Using xmltv feeds with EyeTV

In October last year I bought a Mac Mini to use as a media center. The software I am using is Elgato's EyeTV which does a great job of managing and recording TV shows. Initially I had setup schedules for each of the TV programs I was interested in, but this only works when shows are on at the same time every week (which the commercial networks are notorious at sticking to).

With the release of v3.0 in January one of the new features I was most interested in was "Smart Guides". This allows you to set your recordings based on search criteria (e.g find Top Gear or Doctor Who). This works well when you have a complete EPG. Now while 7, 9 and 10 transmit a 7 day guide, ABC1 & 2 only have one for the next 2 days and there nothing for SBS.

With the latest release of EyeTV (version 3.0.1) it allows xmltv files to be used as an EPG. First drag the downloaded xmltv file onto the EyeTV application. Now Go the the Channels in EyeTV and for each of the channels you want to use the xmltv file for the EPG set its EPG to xmltv.


In some cases if EyeTV cannot find the channel in the xmltv file it will ask you to select from a list of channels it has found in the file (this always seems to happen for SBS).


This works well, however, EyeTV needs to be restarted or the xmltv file dragged onto it for the EPG to be refreshed for a newly downloaded xmltv file.

I get my xmltv EPG from Free*EPG and to make my life simpler I have written the following Applescript which downloads the zipped file, unzips it and opens the xmltv file in EyeTV. The only user settings required is to enter your ClientID and Postcode into the two variables (they currently contain ????) and save the script.

To activate the script you can either set it to run via iCal or cron. For example I set iCal to run the script daily at 6:50.


The same script can be used to grab files from other services. I included a separate variable for the download link so this can be changed easily for other xmltv providers.

My Money Minder 1.9.8 released

I have released another bugfix to My Money Minder. I had thought 1.9.7 was going to be the last release before 2.0, but a few bugs were found that needed fixing. For the full details of the changes and download links go to the My Money Minder pages

My Money Minder 1.9.7 released

I have released another bugfix version of My Money Minder (which I hope again will be last bugfix before v2!!). This release also includes a revised help system which is modelled on the current style in Apple's apps and is also searchable. For the full details and download links go to the My Money Minder pages .

My Money Minder 1.9.6 released

Just a quick post to announce the new version of My Money Minder. In fact today is 5 years since I released v1.0.

Originally I was planning to have v2 out this May, however, I realised a while back that this was not going to happen. Along with that several users reported some bugs. So, instead, I combined some of the work I was doing on v2 which fixed issues in csv/tsv file importing, fixed some of the other bugs and added 2 partial localisations. I am hoping that this is the last 1.x versions of MMM...

Anyway head on over to the My Money Minder pages to see what the changes are and grab a copy.

Website update

I have now updated each of the three sections of our website (done over several days). I approached this update much like I do with home renovations, I make a list of things that are broken and things I want to improve.

While my blog is relatively new and the standard Blogger template I was using was ok, if I ever wanted to change any of the colors for the nice rounded boxes I would need to change all the images. This would be a pain! I had used some CSS trickery on the Ben's Software pages to do this but that was also a pain to maintain. I also wanted to have random backgrounds on the blog. The Ben's Software pages were the oldest part of the site (having been transferred from Geocities with little modification) so it was time to do a general cleanup to make them look at bit more professional. With the addition of the blog I now had three separate sections to the website and I wanted each of these linked and improve their navigation. Lastly I wanted to add in better website tracking.

To find the rounded corners I just did a couple of Google searches and reasonably quickly found what I wanted. In the end I chose two different javascripts that generate the corners on-the-fly. In the end I found 2 different javascript solutions. To give me nice anti-aliased boxes that will work with any of the random backgrounds on the blog I chose Curvy Corners. However, since I wanted a drop shadow for Ben's Software, I chose Ruzee Borders (which does not work well with the random background). Another Google search found a random background javascript, currently there are 6 possible background images.

For improving the navigation I had a look at a couple of other websites (such as Apple.com) and they used links at the end of each page called breadcrumbs. These have been added to Ben's Software and the Photos pages.

Lastly I added Google's Analytics to monitor traffic on each section of the website.

I have tried to make sure that these changes work in well in most browsers (let me know if things don't work or look right). However, I have done most of my testing on Safari and Firefox. This should work in Internet Exploiter but I highly recommend you get Firefox as it is quite simply much better :)