On doing a bit of exercise
I have a new but temporary hobby.
I mentioned how I had resurrected my old satellite receiver and I find it is brilliant for cocooning myself from the constant barrage of news from Ukraine [when did it cease to be The Ukraine?].
I know Microdave suggested just programming in the channels I needed but that’s cheating. My quest is to tame the fucking thing to obey my orders.
I went back to it yesterday. I did a scan of the various satellites Up There and came up with 1472 channels. Surely there must be one in there that’s interesting. When the scan was finished I went into the channel listing. There were all the radio channels I had found but where were the rest? I was stuck in Radio. I couldn’t get any TV channels. There’s a button for “TV/Radio” which I pressed but that did nothing apart from listing my radio stations again.
I tried various things. I tried rebooting the box which is somewhat time consuming. It runs on Linux but for some strange reason it takes about twenty minutes to boot up. That did nothing anyway. Fuck!
I decided on a Factory Reset. That was a mistake as I then had to tell it all about my dish and it’s little aerial things. That took a bit of research. Anyways, I got the box going, told it which satellites I wanted and sent it off searching again. 1472 channels. And it still only displayed fucking Radio. Bollocks!
The purpose of all this messing is really to exercise my grey cells. It makes me think. It makes me try to solve problems. But here was a problem that was apparently unsolvable. I was on the verge of giving up. I searched the Interweb but no one elsee seemed to have this problem. I was getting a little annoyed which somewhat defeated the point of having fun. I was getting tense, and the tension made me press the “TV/Radio” button and hold it down.
Wow! There were my television channels! So the buttons on my remote control do different things depending on how long you press them? This opens up whole new avenues to explore.
As part of my quest I had tried various means of accessing the guts of the box. I found a way this morning. There is the whole Linux setup in all its glory and I can browse it on my laptop.
Now I can really fuck up the box!
You got into the linux? Well done !
I going to be like Russia entering Ukraine. 😈
“I have a new but temporary hobby.”
I made the same statement regarding beer, whiskey, and pipe tobacco about 50 years ago.
I say “temporary” because sooner rather than later I’ll either get bored with it or will break it.
“The Ukraine” referred to the province of the Soviet Union. When it became an independent nation, the name changed to simply Ukraine.
Thank you, Joan. That was a serious question and it’s unusual to get a clear and concise answer!
I had wondered about this myself, thanks Joan. When all this first hit the news, I thought someone just screwed up, but then I kept hearing it over and over.
I misread “Radio. Bollocks” as “Radio Bollocks” and wondered if this were an extension of the excellent podcast “Talking Bollox.”