A mini-project that wasn’t (yet)

I’ve always had projects, going back decades, really. Some are big, most aren’t, some take a long time to finish, some don’t. But it’s kind of rare for one to go away because it became unnecessary. That’s what just happened.

Yesterday, I ended a post with what I thought was my final foreshadowing of a topic I’d be explaining in greater detail "soon". In the closing paragraph to that post, I said:

“Right now, though, I need to haul myself out to the lounge to take on another part of a mini-project, and that, too, relates to recent blog posts. It’s the circle of blogging, or something.”

That project was about what I call the "Android Box”, which I said in my post about the storm yesterday, “receives and decodes the digital UHF TV signals” from the aerial. I said in that post, and also in my post last Thursday about the changes to our television channels, that the Android Box was its own topic.

Ever since the storm a few weeks ago, my TV reception hasn’t been good, although it was better after I replaced the aerial and internal splitter. I said yesterday that “it seems obvious to me, I need a signal amplifier”, but that was merely one possibility at the time. There was a also a possibility that the there was something wrong with the transmission itself, something I thought might be improved by the impending channel changes. But another possibility was that the Android Box itself had a fault.

The problem was, how could I tell what the problem was? There was one channel, Choice TV, that I couldn’t get at all: There was either nothing at all, or it was very badly pixelated, like when a storm interrupts the satellite signal for NZ's broadcast pay TV service, Sky TV. Pixelation was also an intermittent problem on TV One. This last one was something I was pretty sure an amplifier would fix.

To test the faulty Android Box theory, I hooked the aerial directly to my TV, but it couldn’t tune in more than a handful of the channels. That suggested an amplifier was needed. I next hooked the aerial up to our original Freeview receiver/DVR, but that was still tuned for use at the old house (different transmitters). I was able to get it to check for channels using buttons on the machine, but that was it: I didn’t have the remote and couldn’t do anything else, including trying to change a channel. I still have no idea where the remote is.

So: At the end of my initial tests, I still couldn’t rule anything in or out, but I decided to put off buying a new signal amplifier until after the channel realignment. That change began Monday night and finished sometime in the early hours of the morning. The storms yesterday delayed my tests with the new alignment (because I’d disconnected the aerial), and doing that after the weather cleared is what I hauled myself into the lounge to do.

After having the Android Box scan for TV and radio stations available, I went through the channels one at a time. While the EPG (“Electronic Programming Guide” was wrong a lot, all the channels worked—and I mean all of them. Choice TV’s successor channel, eden, was fine, but so was the channel at Choice’s old channel position. So, too, were all the god channels and Chinese channels I couldn’t get (though I didn’t care about any of them), and also returning were the formerly missing radio channels, Parliament TV, and, possibly importantly, the channel that carries Juice TV, NZ’s only remaining free-to-air video music channel. All were fine, all were present. This suggests that the transmission itself was the problem.

Which is not to say that everything is now perfect: TV One still sometimes pixelates, so it looks like I do still need a signal amplifier. There’s another problem with the Android Box: I can’t watch YouTube videos on it anymore, not since the App signed me out and I can’t sign back in. The Box’s remote has no keyboard, as most don’t, and if I encounter a field where I have to enter something (like a username and password), clicking on the field is supposed to bring up a way to click on the letters, etc., needed to fill in the field. It’s slow, tedious, and annoying, but it works—or, it used to work. Maybe a software revision will fix that? Maybe adding a different remote will work?

So, I’ve had to start using the YouTube App on my Apple TV to watch their videos on TV, and that involves switching devices, and that’s an annoying extra step, especially if I want to see what's on broadcast TV. Right now, there’s not much I can to about it.

What all of this means is that, for now, I don’t need to replace the Android Box, though I still want to find the remote for the other device, partly “just in case”. Also, I still need the signal amplifier, I think, but that’s not urgent. And because of all that, the mini-project I was talking about is, for now, cancelled. TV watching works, even if I sometimes have to take extra steps to get there.

Lucky for me, it’s not like I have a shortage of other projects to work on.