Conor's Bandon Blog

Local stuff and other stuff from a blow-in

December 3, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
11 Comments

The RTE Digital TV Switchover and a Xoro DTV-M5 Review

I recently wrote about our switch away from Sky and on to Freesat and Saorview using the Ariva 120 Combo box. After initial success I can no longer recommend that box to anyone. It crashes constantly, it loses channels and its recording features are worse than agricultural. Actually, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be faulty it’s that bad, so I’m returning for repair and will report back.

However, it it critically important that anyone who relies on their standard roof aerial to get RTE, TV3 etc knows what is happening on Dec 31st 2012. Whilst there have been Saorview flyers in the post and the Dept of Communications has put together this horror of a web-site, I have severe doubts that those whom it will affect most are even aware of the analogue TV shutdown. My biggest concern is that older people are the ones most likely to be still using non-digital TV and they simply won’t know that the switchover is happening.

I strongly recommend that if you know anyone who is not on Sky/UPC/etc and is still using a roof aerial to get their small set of channels, let them know they need to move to a digital receiver in the next 12 months. In fact they can move now, since the Saorview service is working really well.

Given the dire financial situation in the country, any extra cost on people is going to be a strain so I was thrilled when Barry from tvtrade.ie contacted me about the Xoro DTV-M5 Digital TV Receiver. He had read my review of the Ariva and wondered if I would review their inexpensive Xoro box for them. At €49 for a fully-functional Irish Terrestrial DTV box, of course I said yes. He shot me down a review unit for free a couple of days later and I’ve been beating it up for the past few weeks.

Short aside: I need to clarify the difference between “Saorview” and Irish DTT. You will see a lot of boxes on the market like the Xoro that are labelled Irish DTT or Irish Digital TV but which are not Saorview-certified. You shouldn’t worry about this in the slightest. Either the boxes obey the relevant standards that Saorview uses or they don’t. If they don’t, you simply return the box for a full refund. It’s a bit like saying your PC is certified to access the internet. That’s why we have Standards in the tech world. The key thing with Saorview is that the box can decode MPEG-4 video and can display the Programme Guide (EPG). The Xoro does both perfectly.

First the basics. The really nice thing about Saorview is that if you have an alright RTE aerial signal now, you literally unplug the aerial lead from the back of your TV, plug it into the Xoro box, plug a Scart or HDMI lead from the Xoro back to your TV and you should now be receiving RTE, TV3, TG4 and some other stations (not UK) in crystal clear digital. You also get a bunch of Irish radio stations in digital too. It really is that simple. In fact, even if you have a buzzy RTE signal, it’ll probably work perfectly and fuzz-free for Saorview.

Now on to the Xoro box itself. It’s tiny! I love getting neat units like this which can fit into the smallest nook or cranny. The front panel has just Power, Channnel+, Channel- and USB. I really wish all the box manufacturers would put the USB on the side or the back but most have it on the front. More on USB later.

This picture shows its size compared to an XBOX (excuse the messy cable setup, I moved it quickly between rooms last night so the kids could watch the Toy Show):

Usage is dead simple simple and the box goes from off to showing a TV programme in a couple of seconds. You can channel change up/down as you’d expect and Saorview has a 7-day Programme Guide, so you can see what’s coming-up on-screen. You can use Scart (for older TVs) or HDMI (for LCD/Plasma) to connect to the TV. It handles all the various picture resolutions up to 1080p but I’m pretty sure nothing on Saorview is at that high-res yet. There is teletext handling there too but as it’s not 1987, I didn’t bother check. The remote is fiddly compared to a Sky+ one but is fine and you get used to it in a few minutes.

Like all Irish DTT boxes, the TV channel list is as follows:

  • RTE One
  • RTE Two HD
  • TV3
  • TG4
  • 3e
  • RTE News Now
  • RTE Jr
  • RTE One +1
  • RTE Aertel

Radio is as follows:

  • RTE Radio 1
  • RTE 2fm
  • RTE Lyric fm
  • RTE Radio na Gaeltachta
  • RTE 2XM
  • RTE Choice
  • RTEjr
  • RTE Gold
  • RTE Pulse
  • RTE Radio 1 Extra

The bit that really impresses me with the Xoro is the USB/PVR. Basically you plug a portable USB harddisk into it and you now have the ability to pause/play/record/timer-record anything that is being broadcast. The overall setup is similar to Sky+ but obviously isn’t going to be as slick. Unlike the hell that is the Ariva 120, it all works really well including getting the programme name right (helllllo Ferguson, can you sort that out?).

