Codename: Cashew

Big news! I am going to be a Dad!!

That's right, Ruby is pregnant with our first child and now that we are past the 12 week mark I can tell everyone. Why 12 weeks? This is mainly due to the risk of a miscarriage is greatly reduced after that time (though we did let immediate family and a few close friends know easrlier). Also, we had an ultrasound on Monday so now I have some pictures to show off!

Ruby already reckons that it looks like me!

The reason for the ultrasound was a Nuchal scan which is normally done at 12 weeks to check for the risk of Downs syndrome. The good news is we have a reduced risk (now 1 in 2000 as opposed to 1 in 400 before the scan).

Oh and "cashew" is what we started calling the baby back when we first found out Ruby was pregnant and the name has kinda stuck (though I have suggested others...).

I was wrapped with the ultrasound. Just seeing our little cashew waving and bouncing about was nothing short of amazing (and yes we do have a video of this).

Revised Applescript for downloading EPG for use with EyeTV

Last year I wrote an Applescript to download an xmltv file and load into EyeTV (see this post). This relied on downloading a single xmltv file from Free*EPG. Unfortunately in Septembver 2008 they discontinued providing this file for direct download and instead required their software which only worked on a Windows PC. 

The handy part with the Free*EPG file was they handled all the location set-up and provided a single file for download (EyeTV only accepts a single xmltv file). The other choice for downloading xmltv files was OzTiVo , but this required updating the Applescript to do all the file handling and aggregating. This turned out to be a bit of work and some of the bugs I had to fix took a week to appear which slowed things down a bit.

Version 2.0 of my xmltv Applescript can be downloaded here (168 K). I also included instructions on its set-up. Apart from choosing which channels (e.g. ABC-NSW) to download on first run, it is basically the same as for version 1.0.

UPDATE 12 Oct 2009: All the Australian free to air networks now publish up to date EPG data for about 7 days over DVB (thanks to the Anonymous comment on my original post). I highly recommend using this data instead of my Applescript (which will now no longer be updated). To change to DVB go to each channel and change EPG to DVB, then right click on the Program Guide item and select "Clear EPG Database", then right click again on Programs and select "Update DVB Program Guide".