Tales From The Geek Side

On Sunday I finally climbed back up into my attic to adjust my antena. I live in Rochester but I used to want to see WB49 out of Buffalo. I’m a fan of Smallville and there was no over the air broadcast of Smallville in Rochester. Now there is no more UPN and no more WB. Channel 49 out of Buffalo is My Network TV. Channel 40 out of Rochester is also My Network TV. I have no longer have any reason to attempt to get signals from Buffalo. I can’t watch Smallville anymore but I’d rather wait for DVD anyhow.

Quite some time ago I bought an HD tuner card that ignores the “don’t record” flag broadcasts. I installed it but really never worked to get it working correctly. I was more interested in getting my PVR 150 card working with MythTV than getting the HD3000 card working. Since, at that time, the drivers somewhat conflicted with each other I didn’t try to get the HD card working. However, when the HD was installed and I was playing with it I wasn’t able to get a lock on Rochester HD stations but I could on Buffalo HD stations! This was because I was getting a ghosted signal from Rochester (multi-path interference). By orienting the antena towards Rochester I shouldn’t have that problem anymore.

So on Sunday I turned the antenna towards the Rochester towers. I climbed up into the hot attic which is difficult to manuever in because of blown-in insulation. I loosened the antena bolts and spun it to the east. My wife reported a good signal on the Rochester stations but poor results from Buffalo stations, which was what I was expecting. Since I was up there I decided to try a few other positions. All of those resulted in poor reception for our target stations, FOX 31 and WXXI 21. WXXI in particular used to give us a ghosted signal. So, 21 was my point of reference for adjusting the antenna. If we could get a good picture on 21 I knew that we’d be set.

I rotated the antena BACK to the east facing position. Now my wife reported that 21 wasn’t coming in at all! I started getting frustrated and my wife was level headed enough to call my parents and see what 21 looked like from their house. They couldn’t get 21 in either so obviously 21 was having broadcast issues. Grrrrrr…such bad timing.

I tightened up the antena and came down. Later in the day 21 was crystal clear. Now my next project is to get the HD tuner card working with MythTV. I’ll be taking notes and posting it here.

I could not find an option in the Thunderbird config to choose a browser to handle URLs in Thunderbird and changing the system browser through gnome didn’t work. I googled for the answer and found it here. You don’t have to edit the prefs.js file directly though. If you go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced, under the General tab you’ll find a button labeled “Config Editor.” Open up the config editor and filter for network.protocol-handler.app. There are two properties, one is for http and one is for https. Simply set both of them to /usr/bin/firefox and all is well with the world.

I’ve posted an updated Doxygen filter for TCL code. I fixed a number of bugs related to OO extensions for TCL. Upon a users request I’ve also included a Doxyfile (doxygen config file) that works with the filter. From this point on I’m going to call the program tcl dox.