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Being the impatient sort, I ordered my BlackGold BGT3540 6in1 DVB-S tuner, even though I haven’t yet installed my satellite system. (Though I have convinced myself that it will work!)

However, I didn’t expect it to turn up the next day. This was quite frustrating since the lack of suitable weather and someone to hold the ladder for me meant there was no way it was going to happen this weekend.

Spurred on though, I spent a couple of hours crawling around the loft routing the cable in readiness. The wind and rain were lashing the other side of the slates, so I was thankful to at least have an indoor task to complete.

My cunning plan to achieve the WAF and keep the cables safe and out of site, I routed them down the cavity surrounding the soil stack running the full height of the house; from vent in the roof to the drains beneath. A little fiddly, but I think worth the effort. My living room set up is in the corner of the room backing on to this space and the stack itself is boxed in the kitchen. Thus allowing my shotgun cable to be ready for the BlackGold in my (recently updated) media center and a third cable for a tuner in the kitchen.

Now as soon as it stops raining, I’ll get up that ladder!

I’ve read numerous posts and articles on Vista and the majority of this seem to summarise that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

Since I first tried it out, I have been a fan XP Media Center Edition 2005. Despite it’s quirks, it delivers a simple and usable media interface to the living room. I don’t think I would care to go back to normal just TV and having looked at offerings such as Sky+ and Virgin Media Television, I still feel there are things I would rather not compromise. Vista Media Center too, seemed to offer little incentive and too many headache tales of incompatibility and woe.

Yet upgrade I have!

It went really smoothly too. I didn’t even have to take the disks distributed with the motherboard or graphics card out of their sleeves. I installed the TV tuner card drivers and the few bits of software I have on my media center and the job seems done.

I almost think I’ve missed something!

First impressions. I’m not sure I like it!

Vista itself seems OK, different enough to be disconcerting but nothing major.
(I’m surprised how long it has taken me to even see this OS)

The differences in VMC though, I’m not too sure…

• there is too much on the first screen
• too many menu options, for things I wouldn’t want to use, hanging around
• navigation is horizontal and vertical
• pictures are bundled in with video
• everything seems constrained to the strip across the middle of the screen
• I don’t know if my wife is going to like it!

But it’s late and it it’s done. I’ll live with it over the weekend and see where we are then.

The screen shot is not my own, its from flickr, because I’m tired and I really can’t be bothered to duplicate the effort.

I am writing this at 35000 feet on a iGo blu-tooth keyboard connected to my Atom Life phone (in flight safe mode of course, though I am wondering if blu-tooth is particularly flight safe).

Obviously an internet connection isn’t really an option here, so the posting of this missive will have to be deferred; I merely wondered how usable the keyboard and phone combination would be, if I actually had anything to write.

Not bad really. I would take a little getting used to, but that’s only really because of the multifunction keys. And then, we’re not talking Sinclair Spectrum here. The keys a firm an definite and only have a blue and green functions to separate numbers, some characters and program short cuts.

Last week, I received a bunch of stuff I had ordered from SatCure. Cable, F-Plugs, silicon paste, that sort of thing. They provide a easy to use shopping list grouping the usual stuff together, rather than you having to trawl the site looking for what you’re after.

Yesterday though, my region 2 dish with quad LNB arrived. It was pretty straight forward to assemble. No instructions came with it, but they can be downloaded from here.

I wanted to have a play with my kit, but it was a work night, there was only an hour of light left and I was not really in a position or the mind set to embark on the full installation. I set the dish up on a camera tripod and pointed it in the general direction of the astra cluster.

Previously I had spent some time looking at Dish alignment with Dishpointer to get my compass bearing and elevation. This is a great resource if you’re planning an installation. Before looking at this, my assumed best location for my dish was way off. Completely the wrong side of our house!

I hooked up a satellite finder and an old sky digibox that hadn’t been used for five or more years. I didn’t really expect much of the box, but figured that it would at least power the satellite finder. Sure enough, even on my dish and tripod test rig, it was reasonably easy to fine tune the position.

Again fore reading resources such as Martin Pickering’s eBook and these sites helped:

• http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/satmeter.htm
• http://www.uksatellitehelp.co.uk/
• http://www.heyrick.co.uk/ricksworld/digibox/satfinder.html

The digibox didn’t lock at first. This would usually suggest that I was pointing at the wrong satellite, but I was more confident with the orientation than I was with the state of the box. Being a a software engineer faced with a hardware problem, I went through a couple of power down cycles; sure enough a few minutes later I had a lock, 50% signal strength (with meter still in-line) and 75% quality. A pretty pleasing result for no more than an hour of tinkering, and that’s an hour from unwrapping, and getting all the kit together. Lining up took no more than a few minutes.

This has definitely given me the confidence to proceed with the installation proper.

I read an great article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus via eirikso.com, that I was determined to post on but haven had the chance. To much watching TV no doubt!

I have some fun playing with a this java testability explorer from a guy called Misko Hevery.

Then a I had a frustrating delve back into J2ME with a little help from J2ME and My RAZR and in particular this Guide to getting started in J2ME for the Motorola v3x phone. Though I must admit that the bundled MOTODEV Studio for Java ME v1.3 from The Motorola developer network covers pretty much everything.

In the end I was just let down with unlocking my phone. I’ll give it another go, but I’m not holding my breath. Perhaps this Motorola V3 RAZR Unlocking Kit might help. If it’s as straight forward via Blue Tooth as instructions in this post suggest, I’ll eat my hat! I hate it when technology you pay good money for is senselessly hobbled.