I had a productive evening yesterday. I had a reply from the author of the ZapDVB digital TV recording software. He welcomed my offer of help in improving the English language text displayed by the software, so I did some editing of the language file and sent it back to him. He says that a new version is being worked on.

I've made a few recordings with ZapDVB, but they take up a lot of space at around 2GB/hour. I had thought about converting to DVDs, but as my new DVD player can do DIVX I thought I could use that instead. As mentioned earlier I was playing with mencoder to do this. My first attempt produced a file that played on the PC, but was rejected by the DVD player. I managed to find some options that worked. Playback on the TV is a bit blocky, but may be acceptable. It's mostly going to be stuff for the kids and they are not as picky as me about picture quality.

I've been having some thoughts about using some sort of Jabber bot to do some remote administration tasks, e.g. notifying me of comments on this site. I've had a look before to find an example that I could use as a basis. My latest find was gozerbot. It's written in Python and already has a comprehensive set of plug-ins. With a little help from their IRC channel I got it working on my PC. I need to investigate further into how to write my own plug-ins.

It's amazing what you can achieve if you don't spend all evening reading slashdot ;)