Hard News: Connecting the Box
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I'm suprised you got it to work with either the Zinwell or Hills boxes - neither worked for me and I ended up with an unofficial "Kaon" one.
Good to see that TVNZ 6 is working, as is the preview of Stratos which is cool. Have it working through Media Centre as a PVR BUT, there is no EPG available for a few of the channels as media centre doesn't support the EPGs in NZ (due to the TV Stations not playing nice with Microsoft) and its not updated in the homebrew EPG yet (www.reven.co.nz).
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Also, woke up to the flatmate watching fraggle rock on TVNZ 6. He's well pleased with the new channel :-)
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I'm suprised you got it to work with either the Zinwell or Hills boxes - neither worked for me and I ended up with an unofficial "Kaon" one.
What happened? Just no signal?
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I can happily say I had no issue setting up a $199 Dick Smith box (same as a Zinwell apparently). And yes, well pleased with the quality of the signal and the EPG.
PVR-wise, there appears to be at least one cheap and cheerful Freeview box with PVR listed on Trademe. Not officially sanctioned, but it looks fine, and uses external USB for storage, so is effectively unlimited.
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I didn't feel like going out on Saturday night. It was cold, I was tired, but I had this Blam Blam Blam ticket, so I hauled arse to the King's Arse and I'm so glad I did.
The lads put on a great show. It didn't feel like some guys who'd got the old band back together. It felt young, fresh and new.
I blogged about it here. What a brilliant night.
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You are killing me with the Blam Blam Blam reports, people. What was I thinking, staying at home and drinking margaritas?
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I was also pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get Freeview going. Just plug everything into the right sockets and it launched.
It's a shame that the manual (the DSE version of the Zinwell) was so dense - it could have done with a one-page simple setup guide in advance of all the advanced satellite selection carry-on. Also there were loads of acronyms they didn't bother to translate. I'm still wondering what an MHEG is, and whether I need to know more about it. There's no explanation of what the various flashing lights mean, and seems only to come in On and brighly-lit Standby if the power's plugged in.
Still, these are quibbles for more than seven viewable channels at the cost of less than 6 months subscription to one of the pay providers. I'm looking forward to more of the NZ-made kids' sci-fi from the 80s on 6 - a young Katrina Hobbs was in The Boy from Andromeda yesterday afternoon. Bring on Under the Mountain and the Kids from OWL.
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actually, retail is $3049 if you take 2GB of RAM, which you'd be silly not to, even though that makes it a build-to-order spec, which means you have to wait up to two weeks for your computer
Just buy your machine from the nice folks at Ubertec, they were happy to whip my iMAC (not this brand new model which may be different) upstairs and plug in the extra RAM on the spot. Took 10 min, which of course meant I was looking at the goodies in their shop for 10 min.... :)
cheers
Bart -
__ I'm suprised you got it to work with either the Zinwell or Hills boxes - neither worked for me and I ended up with an unofficial "Kaon" one.__
What happened? Just no signal?
Russ:
Experiences with certified freeview boxes:
http://mikeenz.blogspot.com/2007/07/freeview-zinwell-shit.htmlNew Channels:
http://mikeenz.blogspot.com/2007/09/2-new-channels-now-available-on.html -
Experiences with certified freeview boxes:
Interesting. We've got a smaller Zinwell box (Freeview sent it to me a little while ago), and it performed its software upgrade flawlessly. But yes, when the "approved" decoders are so iffy, it rather undermines the quality control argument for being so tight on approvals.
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That patch updated the time on the actual clock in the system preferences on my MacBook, but the clock in the display in the top right hand corner is still on the old time.
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The time on the Freeview Electronic Programme Guide was an hour off yesterday, which is a pain when you want to know what's on now as opposed to an hour ago. I don't know whether that's something the Freeview people need to sort, or we can do that on our set-top boxes.
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(actually, retail is $3049 if you take 2GB of RAM, which you'd be silly not to, even though that makes it a build-to-order spec, which means you have to wait up to two weeks for your computer).
Rookie move buying Apple RAM. It is far cheaper and quicker to buy the box as is and then get some RAM from one of the local PC shops for about $150GB. There are even videos to show you how to change the RAM. So simple even n00bs can do it.
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Hey Russell,
yeah I had the same wee curious thing as Jake with my MacBook and the clock on Sunday morning.
