The Open University here in the UK regularly coproduces educational programming in partnership with the BBC. Some of these programmes are for a wide audience such as Coast, and other programmes are for more specialist audiences such as The Story of Maths. To catch these programmes you don't have to necessarily stay in and make sure that you are sat on your sofa in front of the TV at a scheduled time, instead you can catch the repeats on BBC iPlayer (sorry - UK, IoM & Channel Islands only). My colleague Tony Hirst recently created a mash up to find the OU programmes from the last seven days posted to iPlayer using feeds from Twitter, iPlayer and a Yahoo Pipe, he then presented the results in a web page. When looking at his blog post on this it struck me that it would be really nice if this could be presented in a way more suitable for a media centre PC connected to a TV, so this would mean nice big fonts, an attractive interactive-TV type interface and ease of use from a remote control, and then I thought it would be even better to feed this into MythTV, integrating seven days of OU programming alongside the rest of your entertainment.

I was sad today to find out that a radio station I really quite like has shut down. That radio station was Captital Life, which broadcasted on the UK's digital radio system (DAB), a nice radio station that played a lot of music without lots of interruptions from presenters and adverts. It has been known for some time that this was going to happen as the station's owners GCap Media was having problems making DAB radio a profitable venture. This is the latest development in the sad story of DAB radio in the UK, which has recently been branded by technology news website The Register as "a very British failure", they have also published an interesting article exploring some of the options to save digital radio in the UK from terminal decline in "Fixing the UK's DAB disaster". It would be a great shame if digital broadcasting did die off as the idea of a platform that can carry many stations serving diverse tastes is very appealing. Yes you can put everything through the Internet, but for the times when you are out and about, maybe in your car, relying on a mobile broadband signal is not usually a reliable business. Radio can be used in many ways and as it is much cheaper to make programmes for radio than TV it can be possible to make diverse programming and cover costs.