Watching Sky TV in my bedroom without an aerial

Posted on September 26, 2010 by thewibbler

My next problem was to finally put a Tv in our bedroom. Again, sounds straightforward but again a fly in the ointment – no aerial in the bedroom.

I thought about getting an aerial fitted or at least a feed from the satellite dish, but decided to try a wireless transmitter instead. I chose Emprex awv-698b (partly because it was quite cheap and partly because it seemed to have good reviews on Amazon). I connected the transmitter end to the Sky box and the receiver end to the TV in the bedroom. I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality – I was a little concerned as the bedroom is at the far end of the house to the Sky box. The picture is really good and we can even change channels from the bedroom – the device has a transmitter back the other way to transmit the remote control infra red back to the Sky box. Very pleased with the results.

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Upgrading iPhone 3G to IOS 4.1 with ubuntu and vmware

Posted on September 25, 2010 by thewibbler

Ok, so I’ve got an iPhone 3G at 3.1.2 and want to upgrade it to IOS 4.1 – so what’s so hard about that? Well, the only fly in the ointment is that I run an ubuntu desktop (10.04) with Windows 7 within a vmware virtual machine. And I’m scared that I’m going to brick my iPhone.

After much reading around and even more reading around I finally plucked up the courage to do it. The main help with this was Ivan Kuznetsov who had written about this with ubuntu 9.04.

I followed Ivan’s instructions almost to the letter, modified slightly as they didn’t quite work for me. The steps that worked for me were:

  1. Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb
    • sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb
  2. Add usb modules not to be loaded into that file
    • blacklist snd_usb_audio
    • blacklist usbhid
  3. Unload blacklisted modules manually, in case if they have been loaded already
    • sudo /sbin/modprobe -r snd_usb_audio
    • sudo /sbin/modprobe -r usbhid
    • (I ignored the .conf warnings that were displayed)
  4. Reload kernel event manager for the changes to take effect
    • sudo reload udev
  5. Restart VMware and make sure you also restart Windows in VMware

I thought this would work but unfortunately I still had problems in upgrading to 4.1. The first step of upgrading is for iTunes to take a backup of your iPhone. This took forever – well not quite forever but a long time – and then it failed and asked me if I wanted to proceed without a backup. I cancelled the upgrade at this point.

Instead, I performed a manual backup (right-clicked on my iPhone in iTunes and selected “backup”. I then selected “restore my iPhone” in iTunes and this installed 4.1 successfully. All I had to do then was to resync my iPhone and it was done. I now have my iPhone 3G at IOS 4.1.

Don’t forget to then remove the blacklist file and reload the kernel event manager.

  • sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb
  • sudo reload udev
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