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Among my set of "daily" tabs is a random wikipedia page, and couple of other random searches.

At least it gives me a chance of seeing something I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

Link

I refuse to explain how it is relevant, you spoonfed booby.

Indeed. In the UK, the two biggest broadcasters are the BBC and ITV. Both contract out to "Broadcasting Data Services" (BDS) to collect royalties for the publication of TV listings.

This royalty is enshrined in law (The Broadcasting Act 1987).

The BBC, however, get the Internet and have opened http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ which gives free non-commercial access. ITV, however, do not. This means that you can't publish any listings for any of the four ITV channels without paying ITV money. More details here.

Given they're in dire straits, it's amazing they aren't more interested in boosting their viewership. A petition has been created to get them to allow free non-commercial use.

All UK channels except ITV are also available as an XML/RSS feed.

After having three Microsoft articles in a ROW yesterday (or the day before?), we oughta give GOOG some (more) time.

Read a random Google page while you wait for that precious non-Google story, I guess...

Also: data sources in XML format.

I'll have to look more closely at this new version to see if it can be parsed more easily.

Hardware: Old Dell optiplex 110 with Pentium III 800MHz, 256Mb RAM, DLink 802.11b PCI wi-fi card. Cost - a favour to a buddy.

Additions: Hauppauge PVR-350, 200Gb Seagate Barracuda, USBUIRT http://www.usbuirt.com/. Cost of additions - £ 216

Wi-Fi with MythTV was hell, PAL TV out with X-Windows was hell, S-Video input with MythTV was hell, EPG download from http://www.bleb.org/tv with MythTV was flaky, IR support for driving my Cable set-top-box was not great.

I tried a copy of XP MCE, but unless you have certified hardware, forget this being easy or stable, so I went on the hunt for Windows based PVR software and came across http://www.gbpvr.com/.

I must say I have been suitably impressed with ease of setup, ease of use, stability and features. Pretty much all of the MythTV features, but a lot easier to set up. Total setup time from blank hard drive to working GBPVR on XP in under 2 hours on above hardware. MythTV took a weekend to have partial functionality working on the same box. The USBUIRT works well with GBPVR, and GBPVR is able to pull EPG from Bleb (Or other XMLTV sources). Main problem now is 256Mb of RAM is just not quite enough for XP... the box is now deemed prototype, waiting for more cash to buy a new barebones system with decent CPU and RAM. Probably go for a Shuttle small form factor like one of these ST62K's http://www.de.shuttle.com/en/desktopdefault.aspx/t abid-72/170_read-2782/

In fact, there's a picture of a CBBC presenter wearing the 30th anniversary T-shirt. I think the off-the-shoulder style was made after the T-shirt was produced ;-) :-)