Winter Draws On

[thermalsatsuma]

Down south for the weekend to go out for a meal with my bro to celebrate his birthday, and a good excuse for an extended run in the Prius. The roads were relatively clear (for a change) and I can report that the car is quite happy to cruise comfortably at, errm, the legal limit (or thereabouts) and still get 55mpg without trying.

I had a bit of shock on the way back this afternoon when an ominous yellow warning triangle flashed up on the multi function display. It took me a while to twig that the warning was telling me that the temperature had dropped to 3 degrees centigrade and that the heavy rain was rapidly turning into sleet. Lovely.

It was most strange waking up this morning sans kitten on the bed gnawing at my face. Still, at least she was pleased to see me when I got home. After a coffee, a trip out to fetch Jamie's new bike from Halfords and a snooze, I ventured out to give the dog a chance to stretch his legs.

Blimey, it was chilly - 1.8 degrees according to the weather station - with freezing rain and a stiff breeze whipping it into my face. Is it really only half way through November?

In other news, I've just updated to the latest version of Mystuff for the Topfield after recommending it to thebustocrookes and it's looking good so far. I need to sit down and go through the configuration options and tweak the channel lists to get rid of the ones that we never watch. I need to investigate the video processing options on my macbook so I can take recorded programmes off the toppy and convert them to xvid files for archiving.

Comments

[smwright.livejournal.com]

Busy weekend!

(I still envy you the Prius. I'm at almost $60US to fill up my car.)

[skyekat.livejournal.com]

Oy! Sleet already. I don't envy that. I was bemused by just the few flakes of snow I saw this morning.

I just bought a Prius myself, and am so overwhelmed by the amount of info on the screen! I've never even had power door locks before, nevermind all this other neat stuff. It's so freaking cool though.

[thebustocrookes.livejournal.com]

Series links? Looks rather interesting!

Are you able to transfer programmes from the Topfield box to PC and vice versa ok?

[thermalsatsuma.livejournal.com]

Mystuff has the option of setting up a search to record something based on the programme name or something else in the epg text. When you press the record button you can set it to record once or by whatever criteria you choose.

As for transferring, yes - it works, although I've not tried transferring something back. I just copied a .rec programme file across to my macbook and played it using the vlc video player without needing any other conversion.

[thebustocrookes.livejournal.com]

Aha, so if we use a keyword it'd record anything with that keyword in the programme guide? Smart feature!

Did you just use a memory stick to transfer, or were wires involved?

[thermalsatsuma.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's pretty much it - you need to read the manual to see all of the options, like stopping it from searching on the +1 channels and recording the same thing twice.

For the transfers you need a usb cable with the square end (like the ones you use with printers). I've got a 1m long cable so it will reach from the back of the Toppy to my laptop without any contortions. You then run a program on your pc (download the windows utilities from http://www.toppy.org.uk/downloads/windows.php) and plug the cable in, and you can transfer programmes off your Toppy and put TAPs on.