Snafu.org.uk

I’ve finally found the time to write a catch up blog post! As you can probably guess from the last blog posts I made, things have been pretty busy. So, to summarise:

Had a baby

Daniel is getting big now and doing his best to destroy the house! He’s discovered crawling and so now nothing is safe. He’s also figured out how to pull himself upright on furniture, so I suspect it won’t be too long before he’s tottering about the place. There are various pictures of the little blighter in the gallery

Moved house

This took a lot longer than we thought it would, though thankfully we sold just before every started getting really nervous about the housing market. The estate agents were pretty rubbish (Ward and Partners), sending round people who were totally unsuitable for our house. Talking to friends this doesn’t seem uncommon for Wards, so try and avoid them where possible. The person we sold was planning to rent it, and seemed to have a number of other properties but seemed to have a hell of a job sorting out her mortgage properly which meant she overran the completion date. All fairly stressful for us as this was happening around Christmas and New Year, however it finally went through in the end and the house is sold.
This means we’re now back living in Canterbury, which is great. Much better for work if nothing else as a 10 minute commute is much better than 40 minutes+. Also this house is bigger and more conventionally laid out than the Margate house which means furniture fits better and is much more child friendly.

Other than that(!), everything is much the same. Which is probably for the best actually as that’s kept us flatout for the best part of a year

Whilst I’m enjoying my time at home with Claire and Daniel I’ve also managed in the last couple of days to have a go at a couple of things I’ve been meaning to do for a while (in one case for about 3 years!). These enable us to watch things we’ve recorded on our PVRs virtually anywhere, though mainly it’s so we can watch TV in different rooms of the house without having to mess about with cabling or those TV sender boxes. First up we have…

Slingbox

This is a rather neat box that you plug in to the piece of equipment you want to “sling”, connect it up to your router, install the player and away you go. The quality is excellent and it cleverly optimises the quality on the fly depending on your network connection. Running on my local wireless network the picture quality was very close to that on the TV. It usually takes a few seconds to build up a buffer, optimise and start streaming but after that there were no audio or video dropouts at all.

You control your remote piece of equipment using a virtual remote control, which looks exactly like the real one. You have to attach a couple of IR blasters to the equipment which is a shame as they look a little naff. It’d have been better if you had the option of using an internal blaster like in the Tivo. There is a slight pause in changing channels etc. but that’s to be expected. It’s certainly usable enough that setting up recordings away from home is possible.

The only downside really is that as it’s controlling the box directly you might end up annoying someone who is trying to watch a program in front of the TV. It’s also only streams to one client at a time due to copyright/licensing reasons which is a little annoying. All in all though I’m very impressed.

Once I had this working it got me thinking about the Turbonet card I had in the study and so I decided to move on to project two…

Networking the Tivo

I bought the card quite a while ago, not long after we got a Tivo. At the time I was too scared to install it in case I broke the Tivo as we didn’t want to be without it. We now use a Sky+ box mainly so I didn’t mind having a go with installation.
It actually turned out to be a doddle, with the card slotting in easily and the software install just worked. I connected it up to the network and was amazed to get a bash prompt without any further fiddling It’s currently connected via a slightly eccentric wireless bridge which took much fiddling to get working. This is probably my own fault for buying a cheapy one that’s designed for connecting Xboxs rather than a proper bit of networking equipment Also the Tivo is in the kitchen (as this is where our other Sky box is) and this means the wireless signal has to go through the outer wall of the house which consists of a few feet of flint/bricks/rubbish which isn’t the best for wireless conductivity. This means that I can do everything but streaming and video extraction over the wireless network, currently I extract video by my laptop in directly and using a batch ftp program. Once the Sky box is moved in to the main part of the house it should be a bit better.

The absolute killer app that I installed on the Tivo, and the thing that is really making me consider using the Tivo much more is TivoWebPlus. This gives virtually full control of the Tivo via a web interface, making it a doddle to set up Season passes, search for programs, manage your Now Showing, in fact, pretty much anything. I’ve put some screenshots below showing some general usage. Using the Tivo again has reminded me how much the Sky+ box sucks, especially when it comes to the EPG. It’s great to be able to search easily and set up season passes that persist rather than vanishing if the show isn’t on for a week which is what happens on the Sky+.

Sky+ does have dual tuners though which is the main advantage of it, though it is tempting to pick another cheap Tivo up from Ebay and use them instead

TivoWebPlus main menu

Channel guide with hi-lighting

Tivo Information

Now Showing

Due to popular demand we’ve been taking some more pictures of Daniel and putting them up here

Claire and Daniel were released from hospital yesterday which was a nice suprise as we thought they’d probably be in a while longer as Claire had a section. We’re now adjusting to life with a fulltime baby (well, Claire had him fulltime anyway in hospital, I just got to escape in the evenings). Quite a steep learning curve for us and Daniel but we slowly seem to be getting there. We were worried the cats would take exception to him but they’ve shocked us by actually really taking to him. Nibby especially likes to check he’s okay when he cries, though he has pinched the Moses basket when it’s not in use

It was Claires’ nans funeral today as well and we weren’t sure if we’d be able to make it as Claire is still recovering and we’re getting used to looking after Daniel. In the end we went as we didn’t really want Claire to miss it. As we’d disturbed Daniels afternoon routine he was rather grumpy so I stayed with him in the car while Claire went to the service. He behaved really well considering it was his first big trip out and after I managed to get some wind out of him he promptly dropped off for half an hour until everything was finished

Nothing planned for tomorrow and it’ll be nice to have a fairly easy day after rushing about for nearly a week!

Finally after a fairly traumatic labour Daniel finally came into this world at 15:37 weighing 8lb 1oz.

It wasn’t an easy day though. I got a call at just after 08:00 today Claire had gone in to labour ward, which sounded like good news as it meant things were finally progressing. However when I got there it turned out they’d moved her to start her on Oxytocin to try and get things going. This started around 09:30 and continued all morning and in to the early afternoon with Claires contractions getting more painful but unfortunately she still wasn’t dilating enough. Around 14:00 Claire had had enough of the pain and asked for an Epidural, this was sorted and she felt a lot better. Around 15:00 the midwives became more worried about the babies heartbeat which had been dipping during contractions for a while, and even I could hear it was getting noticeably slower. After the Doctor had a look they decided to do a crash C-section and within 2 minutes Claire had been rushed off to theatre. I then had the scariest 20 minutes or so of my life while I waited in the recovery room for news of Claire and the baby. The staff were brilliant though and kept checking up on my and let me know as soon as the baby was born and kept me up to date on how Claire was as well. After they’d got him cleaned up they brought him through to me and I got to sit and hold him for half an hour while Claire recovered.

He seems to have come out of his rather traumatic birth fine, and the Doctor said afterwards that now they’d tested the blood from the umbilical cord it probably wasn’t such an emergency as he wasn’t doing too bad, but at least it got it over with I guess

So far he’s a very content baby, barely crying even when he got his Vitamin K shot. He does do a great grumpy face though I’m hopeful this will last but it’s probably the drugs in his system keeping him dozy

Claire is well too, though she’ll be in hospital for a few days recovering. There are a couple of pictures of Daniel below for the interested