Cheapest New Car in Ireland 2012

A Renault Twizy is the cheapest car (?) in Ireland at the moment. It is a 2-seater electric vehical. The cheapest version costs 7,800 EUR.

The Skoda Citigo is a proper fossil-fuel burning, 4-seater car. The cheapest version costs 9,995 EUR.

Updt Aug 2012: The Seat Mii priced at 9,895 EUR will beat the Citigo.

DOS sleep command for batch files

If you have windows Vista or later installed, you can use use the 'timeout' command instead of the old sleep command.

Wireless cable TV (Sky) using a Dreambox

Objective
How to avoid buying a TV :)

Background
My wife wanted a 2nd TV installed in the bedroom since the house is wired for multi-view Sky cable TV. But I did not want to spend money buying a 2nd TV, given that I have 3 laptops and a desktop in the house.

I began with searching a way to convert SCART to SVGA, but found no convincing solution on the web. There are boxes made in China available on ebay for 40 USD, but I did not want to risk a loss of $40 if their video did not match up with the 16:9 LCD monitor.

So the techie in me started thinking of a zero-cost solution.

Apparatus

• Dreambox ($60, I knew about a spare DM500-S lying around at a friend's)
• Wireless router ($25, I had a free router lying around)
• Ethernet wire (I had a 2 of these as well)
• Windows computer (may work on Linux as well, but I have not tried it)

Procedure

1. Plug in the feeder cable to the Dreambox.
2. Connect the ethernet cable from the router to the Dreambox
3. Install VLC media player version 0.8.6i on your computer. If you have a different version of VLC media player installed, uninstall that first. Choose the advanced install option and make sure that you check the activeX checkbox.
4. Find out the IP address that the router has allocated to the Dreambox.
5. Next, open IE on the computer and type in the IP address of the Dreambox. There is a webserver running there. It will ask for a username and a password. The defaults are 'root/dreambox'.
6. Now you should see the admin console. Click on 'Providers' and choose an open channel. Check that the vpid and apid entries above the list of channels is not 'null'.
7. Click on x-webview link. A new window should launch and the video and audio should stream to the vlc activeX content of the window.

Notes

If you need help through any of these steps, try to google the issue, and if you are still stuck, ask a question though comments.