My PVR now does HDTV. Sort of. I bought the pre-ridiculous broadcast flag law HDTV receiver card from pcHDTV, before they become a gray-market commodity on eBay. It arrived last Friday in a box containing a brochure about the EFF, which I found a nice touch. Note to self: renew membership for this year.
Last night was the first chance I had to try it out. I downloaded kernel 2.6.12-rc2, compiled it, repeated the process until I figured out which modules I was supposed to use, then dmesg reported success. I proceeded to try to tune the six or seven channels I can receive in my area. I don’t have a real antenna so I used an old pair of rabbit ears that I had. Got locks on 3 or 4 channels, which is good. The signal was too noisy on all of them to actually capture anything, which is bad. I also tried tuning QAM over my (analog) cable with no luck. So I guess I’ll be buying an antenna soon. Then all I need to get is an HD television, a minor detail.
Having finished the issue, I do have to say that MAKE has too many articles of the following form, which is to say more than one: I found myself wondering how to do [some incredibly mundane task] on my [Powerbook|G5|ipod], then I located [overpriced commercial package] and it solved all my problems! What that has to do with making things, I don’t know.