A few updates…

March 4, 2013 Personal, Ramberlings No comments

I’ve updated a few of the static pages on the site, including my about me – which I will update a little bit more when I get the chance.

Unfortunately I haven’t really had the time to get back into blogging, even after installing the mobile WordPress App.

If you want to keep up-to-date with what I’m doing, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@robclarkey), where I am most active.


I’ll add some more posts and reviews when I have the time. I’ve got a massive pile of empty tech boxes waiting for me to write about…

It’s go time!

November 16, 2012 Ramberlings No comments

I’ve been really bad at keeping my blog up-to-date, which is why nothing has changed on here for a while.

I’ve just downloaded the WordPress iOS App in a hope that it might encourage me to blog me. Keep tuned?

Sorry for the delay!

July 27, 2012 Personal 2 comments

Just a quick post to say I’ve not totally forgotten about my blog, and I’m still going to carry on blogging. Things have been really busy here, so I’ve not had much time to write, but now that the summer is here (ish!) I should have loads more time to write new posts and tutorials.

Stay tuned!

Installing TBS 6981 DVB-S2 Dual Satellite Tuner on Ubuntu 11.04

June 5, 2012 Technology, Tutorials, TuxTV 19 comments

This is my first post in a number of posts I will be making detailing how I’ve got the (Almost!) perfect TV Server & Client setup for my house.

In order to make a TV server, you will need some form of tuner. As I’m a paying Sky customer, I’ve chosen to purchase 2x TBS6981 DVB-S2 Dual Tuners. These are currently priced at about £89, which is a good deal.

The cards are low-profile cards, but come with a bracket in order to fit them in larger cases. I’ve decided to put mine in my HP Microserver (which I blogged about here).

Without going into too much detail on the spec of the cards, they are pretty meaty.

Being a dual tuner card, it requires two drops from the satellite LNB (you need to run one cable for each input on the card. Don’t use splitters!)

As I have two cards, I needed to run 4 cables direct from the LNB on the satellite. If you only have a standard dual-lnb, or you’ve filled up all the slots on your quad-LNB, you will need to purchase either a bigger LNB, or a bracket to mount two quad-LNB’s on the same dish. You don’t need to go buying a bigger dish yet!

The cards will churn out both DVB-S (SDTV) and DVB-S2 (HDTV), which is great if you’ve got Movies or Sports in HD.

Each tuner can be tuned to one multiplex at a time, which is different to a channel. Multiplexes contain multiple channels. For example the BBC multiplex contains BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three (and CBBC), BBC Four (and CBeebies), BBC News and BBC Parliament.

When you change a channel, you are in fact changing a filter to filter out the channels you don’t want to see in the multiplex. So even when you are viewing BBC One, your box is in fact viewing all the BBC channels and just filtering out everything but the data for BBC One. This is great, because we can ‘exploit’ this to watch/record/stream more than one channel at a time on one tuner, leaving the other tuners free for someone/something else to use.

You can view all the mutiplexes and more information at Lyngsat. For Freesat/Sky UK we most commonly use the Astra satellite cluster at 28.2E (East). Details for all the 28.2E multiplexes are located here.

Read more

Sun, Sea and Pi

May 26, 2012 Personal, Ramberlings No comments

First of all, appologies for the lack of posts and slow response to comments and emails. I’ve been busy with work, and enjoying the lovely weather, so I’ve not been able to respond as quickly as I’d like to. Sorry!

You’ll also be happy to know that I’ve received delivery of my Raspberry Pi (It came Friday!), so I’ve been non-stop playing with it. I even took it out in the garden to get the best of the weather, and tech time. I’ll post some pictures and a ‘first steps’ review tomorrow (possibly!)

On the TuxTV front, I’ve recieved delivery of my TBS 6981 Dual DVB-S2 Tuner card. It’s low profile so it fits very well inside my HP Microserver. It was however very messy to install, and I had to take the whole server apart, bit by bit. This does however mean I can post a tutorial on how to install things into the server, and I can also post a review of the TBS so far.

So now you know what I’ve been doing, You can look forward to heaps of reviews and tutorials coming your way.

Enjoy the sunshine!

Installing ATI Radeon HD 6450 Drivers on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit

April 12, 2012 Technology, Tutorials 53 comments

UPDATE: If you try upgrading after this tutorial, it will cause the drivers to fail. This seems to be an issue with 64bit operating systems, and the ATI drivers. If you want a quick setup, use Ubuntu 12.04 32bit.

If you really want 64bit, Install 10.04 64bit, then install using the CD’s until you reach the latest. If you hit any black screens, reboot and tap Shift until the Grub menu appears. Then enter recovery mode and do the upgrade using this.

For a quick media centre solution, use OpenElec and install to the HDD, which works perfectly! I recommend the OpenElec + Pulse Package.

——————————————————————————————

I recently bought and reviewed the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 Nettop PC. It comes as standard with a powerful ATI Radeon HD graphics card (the 6450 to be exact). This is great if you are a Windows user, because AMD produce all the Windows drivers you could possibly want.

However, I’m not. Windows in my opinion shouldn’t be let anywhere near my movie collections. I’m a Ubuntu with XBMC man, but this causes a few problems for this chip.

