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Fix: iTunes won’t play audio after switching sound device on Windows

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Just a quick one.

If you're using the generic Microsoft drivers for audio on your laptop, you might notice that you have separate audio devices for the built-in speakers and for headphones:

When you don't have any headphones plugged in, your default device will be the speakers; when you plug headphones in, your default device changes to the headphones. All well and good.

Most applications aren't bothered by this change in sound device, and will happily keep playing through the new default. iTunes, however, has some issues with this process, and will just sorta hover there with the playback bar not moving and no sound coming out. When you restart it, everything works great, but who wants to do that every time they plug their headphones in?

The solution is surprisingly simple. In iTunes, click the menu icon, choose Preferences, and go to the Playback tab. The Play Audio Using option will be set to Windows Audio Session. Change it to Direct Sound, hit OK and restart iTunes for what is hopefully the final time.

And that's it!

Setting up the Xbox 360 DVD remote with OpenELEC

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I've recently moved house and so have inherited a new(ish) TV. The TV I was using before had a remote with a set of unused media buttons at the bottom, which I repurposed to control OpenELEC on my Raspberry Pi. Since the new remote doesn't have any buttons to spare, I had to give the Pi one of its very own. I had a look round and eventually settled upon the Xbox 360 DVD remote, which I picked up on eBay for an entirely reasonable three pounds - I expected to get a Chinese clone at that price but was pleasantly surprised to find that it turned out to be genuine! I remember setting up the old remote being fairly involved so I'm making it into a start-to-finish tutorial this time round.

Note: This tutorial was written for openELEC 3.2.4. If you're using a different version, some things might be different (particularly the paths, if you're using raspbmc or stock XBMC instead).

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USB tethering with Nokia N9 on Windows

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After a few days of internet troubles at work, I decided to attempt USB tethering with my Nokia N9 before Facebook withdrawal killed me (I'd browse on mobile but the only place I get signal is hanging off my desk which makes typing a bit awkward). This is a little more involved than on other platforms - if you have wifi you can use the included hotspot app, but I couldn't be bothered to walk the whole 15 minutes home to grab a wireless card. I knew that the SDK app you get when you enable developer mode (you have done this, right? Settings -> Security -> Developer Mode and hit the button) lets you set up a network over USB so you can SSH to the N9, and figured I could simply set up an SSH tunnel and proxy all my PC traffic through that. Course, it's never that easy.

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Airplay is rubbish: better audio streaming to XBMC

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Edit 15/05/13: since the release of OpenELEC 3.0.2, Airplay has been working perfectly (and most of the other bugs have vanished too). Or maybe it's that I wired everything up with ethernet when 3.0.1 came out and wireless stopped working. And by "wired" I mean "nailed the cable to my doorframe". Either way, brilliant work from the XBMC and OpenELEC teams!

The Raspberry Pi is great. For about £25, and with the help of OpenELEC, I've got my whole media library hooked up to my TV - all in all, about 1.5TB worth of entertainment.

Yeah, the speaker placement sucks.

Yeah, the speaker placement sucks.

It consolidates all the different locations (in my case, hard drives and SMB shares) into a single library for each of TV and Movies, so I can chuck someone my phone or sit them in front of a browser and everything's right there in one place. Makes choosing what to watch much easier!

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Cheap Chinese eBay antennas – a complete waste of money?

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I live in a zoo. For the most part this is super cool, but it's in the middle of nowhere and the internet access leaves a bit to be desired. I started using a 3G dongle, but the signal is rubbish and it drops out whenever it rains.

3G signal

Zero bars, aww yeah

I started looking into ways to boost the signal, discovering that many mobile broadband users in rural Australia use Yagi antennas. These are highly directional and, if used correctly, can pick up signals from towers several kilometres away. I didn't have the tools available to DIY one, so turned to eBay for a sketchy Chinese alternative. What I got was this:

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