Those of you on my Facebook or Twitter may have recently noticed updates on Movies and TV Shows coming from Boxee. I know you’ve all been staying up at night wondering what on Earth Boxee is and how does it work, sleep easy my friends as I’m about to tell you about my latest project.

If you’re a dedicated follower then you’ll remember my last project, XBMC, well Boxee is a fork project off the back off XBMC and is my new HTPC replacement (or should I say addition as the XBMC XBOX is now running in the bedroom). Boxee Beta (I was using the Alpha but it wasn’t nearly as good) is running on my Samsung laptop which I have connected to my new LG HDTV via a HDMI cable. The draw card for Boxee is its online content partners and social media integration but for me it’s biggest feature is the media lookup service. This indexes your TV shows and movies and downloads cover art, titles and descriptions from IMDB and TVRage.

Another feature I’m slowly getting into is the online content I previously mentioned. With Boxee you can browse through their App collection and add online content providers such as Joost, Justin.tv, YouTube and even BBC iPlayer. These come from the default Boxee repository but you can easily add more app repositories from users with custom built apps and feeds.

My next project is to build a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for my media and backups. My current 1Tb drive and laptop HDD are about 95% full so I need to look into something a little better. With media centres in multiple rooms, the laptop and 2 iPhones in the house means media on the network has become a must.

Download Boxee Beta here: http://www.boxee.tv/

Check out the new Boxee Box by D-Link: here & here

On Saturday Neil and I got up at 5am and headed to Wales to meet Alex and watch some rally at the Wyedean Forest Rally. It was about a 2 hr drive in the M5 but we got there nice and early and saw all the cars run through on the first stage. The event was much more professional than the previous Tempest Rallies I’ve been too but there wasn’t too many risk takers so not a lot happened on the day. The highlight was the above video where a Metro 6R4 took out a fence and got stuck in a ditch – Neil ran off to help and I filmed the rescue.

Andy Burton and his famous Peugeot Cosworth

Number 211 - pink poker-dots

Alex said the rally was amazing in 3D!

Neil bleeds orange and blue in his 2 Sign-Up.to tees

Overall a great day and my first time to Wales (admittedly not very far in) however next time I’ll heed Neil’s advise and actually wear two pairs of socks because it was absolutely freezing in the Forest, in fact I’ll just double everything I wear next time.

Last Wednesday was Australia Day and instead of heading into London and going to a Walkabout like I did last year I thought I’d bring the festivities to Woking, Surrey.

Even though it was a balmy zero degrees on the walk to work I proudly wore my green and golds in the form of an Australian beach Cricket shirt my younger brother William gave me and my tacky green Australian $100 note board shorts, all topped off with my Aussie flag thongs.

I brought in a couple of other tops for the team and was pleasantly surprised to see a few had brought in their own.

I hooked up the office ghetto blaster and cranked out my Australian classic playlist reminding the English of Aussie greats such as AC/DC, Cold Chisel, Australian Crawl and even a little Regurgitator.

For lunch I’d organised a BBQ outside, Stuart brought in a couple of disposable BBQ’s, Neil some sausages and bread so I ducked down to the local Co-Op (Bottle-O) for a case of… Fosters!
Given the mercury had only lifted a single degree we installed the assistance of Mr Geogre Foreman to help pre-cook our sangaas.

That said we only lasted outside for about 25mins before it become clear that the BBQ’s weren’t going to light and everything seemed to be getting colder than then cooking. We took Mr Foreman back inside and finished off cooking in our office kitchen with a combination of microwave, toastie machine, and George Foreman.

Everyone appeared to enjoy the food and hopefully had an enjoyable first Australia Day.