As you'll notice if you're watching my latest iTunes music buys, I've just bought The Imagined Village — a set of resettings of traditional English tunes, with the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Ben Zephaniah helping out folk stalwarts such as Eliza Carthy.

The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.

Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:

The Imagined Village Trailer

A look at the artists and music of The Imagined Village.

Hard Times of Old England Retold

The Imagined Village band perform this track live in The Big Room at Real World prior to their first performance at the WOMAD festival.

Wait a Minute, There's More

They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:

...first niggles mostly, but never mind.

Keychain

Existing keychain data (ie central password store for pretty much everything from Mail Accounts to Web Sites) appears to have been dumped, so I had to remember the passwords for everything.

Time Machine and Airport

Up until Monday this week, the Time Machine page promised that you could back up to a drive attached to an Airport base station. Well it happens that I have one of those, and I bought it with just this use case in mind.

But on the production release, it doesn't work — the functionality's been removed. You can connect an external drive to the machine you're backing up, or any other Leopard-running machine on the LAN with File Sharing enabled. Maybe it just missed the QA cut and it'll be back for future point releases, but it's not there now.

Iomega UltraMax

This was the drive I bought for Time Machine purposes. Ideally this would be in RAID 1 mode, so you've two mirrored drives automagically backing each other up. If one fails, you can replace it, rebuild the array and no data loss. Some online reviews claim that the drive can't do that under OSX, but that's daft as it's a hardware device. This isn't true, but what is hard is working out how to switch it to RAID 1 — certainly the supplied docs don't tell you. The trick is you need to first press and hold the Rebuild button on the front panel for 10 seconds or so. This will obviously (re)build the array, and it will then pop up in Disk Utility at half the JBOD size. You can then format and you're good to go.

I've now spent a few days looking at the alternatives to appleTV now. Well, I say alternatives... I mean MythTV, as the idea of buying into the Windows ecosystem via WIndows Media Centre didn't even come close to crossing my mind.

But I've looked at quite a few possible configurations for a MythTV system, and I'm beginning to see the rationale for appleTV. The appleTV system is essentially:

Backend Media Server

Intended to be the house's main Mac with the big hard drive. This is the one that hosts the account that buys content from the iTunes Store, holds ripped music etc.

Frontend Client, with a local cache

This is the appleTV device. It's chiefly there to provide a UI to the backend server. But because the default use case of WiFi networking isn't deemed to be robust enough to simply stream from the backend server (particularly for HD content), it needs a local hard drive. And drives are so cheap these days, might as well make it big enough for a few items so you have some local choice without hanging around fot it.

And all this integrates with not only iTunes for music and (iTMS-sourced) video, but also iPhoto. If you stop thinking of it as the only digital media component, but just the front end to what you've already got on your Mac, it makes sense, and it'll pull people into the iApps ecosystem, which is the idea.

But to make it actually effective, it needs to be able to access video content not derived from the iTunes store. It needs to be able to show:

1. Home Movies (you think iMovie's going to get left out..?)
2. Digitally recorded TV content
3. Content ripped from legitimately bought DVDs

Now elgato have already managed to get eyeTV as a content source under Apple's Mac-based media client - Front Row by exporting to iTunes in iPod-friendly format, so they must be able to do the same to the appleTV. In fact, a little searching on their site shows that elgato are confident that eyeTV recordings will be usable by appleTV.

If indeed all that's needed to add a new source to the appleTV's backend server is output in H.264 or MPEG-4 and a wee bit of API smarts, then it can only be a matter of time until someone produces a DVD-ripper and transcoder that'll slot in nicely. The basics are already done:

So the basis of a pretty reasonable backend setup is starting to come together, looking like a Mac Mini, with large-ish external storage and an eyeTV Hybrid as PVR capture. Adding this up, it's probably comparable to the price of a similarly specc'd MythTV homebrew, but with much less setup required.

MythTV alternatives

The Full Myth

Meaty MythTV linux server for the backend. Low-end mythTV Linux machine for the front end. If I can't build one cheaper and quieter, then the front end machine will be the beautifully quiet and affordable Mac Mini, with OSX cleared off and replaced with Ubuntu.

