How-To get free HD Television in Ottawa

If you live in Ottawa and you don’t want to give Rogers or Bell your hard earned cash then you can do what I have done and it only cost me 20 bucks and I get all the HD channels I need.

Things you need:

  • Digital HD antenna  
  • +25 feet of coaxial cable(May need longer if you live in a house)
  • A television with a digital tuner(Almost all new tv’s have these built-in to them)

The antenna can be purchased from many retailers but the cheapest ones can be bought from Walmart, XS-Cargo and Factory Direct.

My antenna came from Factory Direct and cost me a total of $14.99! Some assembly was required to but nothing super technical.

From my own experience the price of the antenna doesn’t equate to the quality/reception of the antenna. I use to use this one but it was TERRIBLE, good thing I never payed 70 bucks for it. :)

1. The Unboxing

2.Some assembly required


3. Almost there

When you have your antenna assembled, attach your coaxial TV cable to the antenna and put the antenna in your house/apartment window. Hook the other end of the cable to your television, your television still neets to be setup to use OTA which is burried in your TV’s menu system … I dont have steps for this part. :D

Once your television is finished scanning for channels, sit down in your favorite chair and enjoy all the free HD television you would ever need.

A TV antenna works best if there is nothing blocking your line of sight to the antennas. So if you mount the antenna high you can get all these channels:

  • CBC (English) 4.1
  • Global 6.1
  • CBC (French) 9.1
  • CHCH 11.1
  • CTV 13.1
  • Omni1 14.1
  • TVO 24.1
  • TQ - Tele Quebec 30.1
  • TQS (V) - CFGS 34.1
  • TVA - CHOT 40.1
  • CTS 42.1
  • “A” Channel 43.1
  • Omni2 60.1
  • CityTV 65.1

To learn more about Ottawa OTA go here.

    The ones in bold are the key ones for me, if I want to watch other channels like Space or Discovery I connect my laptop to the televison with an HDMI cable. If you go online you can watch these stations:

    The not so free sports packages:

    Old laptop digital picture frame … or atleast it was

    Click on image for more pics I hope this younger generation never has to deal with IDE ribbons, floppy drive, dip switches, and CRUSH-ABLE CPU CORES!!!!! 

    I have been working on this old laptop project for the last 4 or 5 days; Taking an old laptop(Pentium III 600mhz) and converting it into a digital picture frame. I had the fitment in the frame done, all my cables and ribbons run flat, linux distro tuned for speed and purpose … all it needed was a backing and one of those legs to hold the frame up.

    I figured time for pictures!

    I take 2 pictures of the frame booting and cycling images then I flip the frame over to take a shot of the back. I dont know how it happened but when I layed it face I crushed 2 corners of the CPU … check out the hi-res pics.

    I know its my own fault but i think Intel should take partial responsibility for building a heat-sink that rests on 3 legs … wtf blue men !

    Anyways time to find a mobile P3 cpu on ebay …..fuck 

    Google Payday!

                  

    I finally received my cheque from google … it only took 2 years. While in college I created a website to experiment with SEO and advertising tasks. I wrote a couple popular articled on the internet built some traffic for my site and then laid in some google adsense ad’s into my articled. Some articles worked better then others and some ad’s worked better then others.

    If you want to try the same go for it … its almost free to-do. Just dont do it with articles that are IT/Computer related as your gonna be competing with the rest of the Internet. Pick something more niche … car or scrap booking or roofing(I did one for roofing) :)

    Ohya the experiment site which is still earning but is no longer maintained.

    http://old.kingbain.com

    Peace!

    Envorment Canada XML DataSet Service

    To use the service you need 2 things

    1. A date
    2. A weather station ID

    For my examples i will be using the following data

    Date:

    May 7th 2011

    Station:

    WINNIPEG RICHARDSON AWOS MANITOBA
    Latitude: 49°55’00.000” N   
    Longitude: 97°14’00.000” W    
    Elevation: 238.70 m
    Climate ID: 5023226    
    WMO ID: 71852   
    TC ID: YWG
    ID: 47407

    To find the Station ID for a weather station near you you can use this google map I created.

    http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=110896327429032700382.00048bdcb7e0dd16f3ebd&z=3

    Environment Canada Station URL:

    http://climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html?timeframe=2&StationID=47407&Year=2011&Month=5&Day=01

    Read more