69mb

I have a PIV 2.6GHz AOpen clone with 512MB ram and 160GB harddisk that had served me well for 4 good years as my primary machine till I went mac. It was either I throw out this faithful servant or find some other good use for it. Well that other good use for me was converting it into a mythbox.

I came across this article about 2 yrs ago and since then I’ve always wanted to try out the mythtv bit but with a shoestring budget and no spare hardware lying around I never got my chance. So when the machine became free and I realized that its just perfect for SD video(besides, we’re not going to see any HD here for 10 yrs most probably), I just had to do it.

Heat & noise are the main concerns when building a mythbox and if you’re going to be having the thing sitting next to the telly then aesthetics may come into play. Initially I had planned on doing a separate frontend/backend system with clunky pc1 sitting in some backroom and a neat looking frontend in a htpc case. Available funds quickly brought me back to my senses and I settled for having both the frontend and backend on pc1 and just focussing on getting the hardware I needed to keep it cool and quiet.

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Safcom have been on a test run of the service since they got the license a couple of months ago.  The service is currently only available in parts of Nairobi with speeds of up to 3.6Mbit/s (The Business Daily article below says 3.6 MB/s!!!)

Its basically their bambanet offering (2,000/- for 700MB & 12.50 per MB after that) and if you’ve already got the Huawei modem, just head over to the safaricom website and grab the firmware update to get the new service.

Link. I’m shocked to see such a poorly written article up on the BD!