Snafu.org.uk

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

Partly prompted by getting a shiny new TomTom bluetooth GPS recently, I thought I’d fire up Wififofum on the way home to see what it found. It’s been about a year since I last did this and plotted the data and it was fairly interesting to see the difference. There are a *lot* more access points out there today, and more now have WEP turned on. Shipping them secure by default must be helping Of course the ones with WEP turned off may be using some other security, but if the SSID is default I’d guess not

Last time I did this I plotted the results using google maps. My code seemed to have broken over the last year so I decided to try the Microsoft Live mapping api. I was pleasently suprised to find it much easier to use than the Google one, and it seems to render the maps quicker as well I’ve also done things properly this time and uploaded the data into a database and made it easier to import data. The prod-development AP with no WEP outside of the Hornby factory might be interesting

The map is here for the interested.

I installed Vista on my work PC recently and was annoyed to find that my PDA didn’t want to sync. It seems that activesync has been killed off in Vista and replaced with Windows Mobile Device Center. This would be fine, but the version that ships with Vista seems to do bugger all and would only let me sync media files. Which is useless as I hate Windows Media Player.

Anyway, after more googling today it seems you need an update from Microsoft (which they’ve only just released) to actually get it working. I installed that today and I’m syncing properly again!