EasyLinuxGuide Blog

A lot of people have asked me about how to set up an HD Antenna, especially after me boasting about the quality, and no monthly fees. It’s a very simple process, however; many fail and give up due to not having the knowledge or patience to do it right. Here are the core ingredients you will need:

An HD antenna (the one on the left is a 4-bay. I use a 2-bay, but it depends no how much room you have)
An HDTV with an ATSC tuner OR a CRT tv with a digital decoder box (quality will suffer but you will get channels)
Patience

Basic setup: attach a coax cable from the antenna to the antenna input on your TV. Position the antenna where you want… Here is where you have options. This all comes down to what you have available. For best results – mount the antenna as high as possible (rooftop) and be prepared to adjust the position based on scanning results. Multi directional antennas can aid this process or if you have a premium antenna that allows for remote adjustment, that’s even better. On a much more simplistic level, I personally use a 2-bay antenna that I have just outside of a window on a ledge where it fits perfectly. There are indoor antennas you can use too but the results may not be as good.

Once the antenna is attached and positioned, go to your TV and select the channel feature in the menu (it will differ from one tv to another) and then select ‘scan’. Wait until this process finishes and then you can go through the channels to see which ones you get and how clear they are. The following factors will affect how many channels and the clarity: positioning of antenna, quality of antenna, weather, line of sight, strength of over the air signals (positioning of your residence in terms of whether it is up on a hill which is better or in a gully, and how far away it is from the signal, as well as whether you are surrounded by large buildings).

The most important thing about setting up a HDTV antenna is to keep in mind that there are many factors that affect results in terms of stations and quality. The bottom line is “you will get, what you get!” If you want more stations or better quality, then get the antenna up higher, position it better (you must rescan each time you reposition the antenna if you want to check to see if it picked up more stations), or failing all of that… move!

You will not get as many stations as you will get with cable or satellite, however; the HD stations you should get will come in very clear in most likely 1080i video and HD audio. The quality in my experience is amazing! I use it to watch football and primetime specials mostly. The internet is the optimal choice for anything else in my opinion. The cost is very minimal. My antenna was roughly $20. They can get quite expensive. I have found in general that I’ve had the best luck with the wired antennas as you see pictured above. Results will, of course, differ from person to person as there are many variables. Some say they can get about 40-50 stations including many HD. I personally get about 20 including about 6 or 7 HD stations. I am very content with that. I am also quite content with not spending $80 or more for a bunch of stations I never watch and I feel good about not giving money to unsavoury companies.

Yes, some people will say I’m reading too much into this, but it just seems like way too much of a coincidence. If you go ahead and visit the Google Nexus 4 website, you will notice that not only the Nexus 4, but also the Nexus 7 and even the Nexus 10 all have the same time displayed – 4:20. Now, surely a bunch of people will be laughing about this, others rejoicing, but some may not have the same opinion. Personally, I am disgusted by this move on the part of Google. I had planned on ordering on a Nexus 4 on release date and would have done so, if it weren’t for the nearly instant sell out status. The last thing I heard was that there was a 3 week backorder for those who had ordered it due to website glitches even though it had actually sold out prior. Now, I am grateful for this unavailability as I am unsure whether I am even interested anymore.

My question is – does Google really want to portray this image? Going out on a limb and saying it was unintentional makes me question the quality control of the not only the website, but also of the device itself.

I have been praising and promoting this device to others for weeks on end. Now it will stop. Will Google fix this or will it be ignored?

If you are getting an error when visiting the Gnome Extensions Website such as: “You do not appear to have an up to date version of GNOME3. You won’t be able to install extensions from here. See the about page for more information.”  in a red rectangle, and you don’t recall doing anything funky during your upgrade, then it could be due to a Firefox issue. I upgraded 4 of my machines to Ubuntu 12.10 and 2 of them gave me that error. I did find a workaround for now:

Open a terminal
Type Firefox -P
Select to create a new profile (I called mine alt)
Open Firefox with that new profile and visit the Gnome Extensions Website

You should be able to install your extensions from there now. I have to assume that there is some sort of miscommunication between my older profile for Firefox and the Gnome Shell Extensions website after the upgrade. Firefox moved to version 16 so perhaps this is somehow the reason why. Regardless, this is a decent workaround for now. If I find something more concrete, I will post it later.

Update — See the comment below which indicates that if you have “click to play” enabled in your about:config in Firefox, then it will cause this issue. Thanks for the contribution!

I would normally write detailed instructions here but the original posts are quite accurately done so I will simply provide the links…

Rooting your Le Pan TC970: see this link

Why Root? Mainly access to system settings you wouldn’t normally have and you can do proper full backups.

Then after rooting, you can upgrade your tablet to gingerbread and cyanogenmod at that, which is even more customized. This is in beta 5 at the time of writing this, so be sure to download whichever is newest and best rated. There were still a couple of functions not perfectly working at the time of beta 5 so when you check, you’ll need to decide if those are dealbreakers or not for you.

Here is the link to the xda developers site with instructions: Grab them cakes!

** The pic shows a different launcher than the default ADW which I generally consider a mess, I much prefer Go Launcher Ex.

I’ve been talking about this for a while and even entered some IRC channels and had some users perplexed. It turns out it is a real issue. When I would copy something such as a file in nautilus with ctrl-c and then attempt to paste it using ctrl-v (right click paste works fine) into another directory in nautilus, instead of the expected outcome, I would see the text name of the file in a small box on the bottom right hand side of the screen. Today I found a bug report on it. It does appear to be an issue with either the newer version of nautilus (3.x+) or with Gnome 3 as I cannot duplicate the issue on any of my Gnome 2 boxes. If I reboot my system, the normal behavior does return, but then eventually it will revert to the same problem. I am hoping this gets fixed soon as it has been an annoyance for quite some time.