englishteeth.co.uk

Done, bar the media center installation…

Safety first, I set up the area where the ladder was to go on Thursday evening. The main component of this was piece wood screwed into the pathway for the foot of the ladder to butt against.

I put the dish up on Friday evening, since the weather was nice.

Saturday defied the weather forecast and I was able to wire up the dish.

Alignment was remarkably swift and simple. As mentioned in my previous posts here and here, I’d read and re-read relevant sections of Martin Pickering e-book on numerous rainy evenings as well as this post on The Perfect Satellite Dish Alignment - a How To Guide, but I was still surprised.

Having used Dish Pointer to find my Azimuth and Elevation, I pointed the dish in roughly the right direction. I could hear the Olympics blaring from the tv attached to the old digibox, so I knew I’d locked on to the right satellite straight away. Then it was just a couple of horizontal adjustments to get the strongest tone on the satellite finder. I did a sanity check on the vertical and got a bit of an improvement there and finished off with the skew adjustment. I don’t think it could have taken much more than five minutes in total.

After that it was just a case of tidying up. Fitting the f-plugs on the dual shot gun cable and sealing the hole into the loft space.

Part of the installation aim was to replace a failing freeview box in the kitchen, so I browsed around for a SD freesat tuner to fill it’s space. I chose the bush, mainly as it was the cheapest and I could pick one up locally.

I came across Join Freesat web site in the course of all this, which was a quite interesting resource.

Bought, plugged in and tuned without any issues. WAF achieved so far at least; she felt the receiver looked better than the previous box and the picture seemed better too.

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.

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.

How much more fun the internet has become …

From Joost: The Adventures Of Brisco County, Jr. - The Brooklyn Dodgers
Brisco (BRUCE CAMPBELL) and Bowler (JULIUS CARRY) help two orphans claim a valuable inheritance.

It had been quite a while since I looked at Joost, but an e-mail from them mentioning an old Bruce Campbell favourite enticed me back. But rather that watching much, I found myself experimenting with the built in blogging widget… with the above is the result.