The Half Myth

Watching the Keynote, the appleTV can suck content from up to 5 Macs on the LAN. Now, I'm sure someone very smart is going to find a way to get a MythTV server to appear in the list... In which case, the appleTV at £200 looks very attractive indeed as the silent front end server...

Sigh. It doesn't feel right, damning Apple with faint praise for both of their major announcements within 24 hours of their launch, but here I go anyway.

First off, let's talk about device convergence. I'm sorry, but I don't want a bundle of second rate camera/second rate music player/second rate phone. If excellence in each means keeping multiple devices, then my shirt pocket is going to have to cope. So to even get on the ballpark, Apple is going to have to convince me of the following:

That the phone actually works.

Reliably. As reliably as the non-whizzy Nokias I've known, used and loved for years now. This is the foundation competence. I used to own a Treo, having got bored transferring numbers via my brain. But the damned thing crashed with dependably high frequency, so I went back to my Nokia.

The data service is reliable and affordable and coverage is good

No idea which network carrier Apple are going to partner with in Europe. But unless it's O2, I'm not going be able to use it at all, as that's who my work phone is contracted to. And that's before I persuade my employers that data services are worth paying for.

The camera is a reasonable quality

By which I mean, the lens is semi-decent optically and the CCD has enough sensitivity and colour fidelity. Never mind pixel numbers which are largely meaningless, it's quality I want. I'm assuming here by the way that the location awareness of the device records appropriate geocoded metadata into the image file's Exif tags. Which could be very fun for moblogging to flickr.

As for the music player — yes, it's an iPod, and therefore de facto of quality. But it's an iPod nano in capacity terms, and I have 30+GB of music, and don't want to have to choose what to take with me.

But what I'm more concerned about is the interface. TheSteve made much of the lack of physical keyboard in the announcement, claiming that a similar problem had been solved in desktop computing by the bitmapped screen and mouse combo. I've news for you Steve — for any text-related function (like the email you showed off), you need a keyboard as well.

One of the most popular Palm accessories has been the wee fold-out keyboard add-on, because text entry by on-screen keyboard is truly hard. People like the physical feedback of key travel. It does wonders for speed and accuracy of entry. And small on-screen keyboards are particularly difficult, as self-confessed fat fingered friends opined yesterday; it's the devil's own job to press only one onscreen key. Unless this Multi-touch stuff is a step-change beyond what we're used to, we'll be back to stylii pretty quickly.

So, the long awaited iappleTV is properly announced and demoed. While in itself, it's all very nifty, I can't help but think that it could have been so much more.

Yes, being able to stream your iTunes video content to big screen TV is A Good Thing, although obviously better if you live in a country where Apple deign to sell you such content. But we have a reasonably large DVD collection whose physical media I'd rather put out of the reach of small children and into storage like our CDs. And when we have broadcast/Freeview TV again, I'd probably like to be able to record it digitally and recall old stuff from a large database living on hefty attached storage.

While eyeTV would probably take care of the Television end of things, for DVD rippage and storage, we're probably talking about mythTV on one of these mothers as the solution of choice for the time being.

Somebody somewhere convince me that there's a better way round this...

...in times gone by, you have asked my opinion on which computer to buy. Regardless of your previous experience with malware of many and varied kinds, and your need for easily configured systems which rarely if ever go wrong, you have consistently and steadfastly ignored my considered opinion of Buy a Mac, usually citing a need to keep some ridiculously outdated piece of software (Wordstar for DOS? Hello?) and retain access to your old files.

Now, leaving aside that there are plenty of Mac solutions that read old WP formats, or even run Windows programs (albeit a bit slowly), these were always just the excuses of the fearful.

So to these fearful friends and relatives, if you really need the comfort blanket of Windows, its security holes, its virii, its botnets, its rootkits and so on, you can now wean yourself off it slowly. Buy a new MacMini.

But what about my Spyware? I hear you cry? Well worry not - if you really want to run Windows XP on that shiny Intel Mac, you now can, with BootCamp.

Here's a movie of the screensaver - to say I want this is an understatement. Fortunately, we pre-ordered Tiger way back on announcement day, so it should be landing on our doorstep in, ooh, 4 days' time or so. I just hope the headlines make "whoosh" noises as they go past.

http://media.weblogsinc.com/common/videos/engadget/TigerRSS.mov