A couple of years ago (3, to be exact), my girlfriend and I bought a house about 45 minutes outside of Oslo. The little village is just far enough and small enough to not get cable TV. So, that means we have to have satellite. I consider myself a lucky geek, because my tuner runs Linux.

Even though I've had it for a while, I've not really sat down and done anything with it beyond watching TV. Stupid me! This things runs Linux and is built almost entirely on Open Source Software (there's no source for the binary drivers to read the encrypted card from the TV company). So, here the other day I pulled down the sources, built the tool chain, and compiled Qt for it:

As you can see, the performance isn't great. I suspect that it's due to the fact that it has an 8-bpp frame buffer and Qt stores the backing store in 16-bpp. I'll have to do some profiling to see what I can do to improve it. But still, this is seriously cool... I can spend my free time hacking my TV!