Code

With the advent of Over-the-Air (OTA) Digital TV in Uganda, I have found myself watching two or more TV channels simultaneously. This is true especially during the 9 O’clock hour when most local TV stations in Uganda broadcast the evening news (OK, now you know: I am a news junkie).

While recording TV shows solves this itch as is the case with an upcoming media product I have been working on, it is still great to watch the news live. You could manually mute a currently audible TV channel, and unmute the next desired one – but that’s no fun.

A while back, I whipped up a script that helps you toggle between all the available audio sources you are listening to. It essentially switches between all the available sound sinks. In my case, I use VLC to watch OTA digital channels with podcasts on some occasions. What is neat, is that you can bind this script to any key on your keyboard, remote, or even Bluetooth device.

If you are using a Linux based device and you are interested, I am making this tool available at: my Github repository

The most common way Ugandans are accessing the Internet on PC today is via USB 3G modems . All the major Internet service providers in the country; i.e. Orange, MTN, UTL, Airtel, Warid offer 3G internet albeit at very slow speeds. The modem dongles that are commonly sold are Huawei models. Some like Orange carry ZTE models.

I just pushed a set of Linux bash scripts to my github repositories. These CLI PPP scripts can be used to dial an ISP in Uganda and connect to the Internet. If you are the type of person, who uses the Linux command line interface a lot, then these utilities are for you. As long as you modem is recognized by the kernel, you are good to go.

You can use these scripts to automate your connection. These scripts also, provide several statistics on your USB dongle, such as the EMEI, IMSI numbers, lock status, speed capacity etc.

You can find them at ppp-ug

Enjoy!