Sky HD box shows FAILED a lot, and broken picture

22 Dec 2008: My second gadget-related failure of the weekend was my Sky HD box, which had spent the last two days showing a couple of problems: scheduled recordings were showing “FAILED” even though their transmission time hadn’t been reached yet; and the picture was breaking up, but oddly only on certain channels. Of course, nobody buys Sky’s expensive warranties, and they charge £65 to come and take a look, so as ever with these things, it’s off to Google. This was a hard one to track down, because it’s difficult to describe the problems in the same way as everyone else, but it turns out that loads (and I mean loads) of people are having the same problem. It’s caused by some [...]

2nd Gen iPod Nano Red gets red hot

22 Dec 2008: Two electronic gadget failures on the same day, and in both cases the solution was online. I’ll blog about my Sky+ HD box showing “FAILED” recordings in a moment, but first, my second generation red iPod Nano from early 2007, which this morning showed a “Sad Mac” icon, something I hadn’t seen on an Apple product since an old Quadra 840AV back in the 90s. I assumed it would need some sort of hard reset, but the normal reboot (press the menu and select buttons together for 6 seconds) wasn’t working, so I thought it was probably discharged, and not even recharging via the usual USB connection to my iMac. Acting on some advice online, I tried recharging using a [...]

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