Fantastic!
The Register has published a guide on how to set up a flat screen/HD TV so that you get a better picture quality from it.
How to set up your HDTV like a pro • Register Hardware.
I know what I’ll be spending half an hour doing tonight!
One thing I really hate about watching programme on channels like Discovery or National Geographic is that they are redubbed from the US originals. That means that some things they say do not really have relevance in the UK.
For example, the US measurement of choice, for distance, is “the football field”. I have no frigging clue how big that is. Also, is that an American football field or a proper football pitch? For weight, the standard gauge is “the jumbo jet”. Again, I have no idea what one weighs. Also, is that laden or unladen? Take off weight or landing?
Why don’t they give these measurements in a scale that makes sense? For starters, it makes sense, and secondly it improves peoples understanding of those scales and of the subject matter.
So, please programme makers, use metric or imperial measurements (either is fine.) Jumbo jets and football fields fit into neither.
Although it’s completely pointless, it’s actually very impressive! (And a good interpretation too!)
A Real Life Simpsons Introduction
Uncategorized
Damn it! They bloody well did it again! Another amazing cliff-hanger at the end of the season – these things get my so irrate because I need to know what happens next (and have to wait a year to find out!), but paradoxically, I love them and their ingenuity.
Last night was the last in the current season of Spooks, on BBC One. My god, it’s been back on form this season. Season 3 was a bit of a disappointment for me, seeing as they spoilt the cliff hanger at the end of season 2 in the advert for the upcoming season, and also because all 3 main cast members left.
Season 4 has been absolutely brilliant again, and I had a double surprise because I thought that last night’s episode was number 9 out of 10, and not the final one! It was another outstanding cliff hanger (which I won’t go and spoil for people who haven’t seen it yet) and leaves a great number of questions unanswered for next season. Spooks obviously have a very talented set of script writers, one of which (at least) has written the brilliant novel “Good News, Bad News” (I would certainly recommend it!), and I’m hoping that season 5 will continue with their excellent tradition.
Well done BBC, another brilliant series in the bag!
Uncategorized
I’m reading a brilliant book at the moment, called “Good News, Bad News”, by David Wolfenscroft (I think!).
I didn’t realise it at the time, but the author is one of the script writers of “Spooks” on the BBC (I believe it’s called “MI5″ in the U.S.) which is a series that I absolutely love.
Thing is, I’m not far into the book, but already I’m loving it. There are a good number of surprises, and the pace is just perfect.
I’ll let you know what it’s like at the end!
Uncategorized
OK, the other day, I receive even more donated PC parts (including another hard disk – this time only 3.2GB but big enough to shoe-horn Linux and MythTV onto, and leave the 10GB disk for recorded videos), so I did a complete reinstall of MythTV – this time missing out the step to trying to load the correct module settings for my bttv based card (which last time knackered everything up).
I had some major pain-in-the-arse stuff trying to get the channels loaded, but eventually I managed it.
Unfortunately, the spec of the PC is way too low to be able to watch live TV on it (because of the ring-buffer based hard disk recording for pausing playback etc), but it should be OK to record programs. I did schedule one recording, which it did, but it’s got no sound when I play it back (I know now that there was no sound recorded), which is a problem that I will have to overcome before the box becomes of any use at all.
I’m also trying to set up port forwarding on my home router so that I can access the program recording from outside my network (e.g. from work, or from my mobile phone), but so far I’m not having much luck!
On another note, I thought “Hang on a minute, I could probably write a application for Windows to be able to schedule recordings from my PC. Yes, I know about MythWeb, but still….”. Anyway, just to make sure that I wasn’t treading on anyone’s toes, I googled, and found “WinMyth” which lets you schedule programmes and also view recorded programmes. I have to say though, after I installed it, I couldn’t get it to run because it appeared to bail out with a .Net run time error (it looks like it is trying to reference a Null pointer – doh!). (Also seen here)
Uncategorized
O2 are taking Liquid Telecom to court for using bubbles and the colour blue in an advert.
Surely then, Finish dishwasher tablets use these devices too. Are they sueing them? Or is this just a way to get anti-competitive on their asses without dropping prices?
Uncategorized
I saw a brilliant programme on BBC 1 last night called “Skint”, it basically followed a small group of people who were existing almost hand to mouth, and who frequently had to “pawn” property to be able to survive.
It amazed me how much of a problem this can be, with some people pleased to receive £10 from a pawn brokers.
One man I could really sympathise with, he was called Vernon and had a ten year old son. As a job, he sold the Big Issue on the streets of Bristol (it was either there, or Birmingham – he had a very brummy accent). But he didn’t waste his money, he had found the cheapest place to buy food from (and it wasn’t a supermarket), and looked after his son in the best way he could – he knows that his son wants to be a footballer, so spent some well needed extra pence on some grapes for his son so that he was eating enough fruit and so that he has healthy.
What really make me respect him, was that fact that he was earning his money (any way he could), and even stated that “he didn’t want to become a dole junky”.
Bit of an eye-opener that programme. Well worth a watch next week.
Uncategorized
Well, I’ve spent a semi-productive weekend turning an old PC that was donated to me into a hard disk recorder, using the wonderful MythTV package and Fedora Core 3.
It’s still not a perfect setup, as I’m currently using an old Hauppage WinTV Go card (with a bttv tuner), so the picture quality is not wonderful. The other problem I have is that although I can get TVTime, and XawTV to receive a picture, I’m not able to receive any kind of picture in MythTV – which is something that I will have to solve. Otherwise though, I can get everything else working (i.e. MythWeather, MythWeb, etc).
Once I’ve got this one up and running, I’m planning on building a much more powerful system, with at least 2 cards (probably Digital so that I can watch FreeView, and get a better picture signal), and put it in a pretty case next to the TV. I thought it would probably be best to see if I can get it running at first on some (relatively) free stuff, before I splash out serious cash on a better system.
If anybody wants, I should be able to provide some notes on how I acheived the setup, and how I got everything working.
Uncategorized
An Applications Developer by day, by evening he's usually on an Ergo or watching TV, and at the weekends, he's a sculler.
