I managed to take a picture of the bird. I think it's a yellow-vented bulbul.

Haven't been able to take picture of the chick. It's been raining the last 2 days. Hopefully the birds are ok. I left some sunflower seeds for them just in case.

FYI those green little balls are tiny rambutans.

Not that in a bowl but a real one! Right on our roof terrace! So exciting!

I sort of suspected it when I kept seeing the same bird over the last few days, sitting on top of the wall. The bird didn't fly off when I approached it. It just sat there, chirping rather frantically. I backed off, not wanting to frighthen it further.

On Saturday morning, I went to the roof terrace and there were two of the same type of birds sitting near the same spot. I waited for a while. When the birds finally flew off, I tip-toed to the potted plants, pushed away the leaves and there was a nest with a chick in it! It was asleep and it looked so cute! The parent birds came back and I quickly left. Didn't want to spook the birds.

I'm checking to see what kind of birds were those. Hopefully I could take some photos too.

Wonder what's happening at Blogger. Had quite a number of problems since I "upgraded" to this Google blogger. Typed an entire page and only the heading appeared. Sheesh..

Anyway. I've hooked up the ATV, sycn-ed it with my eMac and streamed the rest of my videos from my powerbook. ATV comes with an in-built 40GB hard disk which is way inadequate. I mean nowadays storage is quite cheap. So Apple could have included a, say, 120GB hard disk. I did a search and as expected, there're already quite a lot of sites explaining how to hack the ATV. A few even managed to modify the ATV so that it could play other video formats. I don't want to void the warranty just yet. So I'll not open up the ATV for the time being. Luckily streaming was smooth and fast. I did shift my hardware around to ensure full bar in the internet connection. Btw I used wireless even though wire-internet is recommended. So far I have no problem.

I watched Heroes episode 20, CSI NY episode 22, and Casino Royale on Sunday. That's about 4 hours of AppleTV. The Heroes and CSI NY were converted from AVI to ATV compatible H.264 format using ViddyUp. Quality was quite alright when viewed on LCD TV. Better than VCD but not DVD quality. Slight pixelisation and color banding were still detectable. Bottom-line is, if you want DVD quality.. don't get ATV. It's not there yet.

Casino Royale was converted using iPod settings. So quality was not as good those converted with ATV settings. Hence for reasonably good viewing quality through ATV, I'll need to re-convert all my videos using ATV settings. However iPod can't read mp4 files converted using ATV settings. Which means that if I want to have a copy on my iPod I need to do another seperate conversion. That means serious storage capacity because I would have 3 video formats (including AVI format) for every video I own.

My husband wondered what's all the fuss about and prefers to pop a DVD into the player. I told him I'm a big Apple Fan. So guess what I'm saving up for next?

We got our TV back yesterday. Finally I get to try out the Apple TV!

Hooking up the device was easy. Actually it took me longer to find the HDMI port on my TV. It was silly. All the audio & video ports are on the right side of my LCD TV but for some reason, only the HDMI is located on the left side. And for a moment I thought I made a mistake and that my TV doesn't have HDMI.

Anyway. Setup was a breeze. After I switched on the power I saw some flickering on TV and numbers 720 dpi and 1081 dpi keep appearing on the screen. So I guess the Apple TV was trying to configure the resolution.

The language manual appeared shortly after that. Upon choosing the language, Apple TV started searching for WiFi networks. I selected my network, entered the password and a 5 digit code appeared on the TV.

I went over to my Mac and ran iTunes. iTunes detected the Apple TV and added it under the devices section. I entered the same 5 digit code and name the device. And that's it! iTunes & Apple TV are paired.

The next thing I've got to do is to re-organise my iTunes library.