Tuning SBS using MythTV and a DVICO Capture Card on Ubuntu in Brisbane

I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu + MythTV for a while on the Small Form Factor machine I’d previously been carting around the country for gigs. After a reasonably excessive number of reinstalls, I finally got both MythTV and Boxee working, with the caveat that I couldn’t tune SBS, Australia’s second-best TV channel behind ABC.

It turns out that MythTV’s channels.conf file doesn’t quite work for some people. After Googling around multiple times in the intervening months since installation, I finally discovered the solution for various people has been to slightly change the frequency that MythTV searches. For Brisbane it changes to 585791667.

To edit this, open MythTV Backend Setup. Go to Channel Editor > Transport Editor

My MythTV setup shipped with 5 transports.

585500000 is for SBS in the UHF frequency band. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t tune for me. So it needs to be updated to 585791667.

After saving this and re-scanning, I got SBS1, 2, 3, 4 and HD showing up in my Channel List! Superb.

iPhone in AU on Virgin Mobile

I’ve been on Virgin Mobile AU for over a year now. I got in when they were doing their hugely cool 1GB for $10/month data plan, which they subsequently knocked down to 300MB when they realised that people were actually going to use up that data.

Virgin’s mobile internet service around AU is pretty damn good. I used it for my year of touring, and could get coverage in some surprisingly remote towns. I had to do a little bit of geeking to get the phone working as a bluetooth modem with my Macs, but once setup it’s all extremely smooth. The only problem I’ve found is that sometimes the computer connection will crash, and then be unable to connect until I restart the machine. Despite the dire predictions about $15000/GB for over usage, I never even got close to my 1GB cap, and Virgin now have a usage monitoring page on their site, so that’s not much of a worry anymore.

Now, the iPhone is out in AU, early adopters have bought ridiculously expensive ones, even though 99% of them don’t really understand what the thing does. I’ve been thinking of picking one up eventually and probably having to jailbreak it to get working on Virgin. Turns out that’s not the case.

$70/month for 24 months. 1GB data. Usual Virgin awesomeness with free Virgin to Virgin calls etc. and you can upgrade to 5GB/month for an extra $30. Fantastic stuff. I haven’t been on a mobile contract for quite a while now… This almost looks like something which could take me back into the fold.

STOP PRESS: Pixie dust unsuitable for household lighting

STOP PRESS: Pixie dust unsuitable for household lighting – Dan looks at the physics of why an award winning “green” lighting solution would never work.

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