Yesterday I finally got my new pug. It has been 9 weeks of waiting and I am so happy. The only problem I have is coming up with a good name for her. This is so bad lol usually you have the name picked out before you receive the puppy. She is going to be so spoiled. We were at PetSmart yesterday and just had to buy her some cute clothes to take pictures with. I had no idea that they had so much for dogs, I actually saw boots for them to keep their feet clean and warm while they are out in the mud or snow.

I was actually really satisfied with the color she has and with how healthy she seems to be. She is getting along great with the other animals here. She just loves playing with our cocker spaniel babies. It’s funny the pups get together and tag-team the Persian kitties that the girls have. If you can think of any really good names please let me know through comments. I am going to come up with a really clever and cute name.

If you are in the market for a Pug in the near future, I highly suggest you contact Angela over at Trinity Kennels, she was really great to deal with and the quality of her pups is impressive.

So I have had some time to actually fiddle with my AppleTV. I have actually opened mine up and modified it so that I can play all sorts of media formats, it is no longer restricted to just iTunes content.

When I modified my AppleTV I did not know there was a way to do so without having to open the unit. If you are not upgrading the drive and just want to make it so that you can install plug-ins your best bet is to read up on the patch-stick method. The one thing I feel I NEED to say and cannot STRESS enough is that before you do anything you make recovery images of the EFI and Recovery partitions. If you fail to make backups and something goes wrong your only option to fix your drive will be to borrow a friends AppleTV and get the partition images. I can tell you how much of a pain that is. The reason I suggest you use the patch-stick method is because you will not have to open your unit. The patch-stick is a one time operation once the system is patched you will not need the usb drive anymore.

When I was modifying mine I moved SSHD to the wrong directory then went to delete it and did ‘rm -rf /usr/bin/’. Can you say Woops! I attempted to recover the files from the 1.1 update that Apple released but was unable to do that. Somehow during the process the EFI partition of my drive became corrupt. I was left with a perfectly fine AppleTV unit without a hard drive that would boot the system. I had to borrow a friends AppleTV and make the images necessary to fix mine.

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Well I have had some time to play with my new toy and I must say that I love it!  I have had no reason to put any movies, music or pictures on the device because streaming works so well.  When I first tested it out I did so with my wireless-g linksys WRTP54G router.  It worked wonderfully.  I decided to try my girlfriends Belkin wireless-n router and immediately removed that.  With the wireless-n router from Belkin it would not stream the movies without interruption.  Every few moments it would have to buffer the movie again.  However with the wireless-g it works like a charm.

I am looking into opening up my AppleTV and making it so that it can play other formats than only those that iTunes supports.  I have seen people modify them so that they can play Divx and Xvid and there are also some other cool plugins like checking weather and rss feeds etc.  The only issue I have with modifying this myself is the fact that the rubber base is held on with what looks like a rubber based glue.  All of the articles I have read say to re-apply the rubber base with a spray adhesive but they do not specify what type to use.

The only thing I would suggest is this.  If you do not plan to use the AppleTV as a portable unit then go with the 40GB model.  Everything streams fine and you will not need more space than that.  I got the 160GB model because I was a bit hesitant on how well the streaming would work.  It works perfect for me and I doubt I will use the extra space.