Channel surfing last night I caught a glimpse of something really bizarre. Our local public access channel (Access 31) was airing a movie called.... wait for it... Candy von Dewd and the girls from Latextopia. It can only be described as Dr Who meets psychotropic drugs meets softcore porn meets latex outfits. Good for a laugh if you want to check it out.

A prime candidate for procrastination, and wanting to play with MythTV - I installed Ubuntu Linux (clicky). Reports from people I know suggest it's a nice debian-based distribution that's a little more bleeding edge than Debian/Unstable (my previous linux desktop).

For the most part, installation went smoothly and within twenty minutes I had a working Gnome2 desktop running X.org. Despite some problems with sound and sudo, which are mostly fixed now... it all seems well. I will possibly need to recompile the kernel to include support for my shiny new DVB card (see previous blog entry), but that was to be expected.

Upon returning to my Windows installation after deciding to stop procrastinating.... my storage partition was GONE! No, wait... Unaccessible. It turns out that somehow the Ubuntu installer has foobarred the partition table so Windows thinks that the NTFS Storage partition belongs to another Operating System. Because other operating systems use NTFS you know...

Whilst I've fixed it for the time being, I'm not sure whether the installer foobarred part of the partition table (unlikely) or just caused a condition whereby Windows doesn't like me. I'm curious also to know who else has had this problem...

So I bought a Digital Broadcast Card today... I can now watch Digital, High Definition broadcasts on my computer. Much assignment procrastination is to come!

I must say I'm impressed with the reception I'm getting without an aerial, getting signals ranging between 60% and 97%. Channels 9 and 10 are a bit of hassle though, but I expect this won't be a problem once the card gets plugged into a real aerial.

For $160 the card is well worth the money, but I think I've chosen a bad time (financially) to get it. We shall see.

The plan is to set up a fileserver running a MythTV backend (clicky) so that I can watch HDTV and DivX/etc from any TV in the house that's hooked up to a computer (part of the plan). My mate Brendan showed me the setup he has at his Mother's house, and I must say I'm duly impressed.

The next thing to do is go and get MythTV running to show my Mother, so she can foot part of the bill...

I guess that assignment will have to wait...