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Finally my SKY Digital satellite receiver box got updated with the new SKY TV guide yesterday, and I have tried out the personalised SKY's TV listings. It is not exactly what I was expecting, but it surely is a very useful feature.

The new SKY personalised TV listings is actually an enhancement of the favourite channels feature that had been present in the SKY TV guide previously. The enhancement includes an increase in the number of channels you can add to your favourites from 10 to 50, but more importantly the addition of the option to view your favourite channels as a list and a 7 day guide of those channels which then acts as your personalised SKY TV listings.

For those who have not used the favourite channel feature before, here is how it works.

SKY TV personal listings setup

Using the SKY Digital digi box remote control, press the services button.

Choose favourite channels from the options listed.

You are now presented with a screen showing the channels available on the SKY TV digital platform.

Using the up and down arrows on your remote go through the channels, and for everyone you want to add to your favourite channel press the yellow button, a tick should appear on that channel.

Continue through the TV listings until you have selected all the channels you want to add, or you reach your maximum of 50, then press the select button to save these channels. If you want to remove any channel just press the yellow button when you have that channel highlighted, and the tick will be removed.

Once you have finalised your favourite channels, press the TV listings button on your SKY Digital digi box remote control, and you will be presented with the TV guide main menu. You will notice at the bottom right of the screen the favourite square with an arrow pointing down, if you now press the Blue button on your remote control, you will be presented with your favourite channels as a TV listing, this also contains a 7 day guide which you can now use as normal.

The new feature should be very useful to people who have only Free to Air (FTA), Free to View (FTV) or limited subscription channels, as they can now have a TV listing that shows only the channels they have access to, and they don't have to go through loads of extra channels just to see what is available to them.

Personally I think those who are subscribed to all premium channels and thus have access to a larger amount of channels might not use this feature regularly, as they might think they would miss a an interesting program on one of their less favourite channels.

TIP: When adding channels to your favourites, you can get more value by not adding +1 channels to your list, but using the scan feature while watching a channel to see what the +1 channel is showing as most +1 channels are just one channel number up (More4 being an exception).

If you've found an interesting way of using this SKY TV listings feature, leave a comment letting me know.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I have been very busy both at work and home, and time has been very tight to play with gadgets or search out new ones. I have also been working hard trying to find sponsorship for my hang glider adventure so blogging has had to take a back seat, and there are still a lot of things I'm involved with at the moment so it might be a while before I can resume my weekly posts. Anyway here is a little issue I had to deal with this week.

Further to my earlier Email from your K750i mobile phone post, all has been working okay with my SE K750I mobile phone, email wise until recently when I tried to send myself an email at work, and it failed!
My first reaction was that there was a problem with Virgin's mobile phone network, that turned out to be false as I could surf the internet of the SE K750I.
Further investigation showed that I was able actually access the POP3 account setup on the phone, but the problems was when it tried to send the email using the smtp server specified the mobile phones email configuration. If you remember in my earlier Email from your K750i mobile phone post I had to use my personal smtp server for sending email as Virgin Mobile does not provide an email service. Since I did not know the IP address my phone would be using to connect to my home PC, I had to configure my home firewall to accept connections from any IP address. Somehow that setting on my smtp server had changed to allow only local connections. I changed it back to allow all connections and now my SE K750I is now happily sending emails out again.
For the benefit of all you potential spammers, I don't use the default smtp port for connections from the internet, my PC has a dynamic IP, which you don't know and I have a DNS name which you will never guess, so I don't have an open smtp relay.

This is one of the downsides of the email client on the SE K750I, it does not support authenticated smtp, so you will only be able to use this phone to send emails if your mobile phone network provides email service, you have your own smtp server and know how to configure it to work with the SE K750I or you can find an ISP that provides a POP3 logon before smtp service.