Week of 3rd November, 2014

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Monday, 3rd November

OK, after the building works at Mum's, we have a little problem. Mum can't lock her back door. Admittedly, she has problems, due to the arthritis effectively destroying her hand strength, but even Simon can't lock the door - he ended up tying the door handle to an adjacent window handle, in an attempt to work round the problem.

Today, I had a look. And, sure enough, it's impossible to lock the door. Judicious experiments (read: brute force operating the lock mechanism) revealed foreign object intrusion - sand-and-cement from the pebble-dashing - which suddenly cleared, with visible release of sand. After that, even Mum could lock and unlock the door. So that's a result.

Other than that, a little light TV archiving - 4% released on the $ky HD box. And I've also got SWMBO approval for the location of the downstairs wifi access point - on the less-visible side of the wooden stalactite in the hall.

I've terminated the Cat 5 from Katy's room in the loft onto the stairwell patch panel, which has liberated a metre or so of Cat 5 for the VDSL connection into the study. The hole in the wall isn't as large as I hoped, so there's a little more work involved. And I also discovered a modular faceplate with a Cat 5 jack in it, left over from my last rewiring. Which means I needn't have bought the new faceplate and box this morning. Ah well, 'twas ever thus...

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Tuesday, 4th November

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Wednesday, 5th November

409th Anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot

Remember, remember,
The 5th of November,

Gunpowder Treason and plot,
I see no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

In which we commemorate the foiling of the plot by Guido (Guy) Fawkes, et al., to blow up Parliament, and restore a Catholic Monarchy to the UK.

Work today was the usual for a 10 shift, i.e. checking electronic file deliveries, mostly of short-form material. Although there were 2 line feeds, to be directly recorded to server, one of them a PasB. All completed with no problems.

I've made some use of the Catch-Up TV functionality available with the latest $ky+HD software release. It works fine, and experience to date suggests that the advert breaks are removed in the catch-up version. Which makes things better - there's little-to-no need to edit the file, unlike a PasB recording, which has adverts in it. But I can't really afford the download bandwidth - I'm skating very close to Demon's download cap. This problem will, of course, go away next week, when I get BT Fibre at 55Mbit/sec, uncapped - at least, that's the theory.

I have discovered that Jane's preferred location for the AP-900 won't work - there isn't enough space. 90 degrees around the wooden stalactite will work, though, so I think the AP will have to go there. I've had the system running, and it all works, including PoE power from the stairwell switch, so that's all well. But the AP management from the router leaves something to be desired - you do still need to log in to the AP to do detailed setups. Which is no big thing - such work is probably a one-off.

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Thursday, 6th November

So the fortnight is now complete - today's work was much the same as yesterday's, and mostly completed by quitting time. Just a few HD to SD transcodes to be done - one has to wait for the tin mind to complete those in it's own time, and since there were about 8 of them queued up, my humble efforts won't complete before the early hours of tomorrow.

Last week, the BBC, in it's semi-infinite wisdom, decided to turn off a function that the search functionality of get-iplayer absolutely depends on. But you can manually scrape the PIDs from Auntie's programme webpages, and get-iplayer will happily collect the specified PIDs. But you then have to manually rename the files, and the .mp4 tagging is wrong.

Alex Eames, at Raspi TV, has found a solution - the maintainers of get-iplayer have managed to patch round the lack of the RSS feed that Auntie turned off last week, and get-iplayer v2.90 includes the fix. It's not in the official Raspbian repositories yet, but there is an unofficial repository.

Paraphrasing Alex, to get this to work on a recent Raspbian install on a Raspberry Pi, do this in a terminal window -

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

This will bring your Raspbian up-to-date. Alex then suggests copy-pasting 5 lines of code into the terminal window, which doesn't work when you're working remotely, via ssh. In this case, do -

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add this as the last line

deb http://packages.hedgerows.org.uk/raspbian wheezy/

Save the file. Now do -

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated -y install jonhedgerows-keyring

sudo apt-get update

to install the necessary signing key (or else apt-get will complain bitterly) and update the package lists.

Now we can install the new get-iplayer, with -

sudo apt-get install get-iplayer                  note the hyphen in the name

and run it -

get_iplayer --help                                                     note the underscore in the name

You should now have restored the functionality as of 2 weeks ago.

All this worked for me. Your system may not be quite the same, but if you're working at a command line you should be able to patch round any differences.

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Friday, 7th November

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Saturday, 8th November

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Sunday, 9th November

Kempton Park Radio Rally

And also the public celebration of Remembrance for the sacrifice of those who lost their lives in the First World War. The actual Armistice day is next Tuesday.

So, jump in Ulysses, and drive off to Kempton, via a local family that sells Christmas trees -non-shedding (sic)Nordmann fir -in aid of a local Scout company, in order to put our order in.

As usual, I got there late - the car park was over three-quarters full, so there was a bit of a walk to get to the entrance turnstiles. But at least parking is free.

Also as usual, there wasn't much there that I wanted to buy - certainly not when my to-do list is as long as it is. But the Group for Earth Observation had RTL-SDR dongle kits, including a couple of SMA pigtails, for UKP18, and a disc of software that is claimed to handle the new LRIT digital APT replacement transmission mode that all new polar-orbit weather (WX) satellites will use. There's one on orbit now - the Russian Meteor M2. And I renewed my membership while I was there.

Of course, to get successful reception of 137 MHz WX satellites, you need a suitable antenna. Turnstiles are easy enough, and there are several suppliers. GEO themselves do one, as do Moonraker, and even with the member discount, GEO are more expensive. One would also require a support of some kind, and Moonraker have heavy-duty tripods, which would serve the duty, particularly since I still like to be able to do these things from non-home sites. But that's for later - maybe next year...

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