>Great news regarding digital TV but what is the status and timeframe of HDTV content?

Thank you for your e-mail regarding FreeView free-to-air digital television.

Content on FreeView channels will be up to the participating Broadcasters to decide and I expect that the introduction of HDTV by some will be a "point of difference" or giving one a competitive edge over another.  Given that this platform offers the perfect opportunity for HD TV I expect some Broadcasters will certainly introduce it sooner or later.

I am sorry I cannot yet be more specific with timeframe for the inclusion of HDTV programmes on FreeView.

Regards,

Ric

Well this is sounding positive. With Sky's HDTV plans as well, hopefully this is going to create a good bit of market competition for viewers and maybe some HDTV content.

The key good thing I get from this message is that it appears that Freeview will technically support HDTV from day one as a platform.

Bring it on.

Update:

There is some really good information on Freeview here http://www.apsattv.com/ thanks Skippy for the link.

Well today the New Zealand government will be announcing its digital TV strategy. This week has had plenty of media speculation about what this will mean for consumers in New Zealand. I personally hope the New Zealand government makes a firm commitment to adopting HDTV broadcast via whatever medium makes sense (IPTV, satellite, cable, terrestrial). We now have plenty of consumers with HDTV capable TVs, we have xbox's that output HDTV, folk are downloading HDTV over the internet, gee you can even buy HDTV video cameras in NZ now, not to forget all of NZ's major TV studios are fully kitted out with HDTV cameras and vision mixing gear. Come on government, adopt HDTV before it becomes a legacy technology.

Updates:

Not much detail if this is going to be HDTV but a positive sign anayway

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3701440a10,00.html

Some good info here http://digital.tvnz.co.nz/

I love my iPod but... I have had two occasions when iTunes or my iPod ends up corrupting some files in the hidden
directory \iPod_Control\iTunes\ on my iPod. It seems this problem is wide spread over a number of iPod models. This forum entry sums up the problem and some solutions really well. The most annoying thing  about this problem for me is that it leaves my iPod in state of having music files on it but the index file is corrupted. The rest of the iPod is otherwise fine. This means my iPod thinks it has no music on it when it actually does. Because I sync my iPod from a couple of different locations and carry a good few data files on it as well, I find restoring my iPod to be a really annoying task because I have to copy all my files off it and then back onto the iPod post an iPod updater restore. Even with USB 2.0 this still takes a long time with a nearly full 60GB iPod.

To try and avoid this type of problem in the future I have implemented a simple "last known good" database backup script using a good old .bat file. This backs up the important iPod database files to a backup dir but excludes the Music dir so the actual mp3 files are not backed up as well.

So in practice I run the backup after I have finished syncing with iTunes but before ejecting the iPod safely. I have tested this working by manually corrupting some files in the \iPod_Control\iTunes\ and testing a restore and this seems to work.

Hopefully those familiar with batch files can follow whats going on here. Please note I offer no guarantees on the success of this method and please use this at your own risk. Also keep in mind that really important files should be backed up on multiple physical media and kept in different locations to be safe.

rmdir iPod_Control_Backup /s /q
xcopy iPod_Control iPod_Control_Backup\ /s /e /h /y /exclude:excludebackup.txt
pause

It would have been great if Apple could have thought about providing a better solution to this problem with what I will call "logical disk failures". I guess Apple are considering the possibility that there could actually be some real "physical disk failures" starting and it might be hard for software like iTunes to able to tell the difference between logical and physical failures?

Anyway, good luck with your iPods and don't forget to back up really important data.

Well yes I thought it was about time to finally start a blog. While I would like to say my motivation to do this was professional, the main motivation is the fact that I am about to become a dad and I thought a blog was a great way to let all my friends and family keep in touch with how how things go. So watch this space around early July 2006 when our baby boy Zavier is due to be born. In the meantime check out some photos of the very pregnant and lovely Dee here.

I do plan to use categories to separate out family stuff from technology/work related stuff so bare with me while I work this out. For those interested, I have put this blog together using dasBlog which has worked pretty well so far, but hey I am no blogging expert yet. My colleague JD is using WordPress and JB has recently rolled his own blog software in ASP.NET 2.0 which will be interesting to see how it progresses.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.