The Nova-S Plus is a  good card.  http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novasplus.html

But, it would appear there is a defect in these boards, or at least a strange design, which means that they won’t lock on to some frequencies which require the 22kHz tone sending to the LNB with new drivers because there’s no link between the flange and dolphin-points.  There’s plenty to read about here:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9476

And there’s a patch which fixes the problem by controlling the tone generator directly but it’ll never get in to the main kernel.  For your convenience here is a link to a binary driver built for Ubuntu Lucid kernel version 2.6.32-23-generic:

http://www.whizzy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/isl6421.ko

Replace the current isl6421.ko from /lib/modules/2.6.32-23-generic/kernel/drivers/media/dvb/frontends/isl6421.ko with this one.  It might also work for newer kernel versions, or not.  Who knows?  Not me.

I’ve also got a Hauppauge S2 HD and this patched driver doesn’t seem to effect it.

Search hints:

Hauppauge Nova S plus linux won’t lock horizontal 22khz tone can’t pick up some channels

Ubuntu 10.04 doesn’t include the required firmware to get this card to work.  Probably due to some licensing issues.

Although the card gets detected and you get the frontend device and the demod device a scan will fail to detect any channels.

The reason is that the firmware isn’t there.

Solution, copy this file to /lib/firmware/ and reboot

dvb-fe-cx24116.fw

Tsch.  What a bell end.  Instead, install the package:

linux-firmware-nonfree

They don’t go out of their way to draw much attention to it, like telling anybody or anything.

ZonEdit are suffering from a DDOS attack or something and their default free servers have stopped responding. (See: http://www.zoneedit.com/status.html?)

This has caused me a few problems, the main one being that my MX records are held at ZoneEdit and so my email has effectively stopped working.  Initially I was thinking of a quick workaround, but actually this is working rather nicely.

What I’ve done is:

• Created an account at http://www.web-dns.co.uk and added similar entries as I did with ZoneEdit.  Namely, my MX records pointing back to Google, the A record for this site and a few others and some CNAME records for other Google services.
• Updated the nameservers for the whizzy.org domain at my registrar to have ZoneEdit’s two free DNS servers as 1 and 2, and then the first web-dns server as number 3.

That’s it.  If ZoneEdit stop working, then once the old cached entries have expired new DNS requests start being serviced by web DNS while the ZoneEdit servers are down.   I could in theory have three different DNS services listed with my registrar but ZoneEdit have been really good, so I’m happy to stick with them for now.  If this sort of thing happens in the future then maybe I’ll host the DNS myself.

Web DNS gives you much rawer access to the zone file compared to ZoneEdit, but a bit of googling and you’ll be fine.  For example, for an MX record:

1. Leave the first box (the name box) emtpy.
2. Leave the TTL as 3600
3. Change the IN to MX
4. Set the number (auxiliary information)to zero for the first mail server, and 10 for the second, 20 for the third and so on.
5. Set the data (the last box) to, in the case of Google Mail (e.g. Google Apps for Domains) to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.  (note the trailing dot, very important)
6. Add the other mail servers in the same way

For a straight forward hostname resolution e.g. www.whizzy.org:

1. Set the first box to WWW
2. Leave the TTL as 3600
3. Change the IN to A
4. Set the number to zero
5. Set the data to your server IP address, e.g. 174.133.50.212

And good riddance.

During the lunchtime news on Radio 4 the other day was the story of the beginning of the process to phase out cheques.

The usual neigh-sayers were there. ‘Boo hoo – how am I going to pay my bills now?’ they said. ‘Cheques are so convenient’ they said.

Balls.

Cheques are an outmoded, out dated pain in the arsehole.

How come I was listening to the lunchtime news on Radio 4? Because I was in my car – driving 10 miles to the nearest Post Office (30+ to the nearest branch of my bank) to stand in a line for 20 minutes to pay in a bloody cheque. Now I’m waiting for it to clear. For the next month or however long it takes.

Cheques are fine if:

• You live near your bank branch or a Post Office
• You can get to said office at a time that suits you and a time they will be open.
• You don’t have anything better to do with your time than stand in a line nattering about the price of cat food and hair nets.
• You don’t have anything better to do with your money than leave it stagnating in a zero percent interest current account

Online banking, BACs transfers (Faster Payments even better), Direct Debits, Paypal, Google Checkout.  All much more convenient, much faster and much better than cheques.

Now – if we could only get rid of cash as well.  I mean, come on – it’s just bonkers.  Carrying around a piece of paper and a metric tonne of nickel which, if you drop is gone forever?  Crazy.

Contactless payment?  Yes please.

—– SOLD —–

Fancy living in a Grade II listed building? You get a really sweet inglenook fireplace, a garage and an off-street parking spot, a courtyard shared with friendly neighbours, a pretty decent sized garden and you’re right in the middle of town.. Potton is about a 40minute train ride from London and has shops and pubs and everything! A bargain at £180k (seriously, that’s a good price)

Click here to see it on RightMove

Front door:

Lounge:

Easy fix:

Did you read about this?

Police Issue Spotter Cards

Stuart has made a rather splendid mash-up app to let you stick it to The Man.

Freedom RIP.

Sigh.

Alys’ Backgarden Supermarket (stop sniggering at the back) from BBC Birmingham.

I’ve nothing against Alys Fowler, Lord knows she’s more engaging than Carol ‘monotone’ Klein, but “Punk Rock” she ain’t.
This genre has been done before and it’s been done very very well. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and more recently the brilliant Valentine Warner have all been seen ducking in and out of hedgerows like gastronomic Wombles and they’ve made good TV. I don’t think we really need another one, no matter how much backlit-late-summer-sun slow pans through the flowers and vegetables, pink wellys with flower prints on them, and orange chrysanthemums growing in galvanised watering cans they put in. (If we see all three of these in the first episode I claim some kind of prize).

The stylised gardening-cum-cookery show is perfectly well presented. What isn’t, and what should be, is a TV series of “Joe’s Allotment”. A proper vegetable programme with some human aspects to keep the commissioners happy. I’m sure there is room in the schedules for something like this, call it Alys’ Naughty Allotment if you think that’ll help.