Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

Yesterday I was very happy when taking my train: the old second class wagons have all been upgraded with 230V power plugs. There is one for every 4 seats instead of one for the whole wagon. They don’t work right now, but it means that I will be able to use my laptop during my 3h weekly commute. Thanks CFF

Some weeks ago, I was ranting about the Hauppauge ImpactVCB card that didn’t work well on Fedora. Finally, I ordered a 4 channel LMLBT44 card from the kind folks at linuxmedia.com and everything about it is AWESOME:

• 4 bttv compatible acquisition chips (BT878), this means 4x 50 fps in PAL mode and 4 independent inputs.
• There is a useful manual provided with the cards (and that’s rather rare).
• The guys at linuxmedia can be contacted quickly on IRC, I had a very specific technical question about the bttv driver and got an answer in under an hour.

On the downside:

• Their website sucks and doesn’t inspire confidence at all (1995-like design and self generated SSL certificates).
• They charge too much for shipping…85$ to Europe. For god’s sake, I can see the real shipping price on the package and it’s 35$ for 2 cards!

So, on a functionnality/input it’s still a much better deal than what I found before.