo.
   	echo ** Please do not close this window - it will close automatically **
   	xcopy "c:\program files\albumplayer\userdata\*.*" "z:\music\userdata\" /e /q /y

2. Next I have a batch file which will be called on my “Jukebox PC” when I want to start AlbumPlayer. This will simply copy the userdata folder from the shared directory and automatically overwrite the database on the local machine. It will then automatically start AlbumPlayer. This ensures that each time the jukebox software is loaded, it uses the most recent database! Paste the following code (Assuming you have the default installation directory)

   :: FILE TO LOAD ALBUM PLAYER
   
   	@echo off
   	echo ===========================
   	echo   Matt's PC JukeBox Tool
   	echo ===========================
   	echo.
   
   :: ASSIGN DRIVE LETTER (it may not have reconnected at start up)
   
   	Assigning drive letters...
   	net use Z: \\192.168.0.10\share
   	echo.
   
   ::COPY THE CONTENTS FROM SHARED DRIVETO THE LOCAL DRIVE
   
   	echo Copying Jukebox folder from source...
   	xcopy z:\music\UserData\*.* "c:\program files\albumplayer\userdata\" /e /q /y
   	echo.
   
   :: START ALBUM PLAYER (default touchscreen mode)
   
   	echo Starting AlbumPlayer...
   	"C:\Program Files\AlbumPlayer\AlbumPlayer.exe" -touchscreen
   

3. Next assuming you’ve downloaded the PsShutdown tool, I created a batch file called “shutdown_windows.bat”. This will call the batch file in #1 above THEN once that has completed it will call the PsShutdown tool and close windows. Paste the following code:

   @echo off
   call c:\sync\to_shared.bat
   wait
   c:\shutdown\psshutdown.exe -m "Shutting down the PC" -c
   

The above psshutdown.exe can take various commands. The “-c” allows the user to cancel the shutdown and “-m” will display a cusom message in the shut down box.

These little tools now mean that with no manual copying, I can ensure the quality of my albumplayer jukebox. If you’ve any comments, thoughts, or ways I could improve the process, I’d love to hear them!!

I bought a 15″ touch screen monitor from eBay… bit risky as there were no drivers with the screen. It turns out I had a nightmare getting the thing to work. Luckily the company who originally supplied the monitor had their phone number on the back, so a quick call to Dicoll Ltd and I now had the drivers. In the end I got it working, after taking the back off and changing the “emulation” mode….. or something!

I’ve set up the monitor with some awesome software called Album . It reads your MP3 collection and looks up album covers for each one. It also comes with a special “touchscreen mode” which is perfect!!

Here’s a shot of the whole PC… obviously this will be hidden when it gets properly installed!!

Future Plans
As I have X10 equipment – I want to run some home automation software from this PC too. Using the touch screen to control the house will be sweet! Watch this space for some updates!

Update: 11-08-06

I finally got around to putting all the computer bits in to an old case…. also played with the idea of using a cold cathode behind the monitor to add a nice touch…. not sure if it’ll be there for the “final” wall mounted version though… we’ll see! There is also a cold cathode inside the case which is sound activated – which could be cool – except the PC will be inside a cupboard!

Update 18-12-06

Thought I’d post a few updated pics of the jukebox. It’s now installed in the kitchen and running nicely! The next step is to get one of those mini pc cases, as the current one is rather too big for my cupboard!!