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.

• Walmart
• XS-Cargo
• 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:

• Discovery
• Comedy Network
• Space
• Home & Garden
• National Geographic
• Biography
• Global
• CBC
• CTV
• Documentary Storm
• More links too come …

The not so free sports packages:

• NHL GameCenter
• NFL GamePass
• NBA LeaguePass

 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 

Impossible … what happened ?

The Canadian government last week introduced the declaration of a new department in the #GOC, the Department of Shared Services(SS). The SS was formed as a cost cutting measure to bring the IT departments in almost all of the #GOC into a new level of fiscal responsability by consolidating Data, Email and Network infrastructures under one house. Now since I have started working in the #GOC I have been preaching cloud computing, wiki’s and shared resources.

So why would I be worried ?

Because it happened too fast, I’m still at the bottom of the tech pile fighting my way to the top. 

What are you gonna do now ?

Gonna try and get back on top of the situation, with education. My chances of climbing the ranks through the normal course of time/experience/opportunity seem to have disappeared.

What are you gonna take ?

I don’t know, I have been eyeballing the Unix Admin course at Algonquin College but I’m unsure. These shared services may need a few linux/aix admin but who knows, I may just leave the public service … lord only knows.

Moral?

Life may try to get me down but if I want it bad enough I will take it all, after all I am a King Bain.