It seems hard to find information in one place that gives an overview of the different free satellite TV options available in the UK, so here is our guide entitled ‘choices between freesat receivers, skytv, digiboxes or digital TV tuner card’ to try to give you an overview of the options available and their initial costs. We try to cover all the options open to you for UK digital TV reception from the main group of satellites serving English language programming. The guide is aimed at the UK marketplace, although many free to air channels can be received across most of Europe with the correct hardware (normally just a larger dish).
Archive for the ‘linux’ Category
Recovering a lost Mysql root password
The problem
Recently I had to recover a lost MySQL root password from a system I dont very often use. Somewhere in the mists of time I must have forgotten it.
List, backup or Restore installed packages on Debian and Ubuntu
The problem
Many a time I have re-installed my system from scratch or created a new system, but get sick of continually installing the same packages over and over. Its annoying when 2 or 3 months down the line you want to use a program you used to have (or have on another system) only to find its not yet installed. Sure, an apt-get install only takes a few minutes for a single piece of software, but that’s a few minutes a geek like me could better spend doing something productive.
Encrypting your Ubuntu swap partition
What is swap?
Even if you encrypt data on your partitions, something that is often overlooked is your swap partition. Swap is where linux ’swaps’ programs (and their stored data) from physical system memory onto the hard disk when they are not used. When those programs become used again, the system ’swaps’ them back into memory. This approach can allow you to run more programs than you have RAM for, at the cost of delay – for example when programs are swapped back into RAM from disk.
OGG to MP3 streaming howto – icecast and shoutcast
If your station DJs only have the ability to broadcast in OGG/Vorbis but your listeners listen mainly in MP3 via shoutcast (for example, Traktor can only broadcast in OGG), this howto guide is for you as it shows how to seamlessly integrate and transcode an Ogg (icecast) broadcast to a shoutcast (mp3) broadcast using some off the shelf, free technology. The way the system works is using the feature in icecast to call programs when a source connects or disconnects. These scripts then invoke (or terminate) a custom perl program which uses ogg123 to receive the ogg stream from the icecast server, pipes it into the lame program to convert to MP3 and then uses the libshout bindings to send the stream to the Shoutcast MP3 server. While this will work with any linux distribution, in this howto I use the Ubuntu and Debian ‘apt-get’ system to install the various required components. If you use a different distribution you should substitute any apt-get commands with your distribution specific package manager (or build from source if you are into punishment).
Setting up a linux based shoutcast server
If you have ever wanted to do some broadcasting online, its essential you have a server to broadcast from. You could run one of these servers from your home broadband connection, but you upload speed will decide how many listeners you can broadcast to. For example on Virgin Media cable’s 10Mb package in the UK, while the download speed is 10mbps, the upload speed is actually only 512kbps, so that upload speed becomes the limiting factor of exactly how many listeners you can broadcast to. You can also use a server hosted in a datacentre to broadcast, this has the added benefit of not having the upload limits like your home connection does. I provide shoutcast servers for some of the worlds biggest names in internet radio, such as the ever wicked NSB Radio, Glitch FM and The Nuskoolbreaks.co.uk forums. If you are interested in getting server capacity from me, you can email me for a competitive quote.
MythTV Frontend on Windows
If you want to run MythTV frontend (watch live TV and recordings) on a windows PC on your home network and already have a MythTV backend installed (see my howto for setting up a MythTV system) then Davco has a windows installer for you!
ITV HD on MythTV DVB-S / Freesat
ITV HD aka High Definition is available on DVB-S on Freesat. MythTV can receive this programming, but requires some simple modification. I recommend you use my channel plan for the numbers to match.
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