I did have issues with one harddisk but it turns out that this is a very common problem. Harddisks of around 500GB capacity that are USB-powered struggle to get enough juice from many USB ports. In fact my troublesome one doesn’t work on any of my PC’s USB hubs either, I have to use a split-cable for it. The same split-cable trick worked on the Xoro. In general (not Xoro specific) you should either use a smaller less power-hungry HDD, which are hard to get, or use one that has it’s own power supply. Also these set-top-boxes prefer to format the harddrive themselves. It only takes a second.

If you have a bunch of media files (movies, tv, music), you can copy them onto the harddisk and the media player on the Xoro should be able to handle them no matter what the format. I tried an SD AVI, a 720p x264 MKV and a 1080p AVI and they all worked perfectly.

There’s not much more to say. It’s a very impressive piece of kit at a shockingly low price and no-one should have any hassle figuring out how to use it. If anyone asks me to recommend an Irish DTT box from now on, I’ll point them to the Xoro.

And please, let older relatives and neighbours know that the switchover is coming and they need to get a DTT box. In the UK they are doing information days and a travelling roadshow across the country to let people know. What are they doing here?

 

 

November 28, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
2 Comments

Sean O’Sullivan on The Late Late Show. Just Watch it.

This is probably the first and last time I’ll ever post a clip from the Late Late Show. Despite Tubbs excruciating interviewing style, Sean O’Sullivan blew my socks off. From a family of 9 with a dead-beat Dad to huge success. He runs his current business, Avego, from Kinsale. We need more people like him talking about Engineering and Creativity together. If you want your children to create the future, nudge them in that direction.

13 minutes really just left me wanting more. Given that the Late Late cannot compete for “celebrity” guests with the UK chatshows, how about more time on fewer meatier guests like this from now on?

November 17, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
11 Comments

Bandon Flood (FEWS) Open Data Now Available

I was thrilled to get such positive feedback about the @BandonFEWS Twitter account yesterday. Thanks again to Gordon for doing all the actual work whilst I basked in the glory :-) It was even better considering how sick I am with a nasty tummy bug. The bug means I can do little useful work for the past few days. But I can play with code.

One fantastic outcome from yesterday’s blogpost was John Handelaar and others pointing out that I’d given up too easily on trying to extract the river level data from the Bandon FEWS web-site. And it turns out they were right. A small amount of messing around and I was able to extract out the water level and the date/time.

I’ve been meaning to do more with Google Fusion Tables for ages and this seemed like a good opportunity. It’s like a Google Docs online spreadsheet but with knobs on. So  you can populate, query, visualise etc using an API. I decided to use that to make the FEWS data available to everyone. Of course then I ran into the horror that is OAuth2. But a fair bit of messing and stomach cramps later, and I got that working too.

So we now have the hourly Bandon river level data available to use for whatever purpose your fiendish minds can come up with. I’m thinking trends, analytics, charts, maps, mashups with weather data, other alerting methods (email, Twitter DMs, iPhone Alerts), a Facebook Fan Page, widgets for other Bandon-related sites. What other ideas do you all have?

If you want to embed that live graph on your own site or blog, just paste this code in:

<iframe width="500px" height="300px" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?gco_allowHtml=true&gco_displayAnnotations=true&gco_wmode=opaque&gco_chartArea=%7B%22top%22%3A%2230%22%7D&containerId=gviz_canvas&rmax=250&q=select+col1%2C+col0+from+2191951+&qrs=where+col1+%3E%3D+&qre=+and+col1+%3C%3D+&qe=+order+by+col1+asc&viz=GVIZ&t=TIMELINE&width=500&height=300"></iframe>

You can export the data to CSV and play with it offline in Excel etc or you can go fancy and query it live over the API.

e.g. this API call grabs all of the data in one go (you can test with your browser): https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=SELECT+ROWID,+riverlevel,+datetime+FROM+2191951

But of course you will be able to do far more complex queries than that, once we have a decent body of data. See the Google Fusion Tables Guide here.

Note that I was forced to use that awkward date format to make the timeline feature in Fusion Tables work correctly.

I don’t know if anyone wants the data or will find a use for it but this first step was critical to enabling them to do so. Hopefully this will be a trigger for others to liberate locked-in non-private data on other public sector sites.

Or it could be an opportunity for County Councils to take this tough time we are all living in, where Capex projects are few and far between, and start a Data Liberation Project in every Council department in the country. Nothing I did over the past 24hrs cost a single solitary cent apart from people’s time. And based on recent conversations with old college friends, time is one thing a lot of Council Engineers have on their hands. If any Council people are interested in reading more they should have a look at the links in this post I did at the start of the year.

Comments? Thoughts? Improvements?

 

November 16, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
5 Comments

Announcing Bandon Flood Early Warning System on Twitter

I’m a big fan of the Bandon FEWS system which sends an SMS when the river at the bridge hits a certain level. It must be a life-saver for many businesses and people in the town.

