I opened up my sky+ box to try and get recorded stuff off it. It turns out that anything not free-to-air can't be extracted from the disk, leaving me with a few movies from film4 and some stuff from bbc1.

I did finally put a hard disk in my popcorn hour. I'm still waiting on a wireless card to turn up for it but for now I've repurposed a spare airport express in order to give it some network access and the box is happily torrenting down the tv I missed over the past couple of weeks.