Pharmacies in Finland have run out of iodine tablets as well. Seems that hysteria is contagious. YLE News

I believe Matt has made changes so that browser/platform combos that don’t support Typekit now default to using Arial/Helvetica for headings regardless.

Much nicer, although Arial is a bit boring.

Still, funny that using Firefox on Ubuntu gives nearly perfect font rendering compared to Windows XP. Must remember to try Windows 7 when I get home.

And as a part-time web developer I like what you did with the media queries. Dynamic layouts are cool :-).

What version of DVB-T did Freeview take? I believe that 3.0 includes DRM that can allow forbidding all recording or transfering of recordings off the device. Hopefully that isn't used since it kills all PC based solutions.

Also DVB-T won't appear in phones. It uses too much power, which is why they invented DVB-H for handheld devices. It is now mandated as the European mobile TV standard.

Also odd that there is the split between 1080i and 720p between the channels. But it is not because of any penny pinching in bandwidth costs since the data rate of the two formats is the same. But usually sports channels chose 720p since it reacts better with fast motion.

OTOH, its geeky features rock. I still can't get it to connect to my router, but it didn't take me long to find a couple of great bits of Mac freeware that let you use the USB connection for file transfer (the official documentation insists these features are Windows-only, and that you have to install a special USB driver). I recorded Talk Talk from TVNZ 6 and ripped it to an AVI with a single piece of software. You can even upload custom EPGs, although I wouldn't think that's something your Mum and Dad would be doing.

At least for mine, the USB driver was a necessity, but the were Linux and Mac ways to connect.

I don't really think that ripping programmes off the box is a mainstream feature. Explaining how to reencode a transport stream into a divx is always going to be a bit of a struggle. In that respect the Topfields are more of a geeks toy, especially since they allow you to write your own software for it. One of the best I have come across allows skipping of 3min,1min,30sec per button press. Bye-bye ads...

As for quality, the soaps are fine, but a live sports event is a depressing sight on a good TV. Of course if you are in a poor reception area now then any digital signal is an improvement.

But this is a real issue for mainstream devices. The reason everyone loved MySky when it launched here was that the same gear had gone through multiple iterations in Britain and it was really user-friendly. The Topfield works, but it isn't quite fit for a mass-market device that you're expecting people to self-install.

I'm afraid that the Topfield is about as mainstream as they come. I have had my TF5100 for over a year and it is one of the most usable decoders/PVRs I have seen here in Finland. But that not too hard since some of them are really terrible.

At least you will get HD there though. The head of state TV here said basically that HD isn't stable enough standard yet and they won't implement it before 2012. Which is 5 years after going all digital. Of course every technical literate person in the country called him an idiot (which he really is).

Hopefully the switch to digital goes smoother in NZ. It seems that the main benefit of digital here is to enable pay terrestrial channels and free up frequencies. The broadcasts are heavily compressed with extremely obvious artifacts. Youtube looks better at times.