I mentioned last month that Father Christmas had given me an eveTV Diversity with which I’d be able to watch digital television on my MacBook Pro. I complained about the lack of Dutch channels available via the device and blamed it on the commercialisation of TV via advertising.

Well, the same lack of channels seems to be a problem in the UK. So it seems there’s a problem with the device itself.

My eyeTV setup combines both aerials as one aerial thereby increasing the quality and strength of the signal received. After an exhaustive channel search the setup wizard managed to find a handful of BBC channels, which mimmicked the Dutch case. There was no ITV, no Channel4, nor any of the other digital channels available on FreeView.

So today as an experiment I hooked up the eyeTV to my rooftop aerial. This is £120 of the finest coaxial-based entertainment reception technology on the market.

I ran the eyeTV setup wizard and it found a truckload of channels, including all those from channel4, ITV, and UKTV. Basically the whole FreeView catalogue.

I then hooked up my eyeTV aerials and found out the channels found had disappeared.

So what does this mean ? It means although the eyeTV interface is slick and the tie-in to tvtv is great, the aerials supplied with the unit are rubbish.

Nothing to see, move along. That seems to be the message coming from Techmeme. Not because the site is broken but because everyone’s gone home. The site hasn’t “discovered” any updates in hours, let alone days.

This is a great sign that the blogosphere is a predominantly human device. Techmeme which scans the blogosphere has ground to a halt with regards to fresh content, meaning people are enjoying christmas, visiting family, and playing with their new toys.

I’ve decided to stop bleeding money through web hosting. I’m currently spending $10 here, £15 there… a month and all I’m doing is blogging. These days my basic web hosting needs can be pretty much fulfilled by services from Flickr, WordPress, and GMail. Having bought a MacBook Pro also means I have a Unix environment with me all the time and don’t need one supplied through a hosted provider.

I looked at several engines (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad) and you can tell by the URL which blogging engine won. WordPress seemed to provide the best bang for zero-bucks. WordPress has lots of usable features out of the box: domain hosting, quick authoring, pages, RSS everthing, and nice looking templates.

Now I need to move my old blogging content over from its customised Typo backend and ijonas.com (which is down for an unknown reason). I also need to redirect my ijonas.com email to GMail.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can get a hell of a lot for free and you needn’t look far either.

From time to time I go back to computer gaming. Sometimes there’s nothing better than spending a Sunday afternoon blowing stuff up. So Sunday afternoon I got myself a copy of Call of Juarez. Its a first-person shooter set in the Wild West. Its a good game but at first seemed very flaky and prone to crashing. So I sent an email to the game publisher’s support department asking if there were any patches available to fix the problems I was experiencing. These days I can afford to buy the odd computer game and have no problems doing so… gone are the days in past when you would make a back up of a mate’s copy.

So I was surprised to see the game publisher recommending that I remove their copy protection by applying a patch supplied by them.

Hello,

If you have the DVDROM version of COJ: Please download the Call of Juarez DVD patch (11.5MB) by clicking the link http://patch.focus-home.com/COJ1.0DVD_Patch.zip
You can now run Call of Juarez without the game DVD on your drive. This is an unofficial patch only for those which have a SecuROM problem (not all CoJ players).

Best Regards,
Technical Support
Focus Home Interactive

I think I’ve seen it all.