milliAmp

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on trying to get the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner working with New Zealand’s and had a mixed result. Well recently Elgato brought out EyeTV 3.0.2 which seems to fix all the problem I was experiencing with it.

• The interlaced channels now actually play properly.
• The “New Zealand” setting has the correct parameters.
• It doesn’t appear to stutter after playing back a recording after 10 minutes

My only issue now is that the signal strength isn’t particularly great and I’m suffering choppiness and dropouts every 10-20 seconds at some times of the day. By the looks, that is a lot to do with the aerial on the roof and slightly broken wall socket for the aerial. It is still very watchable but it does get frustrating after a while.

We rent the place we’re staying in at the moment and only moved in in March so I hadn’t really paid any attention to the roof, turns out, we only have a VHF/UHF combination aerial unlike 90% of the houses in the area which have a VHF aerial and a medium or fringe UHF aerial. This explains why reception of Prime is so crap.

In Hamilton, an “infill” Freeview|HD transmitter has been set up in the CBD which means that we are approximately 2.5km from it. The big problem is that the aerial isn’t pointing in that direction so we can’t really benefit. To show the difference though, the aerial is probably pointing out to Te Aroha at the moment but I can’t get a stable Freeview signal from the Te Aroha frequencies but I can on the Hamilton Infill frequencies so I have a hunch that if the aerial was facing the infill the reception would significantly improve.

Some approximate trigonometry using Google Earth and a ruler shows at least 15º rotation between the two transmitters from our location.

My next step is to investigate options of repointing the aerial or asking the landlord nicely for a UHF antenna.

New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.

Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.

Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.

I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.

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Steve Jobs has issued a Hot News article detailing Apple’s stance on DRM and it’s future. I’m going to go so far as to say he has laid down a challenge in full public view to the big 4 Music Distribution Companies. However I can see that his account serves only to appease the public’s wrath due to Apple not licensing it’s FairPlay DRM technology to other companies, I can’t see the big wigs in the music world even reading the article, let alone uttering more than a chuckle.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

It does appear that yesterday I purchased a small laser printer. They retail for about $178 so we’re talking small, low-end laser printer. Its the Brother HL-2040. According to the reviews, photo printing quality is sketchy at best (even for a black and white laser). I just printed a high resolution photo on it and the only thing I noticed was the shadows just out of focus are blotchy, the actual foreground quality I thought was pretty damn awesome. This is of course from someone who has never printed a high resolution photo on a black and white laser before.

Either way though, I didn’t buy it for photo printing, that’s what my Epson Photo R210 is for. It is really nice to be able to print text faster than I can get up and walk to the printer (save warm-up time if it is in standby mode), I pumps out pages at about 22ppm and damn the text is crisp.

Aimee’s Canon which we’ve used for printed text up until now has some blocked nozzle which the printer can’t clean by itself and if it is the heads that need replacing it may not be worth it considering new printer prices at the moment, anyway, the laser was affordable and it is mine and fits on a desk and is better at printing text than my Photo printer by a long shot.

I’m happy with my purchase. Setting it up was a breeze as well, unplugged Aimee’s Canon from the Airport Express, plugged in the Brother, installed the MacOS X drivers from the supplied CD and that was it, Bonjour really is that great, up pops the printer under Bonjour printers in seconds.

As an aside, I pumped up the resolution to print the photo and maxed out the RAM on the beast, unlike other lasers I’ve seen (albeit much older) instead of failing to print and flashing random lights it printed the document fine and then printed a page telling me the printer had run out of memory on the job and had to downgrade the resolution to get it out, I thought it still looked ok so I can’t wait to print something at 1200dpi instead of having it pushed back down to 600dpi.