More on Rowridge Retune Nightmare

Looks like a lot of people have complained about losing channels. Apparently so far about 1% of the 500,000 households have called the helpline.

Friends of mine have had similar issues. One lives close to me and lost the same set of ITV related channels. Another lives near Salisbury (further from the transmitter) and has lost all channels except CBeebies!

I imagine a lot of people (like us) haven’t complained yet, in the hope that service will get better by the weekend. We need to get as many people as possible calling in, as they don’t seem to think there’s a real problem!

Here are my current channel settings, as requested by Ade, in case anyone wants to check their MythTV settings.

Rowridge Retune

Notification of the changing of frequencies for Freeview channels broadcast from the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight came through a few weeks back.

I think I’ve picked up all the usual channels, but initial results in Poole are poor…

Not working:

• ITV 1
• ITV 2
• ITV 3
• ITV 4
• Channel 4
• Channel 4 +1
• E4
• More 4
• Setanta Sports 1
• Heart (radio)
• Rabbit
• Smile TV 2
• Teletext

All the other channels (at least those that are broadcasting at midnight) seem to be alright. I could have quite happily done without “Premier Christian Radio” or “Teletext 1-2-1 Dating”, but all the ITV channels?!

Hopefully they’ll sort this out soon and restore the good reception I’ve been enjoying for the last few years.

Update

Been a bit busy, so haven’t posted since last year. Here’s what’s been happening.

• Christmas at home with the family – peaceful.
• Got married on the fifth of January – in a castle.
• Honeymooned in South Africa for four weeks – sunny.
• Started using Twitter in earnest – tweety.
• Got home just in time to go from 37 Celcius to -10 – snowy.
• Blew up my home router by changing a big lightbulb – grrr.
• Spent a week trying to get new router to do stuff – frustrating.
• Made a video of our new Google Android OMA configuration code – geeky.

Right now we’re up to date, I’ll try to continue blogging properly again.

Fedora 10 PackageKit Problems

Fedora 10 PackageKit Problems | I’d been using the Smart Package Manager instead of the standard Fedora/RedHat offerings for the last couple of years, as it seemed to do a better job of sorting out RPM dependancy problems.

However, on installation of Fedora 10, I thought I’d give PackageKit a try. It had been running nicely for two and a half weeks when an update caused any PackageKit use (even searching) to throw errors like this…

failed to get a TID: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file...

There is a long thread on Fedora Forum about it, but after some hacking about and a general failure to get it sorted, I’ve decided to put Smart back on.

This went without hitch and in the process, I created some Smart channel files for RPM Fusion, the new third party software repository that merges Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna.

rpmfusion-smart-channels.tar.gz (864 Bytes)

Just put the .channel files in /etc/smart/channels/ and Smart-GUI will pick them up.

IPCop Firewall

I originally set up a Fedora 5 Linux box which worked reasonably well. I had some traffic shaping and a limited number of ports open. However it was getting out of date (we’re now on Fedora 9) and I heard good things on the Ubuntu UK Podcast about IPCop, a firewall-only Linux distro.

I have now installed IPCop. It does have some security improvements over my existing set-up, although it doesn’t double-up very well as a mini server since it only includes the parts of the OS required for a Firewall. I think I’ll have to move my Subversion server onto my MythTV box which is always on – although I’m now tempted to give GIT a try, which I’ve also heard good things about.

I think I may have another issue which is muddying the waters as far as my firewall goes. Previously I had very bad connectivity with the old firewall, which went away after a few weeks. When I first set up the new IPCop firewall, I had the same problem, which now seems to have gone away too. It may be just freak network traffic. It may be I have a dodgy network adaptor in the machine (one of the four). More research is required…

Elonex WebBook Ultra-portable

I just bought an Ubuntu based Elonex WebBook from Carphone Warehouse. It costs £239 (although it was listed on many review sites at £219), or comes free with a £25/month Orange mobile broadband package.

Vodafone offer an identical mobile broadband package for £15/month, so the “free” cost of the laptop is £360 even if you do cancel the contract after the obligatory 24 months.

The DVD has been placed to show scale. The WebBook does not have a CD/DVD drive. As yet there is no official way to backup or restore the OS. Apparently details will be posted on the Web soon.

The Linux version has the best price and performance. It’s a full blown Ubuntu distro rather than a cut down OS as found on other ultra-portables like the Eee PC. It’s great to see that all power-saving and wireless options work as they should, although it seems not to support Bluetooth in spite of the presence of a button on the keyboard. I’m not sure if this is a compatibility issue or just an absence of Bluetooth hardware!

I bought the iPod-like white model (black also available).

Three USB ports and an SD/MMC card make this usable as a photography off-line storage and manipulation tool.

Memory is a little low (512MB), but email, web browsing and document creation don’t seem to suffer at all. It only has one memory slot, so upgrading will involve throwing some memory away – not a major concern when it only costs about £20 a gig!

The keyboard has reasonably sized keys and is usable for touch-typing. The Function button (annoyingly where the control key should be) gives access to a shared numeric keypad and hardware control keys for paging, screen brightness, volume and wireless. The mouse pad works well and provides scroll-wheel functionality when its right side is stroked.

The machine is pre-installed with Open Office, Evolution for email/calender, the GIMP, some educational software, Wine (for Windows compatibility) and lots more. Being Linux, this only takes up about 2GB of the 80GB drive, so you’ll have plenty of space left for other applications and data.

The Screen is bright and clear and just about manages full screen video playback (depending on codec) once you configure the player to use X11 video rather than XV. This seems a bit of an oversight as, out of the box, most video playback will show as a black screen! Flash installed seamlessly and played back youtube videos with ease

Overall, this is a really useful ultra-portable at a great price. Highly recommended!

On Holiday - Kinda!

Normally the rooms of our home echo with shrieking, strange music and argument. Now there is but silence. My Beloved and I have the whole house to ourselves for a week and it is utter bliss.

I don’t have the whole week off (I have to go in for Tuesday and Friday), but it’s enough to make me feel much more relaxed.

So far, I’ve managed to get the bulk of our wedding invitations sorted and tidied up a bit. Hopefully we can get a some painting and music done later in the week.

I have decided to learn to sight-read Piano music. We constantly seem to be missing an accompanist for many of our endeavours, and I figure it can’t be much harder than learning to touch-type!

Just a little focused effort should do the trick…