Dunno if it's perhaps a coincidence...I had to reboot for that latest firmware update for the Core2 Duo Macs....and that seem to push the clock forward.
Don't see it being the update that helped, probably the reboot...but shucks, when was the last time any of us did that?
Yeah, yeah, I know, a Windows Sys-Admin should have remembered his first rule :)
Ta,
Mikey -
Rookie move buying Apple RAM. It is far cheaper and quicker to buy the box as is and then get some RAM from one of the local PC shops for about $150GB. There are even videos to show you how to change the RAM. So simple even n00bs can do it.
Ahem. Yes, guess I could have in retrospect (the Apple RAM is $250), but when you're getting a little media discount you just keep it simple.
I did pop open the little RAM drawer in the loan machine in the course of trying to diagnose its horrible hardware failure though. It's quite cool.
But do you know what the service entry for bigger jobs is on the new iMacs? You take the screen off! Retailers have been issued with big suction-cup thingies as part of the service kit.
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Figured you'd be there Russell. My wife and I had a sweepstake on which of us would spot you first - but neither of us did :-(.
Saw several other PA denizens though.
Had a great night - these reunion gigs are bloody brilliant : Newmatics, Hello Sailor, The Blams. I am fervently hoping to see Citizen Band and The Swingers doing reunion gigs sometime.
Cheers,
Brent. -
Dunno if it's perhaps a coincidence...I had to reboot for that latest firmware update for the Core2 Duo Macs....and that seem to push the clock forward.
Yep, a reboot fixed it.
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Figured you'd be there Russell. My wife and I had a sweepstake on which of us would spot you first - but neither of us did :-(.
Saw several other PA denizens though.
Yeah, I saw Robyn, but I wasn't around beforehand and only briefly afterwards.
But Brent mate, I'm trying to send you a bottle of whisky! You won the Whisky Galore ad copy comp for last week. Feel free to get in touch with your delivery address ...
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__Dunno if it's perhaps a coincidence...I had to reboot for that latest firmware update for the Core2 Duo Macs....and that seem to push the clock forward.__
Yep, a reboot fixed it.
Oh -- me too! I turned the machine off to rearrange the power leads under the desk and hadn't noticed that the time had automatically corrected itself.
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Because Blam Blam Blam really are a very promising outfit.
yep, I thought so......
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But Brent mate, I'm trying to send you a bottle of whisky! You won the Whisky Galore ad copy comp for last week. Feel free to get in touch with your delivery address ...
Russell just send it to me and I'll pass it on to Brent tomorrow at pub triv - honest:).
cheers
Bart -
__Because Blam Blam Blam really are a very promising outfit.__
yep, I thought so......
You always were ahead of the pack, Simon ...
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Because Blam Blam Blam really are a very promising outfit.
yep, I thought so......
You always were ahead of the pack, Simon ...
but all silliness aside, it always pleases me just how good the Blams sound every time I hear them. They played a private gig a couple of years back that I spoke at, and, despite the huge gaps not playing together, they were probably tighter than they'd ever been back whenever.
The other thing that always always hits me with The Blams, is what an incredible songwriter, musician and singer Mark Bell is....The Last Post is one of the killer Luxury Length tracks, and it's a shame he's often overlooked in the rush to (correctly) praise Don's talents.
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I’m (as are many others I know) holding off for UHF Digital Freeview to start broadcasting next year before investing in a set-top box. Unless you already have a satellite dish on your roof, installation can be pricey where as (as long as reception is ok) almost anyone who can climb onto their roof can install and align a UHF aerial at nominal cost.
It was disappointing to see that a feature by Greer McDonald in Saturday's Dom Post made no mention of UHF Freeview as I think it will be the carrot that will attract the non-Sky-subscribing viewer (with the added attraction of HDTV broadcasts as well)
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I must confess to being most disappointed by Apple's response to the NZDT change. "Change your system time manually" is an utterly unacceptable "solution", especially since they've had more than sufficient time to develop a patch - a third party got one done in time, after all.
Given what one pays for Apple kit, they damn well ought to offer much better support than this. MS even provided instructions for people to update versions of Windows that are no longer supported, which is far beyond what Apple has given us.
I'm disappointed, Russell, that you are so easily swayed by "Pretty, shiny, ooooh" over "We can't be bothered supporting our terribly expensive product".
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