I have had a few thoughts on other things we could do with that live river-level data for the community. Web-apps, Twitter integration, Analytics, Trends etc etc.

However, despite several communications, I have been unable to get any response from Cork County Council about getting access to the live data. All the OpenData initiatives around the world (including Ireland) are obviously passing them by.

Even something as simple as a Twitter Account could be useful and interesting. So I created one called @BandonFEWS. Of course then I had to get at the data despite the CoCo’s silence. I dug around the Bandon Flood Warning site but it is built in such a way that the data is not machine visible or scrapable.

I discussed this problem with fellow tech-person Gordon Murray of Murrion Software just up the road in Carrigadrohid and of course he had a solution!

Gordon’s company has a very smart SMS service which can both send SMSes and receive them in order to act upon them. By signing up his service’s “phone” number to the FEWS SMS alerts, he can then do something with them. In this case, he takes the SMS, interprets it and then posts it automatically to the @BandonFEWS Twitter account.

Nice one Gordon! If you have any need of inbound or outbound SMS services, give him a shout.

Now if only Cork CoCo would give us access to all of the live data, we could do some really interesting things for the community for free. Anyone got any influence in there to make this happen?

September 11, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
8 Comments

Getting Free Digital TV in West Cork on Rabbit Ears

Over on my tech blog recently, I mentioned dumping Sky TV and getting an Ariva 120 box. This is a combination satellite and digital terrestrial receiver. It costs an amazing €99 and you never have to pay another thing. You disconnect your Sky box, plug the satellite lead and aerial lead into the Ariva and you’re done.

Until yesterday I had only used the satellite bit which gives you BBC etc. It works very well except for the lack of a programme guide. I recorded Doctor Who onto a portable hard-disk using it yesterday! But I really wanted to try out the terrestrial bit. The other night we watched Masterchef Ireland using the RTE Player on a 37″ TV in a browser, full-screen. Not recommended if you value your eyesight or sanity. Sidenote: Dylan surprisingly non-infuriating but I had a big belly laugh when I heard a guy who serves steaks on paving slabs calling someone’s food “contrived”.

Our old roof aerial hasn’t been working right for years and I wasn’t sure where the problem was. So yesterday I cut the cable in the attic near the ingress hole and wired it straight into a old TV I hoisted into the attic. It confirmed that the aerial itself was banjaxed but there was no way I was doing a Rod Hull on it. I grabbed a pair of rabbit ears and then tried them to discover that I could get traditional analogue RTE1 and RTE2 reasonably ok with a bit of noise but not TG4 or TV3.

I wondered if that signal was enough to get the new Saorview Digital Terrestrial working on the Ariva box so I brought the box up into the attic and amazingly it worked instantly! Perfect digital picture on RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 with full on-screen programme guide too. I had some interactions with people on Twitter last night who confirmed that even if your old analogue signal is poor, you may still be able to get Saorview.

Unfortunately the rabbit ears don’t have enough welly to feed a splitter box so today I’m popping into Dwyers Electrical to get this aerial and I’ll fit it in the attic. This type of aerial may be necessary for a lot of people in West Cork due to all the hills. But check using your old aerial first. Hopefully this will work with the splitter so we can have old analogue TV in most rooms and then Saorview in the room with the Ariva box. If they drop in price even more, we may buy another one.

So if you are tired of buzzy noisy old-school analogue TV in West Cork or if you are tired of paying the Rupert tax and can live without Sky Sports, you can save yourself a fortune by going down this route.

I have been very bitchy about Saorview since it was announced. It has taken Ireland 13 years to catch-up with the UK’s OnDigital/Freeview. I worked in a company that talked to RTE about building a Digital TV box in 1998! Celtic Tiger my arse, more like Celtic fat tabby sitting in front of the fire for a decade, scratching its hole. But now that it is here, I have to say it’s very well executed. And €99 for that box is a complete steal.

 

August 7, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
0 comments

Cork CoCo to Support Hot-Desking Setups in County Towns

I don’t know how I missed this when it was announced recently. A superb initiative from Cork County Council. They have put aside €300,000 to help with provision of enterprise centres / hot desk facilities in County Towns. This will include a contribution of up to €35,000 for tech and hot desk provision.

The downside is that is doesn’t cover building rental but surely some joined-up thinker in the Council is already working on a deal with NAMA to get properties for rental at 10c on the Euro or less? What is the point of having unused empty crumbling buildings when they could be generating rental income and be maintained?

There is nothing even approaching hot-desking in Bandon. As I’ve written before, the lack of Fibre is a millstone around the neck of the town but at least 12 Mbs ADSL should be available to anyone near the exchange.

Based on my last post there is at least one NAMAfied office building in Bandon. Anyone interested in trying to do something with it? Maybe even some sort of Co-Working space?