Below I will explain how I managed to get the 6450 working with my Q180. I’m currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x86_64 installed from the ISO downloaded from the Ubuntu website. I’ve then used the Pendrive Linux tool to create a USB key with the Ubuntu ISO in a bootable format. The Q180 can then boot off of this and install Ubuntu. Make sure you use the USB 2.0 ports for booting though. The USB 3.0 ports on the front I’ve not managed to boot from, and Ubuntu throws a filesystem issue if you attempt to boot the Live CD from them.

Installing Ubuntu isn’t covered in this tutorial, so I’ll assume you’ve already done a base install of this. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, and you don’t need any extras pre-installed. All I ask is you have access to the internet and know how to bring up a terminal session.

NOTE:
I will be using some of the tools provided by AMD/ATI. While they do provide drivers for Linux, many users have reported that these do not work correctly on Ubuntu. It is also worth noting that these tools and drivers are NOT open source. They are proprietary software which has been released under it’s own license. You need to check that you are lawfully allowed to use this software in your country. By doing so, you accept the terms and conditions put in place by  AMD.

Read more

HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer

April 9, 2012 Reviews, Technology 5 comments
w0281915_newpage

Since my Iomega Home Media Network Drive gave up the ghost last week, I’ve been in search for a new solution to store the mass of photos, music and digital film collection.

I came across HP’s ‘ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer’ on offer for £239.99 inc. VAT with £100 cashback from HP and a further chunk of cashback from eBuyer when ordering using a corporate discount scheme. This dropped the price to just over £114 inc. VAT for the whole unit with the cashback taken off.

Great! £114 for a home server and 250GB drive. Just what I needed and it’s a proper server and not a closed source product.

For the price, you get:

- AMD Turion II Neo N40L / 1.5GHz (Dual Core Processor)
- 2GB DDR3 SDRAM (Possible to upgrade this to 2x 4GB modules)
- HDD 1x 250GB (With room for a further 3 drives)
- Integrated AMD Graphics
- 1x Gigabit Ethernet Connection
- 6x USB 2.0 Ports
- Expansion Slot for optical drive.
- UK, EU and US Power Cables.
- 1 Year Warranty

Read more

R.I.P Network Storage Drive

April 9, 2012 Personal, Ramberlings, Technology 4 comments
hpic_home_nhd

Over the bank holiday weekend, my Iomega Home Media Network Drive decided to die in a spectacular fashion.

A few weeks ago, I applied a security patch to the device which was meant to fix a few existing issues and increase performance of the device. It seems this might have ‘pushed’ it over the edge.

I originally bought the device back in early 2010 when we were looking for somewhere to keep all the family photos and iTunes library. Walking though PC World one day, I noticed the device on special offer at £99.99. It was a 1TB Network Attached Storage device, with print server and USB port for expansion. A great deal at the time, considering how new 1TB drives were.

It’s been with us through many upgrades on routers and through the large upgrade I did a few months ago, replacing everything with Cisco & Linksys hardware.

After applying the security patch to the device, I noticed that it was slower than normal connecting to the web interface from the internal network. I also noticed all my settings were gone (files were safe on the drive, untouched). This was explained in the upgrade document, and I just took this on the head and set up everything as it once was.

A few days after upgrading, I attempted to connect to the drive and found that it was ‘unavailable’. Assuming that maybe it was just an issue with my machine, I attempted to connect using another machine in the house. No luck. Both the web interface and all the file share connections were dead. Rebooting the device made it jump back into life, and I hurried to the web interface to find some explanation for the problem.

Read more

Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 Nettop

April 9, 2012 Gadgets, Reviews, Technology 35 comments
IdeaCentre Q180

So I couple of weeks ago I told you all that I’d ordered something new for the living room.

My new toy is in fact a Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 Nettop. The main reason for this purchase will be apparent to regular readers of my blog. For those who have just popped in to see what the fuss is about, have a look at my posts on TuxTV and XBMC.

I chose the 320GB version, with 2GB of RAM and no external optical drive. It’s worth pointing out though that the device can be purchased with either a DVD R/W optical drive, or a Blu-ray & DVD R/W combo drive. This clips onto the product nicely and fits in both the provided stand, and the provided TV mounting bracket. eBuyer currently have this version on sale for £168.99 inc. VAT + P&P. I did however manage to pick the product up for £160 + P&P after using a corporate discount scheme. I chose to spend the money I saved on getting next day delivery purely because I hate waiting for things to come – Especially geeky stuff. Read more

[TEASER] Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 Nettop

March 25, 2012 Gadgets, Reviews, Technology One comment

For a while now I’ve been looking for a decent client that I can plug into the back of TV’s around the house to stream media and LiveTV without forking out a tonne of cash.

I’ve looked at the Raspberry Pi, Apple TV 2 and 3, Boxee Box, Acer Revo and many many more small computing clients that claim to have this functionality.

I was seconds away from ordering a Boxee Box, until I found that the operating system was completely closed source and I’d be back to the restrictiveness of Apple TV.So I started looking at other x86 architecture clients. I only really wanted something that would run XBMC, nothing as heavy as Windows.

Read more

« Older Entries