Monday, 13 February 2012

Chilly Mondays, more books and the new TV Box

It was pretty Snowy last week.
We thought it was well and Truly over, only to wake up to a new sprinkling on Sunday.
The DS was narked because he has a Driving test this week.
OH was narked because he wanted to Motorbike into work instead of driving up there, it is more expensive for petrol for the car.
I was narked because I usually drive to the big supermarket on Sunday but I wont drive in snow.

So anyway, OH drove me to Asda and it turned out that our road was snowy but almost all the main roads were clear.
We live in a cul-de-sac which means that there is no through road to go anywhere , consequently the council never grit our road or the one leading to it as they aren't heavily trafficked.   I believe this is a mistake as we and many other residents of the town,there are numerous Cul-de-sacs due to the estate layout, must still get our vehicles TO the main roads in order to benefit from the gritting.
OH needed about 100 yards of clear road to get his Motorbike out last week and only managed it on Friday when the thaw began.
Today is warmer and we are set to have mild weather this week so hopefully DS will get his lessons and test after all.
OH buzzed off happily on the bike and said he might even get a cycle in .

R.I.P. (rest in pieces)BT Vision box

On Friday, our new free-view box was delivered by the courier. This is a non subscription box that I bought from Amazon.
It does everything that the BT vision box did , except,because it doesn't access the internet, it cant get BBC Iplayer. We can always hook up a laptop if we want to watch Iplayer though.
DS connected it up when he finished his driving lesson.
It took about 10 minutes.
We had to move the TV table forwards,de- cable the BT box from ethernet, TV out,TV in and scart.
Then we put it on the floor, put the new box in its place and reinserted TV out, TV in, scart and plugged it in to the power.
THE TV in comes from the Aerial, TV out goes through the DVD recorder, The scart goes to the Big Monitor on the wall as far as I remember.
Anyway,we turned it on and it just worked.
No faffing about.
We scanned for channels and it has the same channels as BT when you watch freeview.
The remote works and now we can use the volume control (BT's volume control was useless),instead of having to get up and go to the HIFI and turn it down.
Our HIFI is the volume on our TV because the screen is a Monitor not a Television.

The old BT box is on a table in my bedroom. I have opened the case and there is an IDE hard drive inside.
That will come out ,I will most likely salvage all the motherboard components using the Dremel and the rest of the box can be scrapped.

Tomorrow we switch over to sky for our internet and will plug in the new modem we got on Thursday and set that up.
We have a phone ready for getting our calls and can discard the rubbish that BT  were allowing us to pay £36.25 a month to use despite the fact that both home hub and phone were faulty units.
Ironically we have had a few calls on the BT phone and haven't been able to answer any as it cuts out the minute you remove it from the hub. I do hope they were from BT with offers to keep our custom.

Bookish Monday

This weeks book is Thief of time
By Terry Pratchet

I had a bit of a struggle getting into the first chapter as it seemed quite disjointed but once past that, it falls together quite well.
Each scenario fits a time-line and you must see them in entirety before you can really get into the story.
One of my favourite Pratchet Characters is DEATH.
He turns up in every book I have read so far and leads away the dearly departed whether they like it or not.
In this book ,he is a little more active and I just love that.
He even has a tiny little helper of sorts.

Anyway I mustn't spoil the story


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