 

 

August 2, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
2 Comments

See where the NAMA Properties are on Google Maps

Well done to Gavin Sheridan and the crew at The Story. They took NAMA’s pathetic PDF release of the properties it owns, extracted the data into the fantastic Google Fusion Tables and then mapped the results into Google Maps.

Go on, you know you won’t be able to help yourself. I immediately zoomed into Bandon to see what was there. Surprisingly few properties actually.

Head on over to the site and click on any dot of interest to see what property it is. Some of the locations will be off as they rely on Google accurately converting text addresses to lat/long. Of course if we had a Post Code system in Ireland, we wouldn’t have that problem. What’s the current prediction for that? 2015?

 

July 24, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
2 Comments

How Your Kids Can Re-Build The Country – Cork Coder Dojo

Ireland has more than enough Corporate Lawyers, Audit Accountants, Bankers and Civil Servants. What it needs are creative people building products, services and businesses. That doesn’t necessarily mean every kid in Ireland should be doing Science or Engineering but lord, would more of you please do those subjects.

The internet is one place where we see a wonderful synthesis of creativity in design and engineering. I believe you can teach anyone the basics of web development to a level where they can contribute in some way to web applications and mobile applications. Some of the greatest web-apps were built by self-taught people, not Computer Science graduates.

The key, again, is the word “creativity”. We need to take back ownership of that word from those we would traditionally call “the creatives”; artists, sculptors, authors and actors. Just look at something like Facebook and think about all of the people involved in the creation of that. Creative coders, user interface designers, product managers and Ops people all working together to build an amazing system which impacts 700 million people in a positive way.

Yesterday I attended an event which may be one of the most important initiatives ever in changing the mind-set of Irish parents. Cork Coder Dojo was put together by James Whelton and Bill Liao. You probably know that Bill is a serial entrepreneur but you may not know James. He just finished his Leaving Cert.

The Coder Dojo is a weekly meetup where young people can learn the basics of web development and build sites/apps with the help of the volunteers there. Yesterday was the first one and it felt to me like I was taking part in the beginning of something huge. The room in the NSC was jammed with kids of all ages and their parents. James gave a basic intro to some simple HTML and then he and others went around to help.

I was there with our 12 y/o who has just finished primary school. He is a geek but not a coder. We have built Google AppInventor mobile apps but he has never seen HTML. Within 20 minutes, he “got it”. We had fun embedding images and videos and changing colours. We also did some basic styling with CSS. The next step is to look at JavaScript and JQuery to make a site that does something.

The reason I feel James and Bill are on to something is that I could see many of the parents were not remotely technical. This is not geek parents turning their kids into programmers (well, except for me maybe :-) ), this is smart parents understanding that their kids can re-build this country with their creativity and the right skill-sets. I was pleased to see that Simon Coveney popped in too.

Whilst I know that many secondary schools teach some basic web skills to kids, I think it has to start earlier and be driven by people who build Apps themselves. I see no reason why my 9 y/o or even 7 y/o could not learn simple development. They may never use it, but they will always have an appreciation for it. Maybe in some ways not that different to sending your kids to piano lessons.

The intention is that The Coder Dojo will be on every Saturday. I strongly recommend that you bring your children to at least one. Don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop, the guys have spares (and I can bring a spare too). They will also be rolling it out in other parts of the country.

Head on over to the site to find out the details and register your child. You can also follow them on Twitter. I’ll hopefully see you at the next one.

 

July 11, 2011
by Conor O'Neill
0 comments

More FSAI Nonsense – Now They are Trying to Ban Raw Milk

After the pork recall debacle, you’d thing the FSAI would get a bit of cop-on but obviously they need to keep inventing make-work to keep themselves in jobs. Their latest wheeze is to try and ban Raw Milk. Not bleach-cleaned chicken nuggets or mechanically recovered meat burgers or sausages with 53% “meat”. No, they want to ban a product that some people actively seek out and choose to drink.

I’m really really getting sick and tired of this bullshit. It’s a miracle that you can still buy unpasteurised cheese in this country with these drones in charge. If I want to drink raw milk I damn well will and I won’t have some paper-shuffler using “safety” as a code-word for control, telling me otherwise.

The last time I had raw milk I was about 6 years old. It was straight from the cow in my Grand-aunt’s house. I didn’t really like it. But I’m bloody going out this week to see if I can buy some more.

Slow Food Ireland has a petition to try and stop these muppets having their way. I strongly recommend that you sign it before all of your rights to buy and eat what you like are taken away from you.

We really seem to be heading towards a world of zero responsibility and zero consequences with faceless bureaucrats deciding everything. The ongoing collapse of the European project shows exactly where that leads.