This is my first iPhone post using a free wordpress app and written while traveling to work on the pt bus. My bike being in the shop for the last week, I have had some good time to play with the new toy, I do think of it more than that though as it has been used a bit for productive things, mostly, I am trying but there so many distractions like these pesky games. Some of the tools like this wp app are great, music and podcasts are fine, converting vids was not made easy and come to think of it, the whole ‘how to use the keyboard thing’ was left up to us to discover the tricks. I think my thumb is a bit big for it and typing is a one fingured affair, but you get that. Well here we go, 3G posting in transit…

Firefox is the browser of choice by the people in-the-know, but it’s best feature is that it allows a multitude of add-ons or plug-ins that can help your regular experience of the net and how useful the browser itself can be made.

Of course customisations are just that, a personal selection of changes that you, the individual might want to make so this list is by no means definitive of what you must have, but commonly, for web surfers, I expect these will be of benefit to you.

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Overall then I hope you find this information helpful. I hope to make some updates and additions in the near future. This is a big project and very detailed so be sure to do some searches and help and participate on many of the forum discussions about it, many people are involved.

So if you have some basic computer literate and technical ability this should not be a huge task, but give it some time to get through and be patient, I certainly feel that it’s worthwhile and because of this I have been able to enjoy the TV that I like, when I like.

One part of the installation was also a module called mythweb and this results in delivering your back-end services and all the TV guide in a web accessible format. I use this all the time either from my notebook I have set on the coffee table I can view the  guide for what is showing and easily select programs and assign more recordings.

Also from here I find that the configuration part of this provides a much easier channel editor list. You can more easily select the channels you want disabled and alter their titles easily but beware, this can lead to tricky config items that you should not touch.

You can also see the recorded programs in here and it shows some wonderful information. Even a regular 1 hour show takes around 3 Gig of drive space, but here it shows that there is an auto-expiry on most of these recordings meaning that when the drive gets full, new programs will push off the oldest programs as required.

Also, I have allowed this to be available externally which allows me to make changes to my schedule from work or even from my web-enabled mobile phone.

When selecting shows for recording you have access to many options. Some of those I like to use is to extend recordings automatically to start 2 mins early and finish about 7 mins late ensuring that the station doesn’t make my shows get cut-off. This is normally great but it also means I need two capture cards as they often overlap. You can set priorities on shows so regular items like reruns of Seinfeld I may put on a low priority that get bumped if there is a conflict.

When you have two cards (and if your not recording anything) you can even do PIP (or picture-in-picture) where one channel is shown full screen and a secondary one is shown in a smaller window.

To get to this and many other options, while viewing a channel hit the ‘m’ key for a menu. In here you can change the picture mode and adjust audio syncing if your having any issues with that. You can even view the TV guide while watching TV, it’s all very easy to access and try.

NEXT: References for more help