Goodbye To All That

The end of today marks the 25th anniversary of the ITV 1993 franchise round as required by the Broadcasting Act 1990.   As a result of the decisions of the Indepdent Television Commission (the regulator of ITV at the time), at the beginning of New Year’s Day 1993  three ITV contractors, the breakfast television franchise and the teletext franchise were replaced with new companies.

Continue reading

Posted in TV | Tagged

Chipsteaks!

I discovered this advert on YouTube recently – it’s one of a series of local adverts produced in-house by Channel Television, the ITV company for the Channel Islands, for Benest’s of Millbrook (prounounced Ben-ays) and Fineprice (St Clements Coast Road) a chain of two family-owned supermarkets based in Jersey back in the 1970s and 1980s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS7H_DBbXfg

Continue reading

Happy Christmas

So once again it’s time to wish all three readers of this blog* a very happy Christmas and New Year and to remind myself that it’s time to program my new PVR build with lots timers to record Christmas telly, and a reminder to extend the validity date on my OpenPGP key before the end of the year.

* Readership figure may be grossly exaggerated

Project PVR (Part 3)

So, just the remote control to do now.   A few weeks ago, I bought an FLIRC USB dongle and a One For All remote control, which can work as a Microsoft Media Center (sic) remote if you use the code 1272 on it.  Configuring the FLIRC device was pretty much as simple as plugging the dongle into a USB port and running the supplied software on it (I used the Windows version, but there is also a Linux version too). Continue reading