Reading the Sky Planner...

Easy one this.. Press Guide, then Green, and "Hey Presto" you are at your planner. Just use the old Mark One Eyeball to make sense of all that data.

Of course, if you want to do something with that data.. say track which Films you have recorded, how long they were, and how much space they took up.. you'll need to link the Mark One Eyeball to some form of data storage, ideally accessible as at least text.

After you've written down the content of your planner a few times, you'll realise that a) it's dull, and b) it's very dull. The solution is obviously to automate it.. but how??

WHS: The referenced account is locked out

After a brief, but entirely planned power outage that lasted for a good few hours, I discovered that the home PCs could no longer 'see' the home server.

Symptoms were an unhappy grey looking house in the systray, and any attempt to access the shares resulted in a cryptic message saying "the referenced account is locked out".. Remote desktop to the server worked, as did opening the server console.. 

Thankfully, there was a very easy fix...

Moving set top boxes..

My current Media PC records from 2 Freesat tuners, 2 Freeview tuners, and an HD Satellite Set Top box via a Hauppauge Colossus. This setup has served me well for quite a few years now, and there was no real reason to change it, until Cable broadband arrived in my area.

Why should Cable broadband mean changing the media pc? Well, the DSL line can only get 4mbps, which isn't a great speed, but Cable can offer me 50mbps. Once you pay the nice Cable people for a fast line like that, it doesn't become that much more to add Cable TV to the bill. And I kinda figured I'd add the Cable set top as a 6th tuner to the media pc...