November 27, 2006

Flat view

Now finally they arrived! My other two LCDs. Now I've set up a phalanx of three LCDs in a row and it looks cool. Now I just have to find the time to adjust the color on them properly and order the stuff on my desk which was formerly sitting on the top of my monitors.

Perhaps I'll try to provide a photo of this new setup...

November 20, 2006

Sickness'n'Pain

Last week was a really memorable one. It's been a week where everyone(!) in our family had been either in hospital or experienced serious pain with their body. My sweetheart and my granny were (grandma still is) in hospital, my dad and I had serious difficulties with our spine and my mother with her knee.

Aside from that I tried to get more info on modding my new digital PVR and thought about continuing my experiments with modding my wireless router but it isn't missing any functionality I'd really like to have. I think if I do some work on that again in the future, it'll be just some minor updates. Or perhaps something in the direction of OpenWrt.

November 10, 2006

The digital future

Yesterday I made the switch from analogous reception of satellite programs to the new digital world. It has been a somewhat forced switch because there was a cheap offer of a digital receiver including a harddisk for recording. Forced also because we had to make the digital leap as DVB-T is causing the analog terrestrial channels to be turned of in less than half a year. Since we had to do something digital in that timeframe I decided to jump onto the DVB-S train.

Now I'm owner of a "Grand Prix PVR 500 CI" or "ZapMaster PVR CI" as it's original brand is called. It has everything we need so far and there is even a Yahoo discussion forum where you can get in touch directly with the developers and get beta firmware.

The whole switch to digital equipment (LNB change, two more cables from it to the "exchange point" in the roof, rewiring everything to exclude the now obsolete multipier, installation of the new receiver) took around three hours but was preceded by lots of preparations, information gathering and price comparisons on my side.

Ok, now one out of five TV sets has been converted to digital and four still to go. I think the rest will be equipped with a combination of cheapest-of-the-cheap DVB-T or DVB-S tuners.

November 2, 2006

The first snowflakes

Today morning the first snowflakes were falling in this winter. Well, it's still autumn but nevertheless... They didn't survive a minute on the ground tough.