The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:39:59 GMT

I've realised that I can connect my STB to the through port on my DVB-C card, and it still receives an excellent signal. I conclude that my cabling is sufficient.

DVBShop say that the Linux drivers don't actually report signal strength correctly. I don't know if that means that they somehow diminish the actual signal. It seems unlikely, but I'm no expert.

I suppose I'll have to pull the card out again and put it in a Windows machine to see if the signal is significantly better.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:11:00 GMT

I've been trying to get my TechnoTrend C-1500 DVB-C card to connect to Virgin Media and tune in the FTA channels.

Linux detected the card and configured it automatically. The TechnoTrend card has been available for some time now, so support is good.

It took a while to work out the correct numbers to give to the tuner program, but I eventually found out how to boot into the Engineering menu of the Samsung SMT-2100C STB, which contains the current settings. I used DVB-Tools on Linux to scan the channels. Here is the config file for scandvb:

# Virgin Cable (UK)
# freq sr fec mod
C 666750000 6952000 NONE QAM64

This worked well, detecting 344 channels, 94 of which were unencrypted (Freeview channels and radio).

My main problem now is signal strength - I'm getting 0-1%, which is just not enough to watch most of the channels. I think the quality and shielding of the cable I've used (TV aerial RF) is much less than Virgin's and I'm connecting to the end of a fairly long extension. I'll try to get a better one this week and give it another go on a machine nearer the Cable access point.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 25 May 2007 11:14:18 GMT

Project Gutenberg has out-of-copyright books and Mutopia has out-of-copyright sheet music.

The Web is a wonderful thing... Yay!

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 25 May 2007 00:25:00 GMT

Yay, my Cable TV card has arrived! It has an add-on CI reader, into which I can plug a module that will read the smart card used to decrypt paid-for Virgin Media TV channels.

It may be some time 'till I get it up and running with MythTV, but I'll post when I do.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 20 May 2007 08:49:00 GMT

Until recently I've been using an open source diagram creation program called Dia. It's an adequate (if a little clunky) alternative to Microsoft Visio. You drag and drop different shaped blocks and join them together using stretchy arrows, all of which can be customised to look as you wish.

However, as a programmer, I want to lay out a set of relationships and let the software work out the best way to represent them.

Enter Graphviz, a set of open source tools for doing just that.

I used the DOT language to describe my MythTV set-up as a collection of elements connected together with wires, IR and Bluetooth. It also allows you to group similar elements together and even create subgraphs.

It really does an excellent job of laying out a readable diagram and I'm itching to find some way to use it in production.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 18 May 2007 15:55:00 GMT

I took the Carlsbro Orion 10 active speaker that I bought for Jay's birthday back to the shop when it stopped working. I'd checked the fuse in the plug and thought that the damn thing had just broken down after an hour's use.

Embarrassingly, when I took it back to the shop, they quickly pointed out that the internal fuse had blown (very kindly not abusing me for my stupidity).

In future I promise not to take things back to the shop when they blow a fuse!

Posted by Kat Crichton Thu, 17 May 2007 13:08:00 GMT

Listening to music in the car back home from rehearsals last night, Penny suggested that we learn the song Paranoid Android by Radiohead, with myself on guitar and Penny on bass.

There's only one tiny snag in this plan, Penny can't play bass... yet!

She does have a lot of experience singing alto vocal parts (kinda like female bass singing) and can already play other instruments and read music, so presumably she'll have a natural ear for basslines.

We shall see... I've bought a beginner's bass guitar book, a Muse notation book, some new Super-Slinky's and a couple'a plectrums.

We'll start tonight!

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 09 May 2007 16:28:00 GMT

Over the last couple of weeks, I performed Around the World with Gilbert & Sullivan with the Bournemouth G & S Operatic Society. This was a compilation concert of Gilbert & Sullivan mixed with other popular music, that went down very well and was highly enjoyable to be involved with.

Auditions for the next show, "Gondoliers" (Half term, Oct 2007) take place in a few weeks time, so I'd better get practicing those audition pieces.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:24:00 GMT

I've not been terribly impressed with the speed or quality of service of my Rails sites running at ASmallOrange.com. I think they are using mod-ruby in Apache, which doesn't quite work as well as it should, giving Application Errors fairly regularly for no good reason.

TextDrive are the official Rails host, as they hosted the first Rails project - BaseCamp. They support Lighttpd as a Rails Web server, which is very quick and fully compatible. They have an offer on at the moment for $99 a year shared hosting, which is not much more than ASmallOrange, so I thought I'd take the plunge and switch over.

It's taken a little longer to get Rails set up on a sub-domain, but since Textdrive has been hosting Rails applications longer than anyone else, there are a lot of good tutorials and users who can give a helping hand.

Follow up..

The Application Errors that I used to have with ASmallOrange.com stopped happening some time ago. They've obviously updated their setup at some point and fixed the issues. I still run a site on their service and would recommend it.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:28:00 GMT

Today I tried to book a ticket to go and see The Decemberists in Seattle using the Ticketmaster Web site. Everything went fine until I tried to pay for the e-ticket using my credit card issued in the UK. Lo and behold I am obliged to choose my State from a selection of US States and enter my Zip code.

This seems pretty silly since the ticket would not even be physically delivered. Given that making credit transactions in the US is ridiculously easy - my signature hasn't been checked once in the last month - it's amazing that the Web is so unaccommodating.

Bad Web design is one of my pet peeves. All Web sites should be location agnostic given the global nature of the internet. Ticketmaster have a UK presence, but the events on the US site don't show on the UK site. Seems the only way I can see the show is turn up on the night and hope.