Live, From New York (actually Brooklyn) It’s

Weekend Update With Michael!

I spent most of Friday night upgrading my Tivo with a new 120 meg drive, which should give me 30 hours of recording capacity at best quality. I copied the data from my old dual drives onto one big one and tested the drive in Tivo. Everything’s ok, but I still need to install TivoWeb.

On Saturday I was finishing up what I call my Great Fight With The Wall Warts and Holy Insurgency Against Wire Mayhem. I’ll write about that later, it might be useful to you.

I also went shopping for fishing gear and spent a buttload of money.
Among the things I bought:
Seeker BA 30 7′ rod
Newell S 338 – 3.6 reel
Guy Cotten SuperKodiak Pullover
Buncha other fishing paraphenelia.

The pullover is really, really nice. It’s the kind professional fishermen wear. It has neoprene cuffs, very warm fleece on the top and fleece covered by PVC on the bottom and sleeves. Just what the doctor ordered for winter fishing.

Interesting thing is, the size of it is pretty much inflated. I am an XL, but in no way am I an XXL. The sizes were probably selected just to stroke the ego of commercial fishermen.

Ok, gotta go sleep, the boat is leaving at 7, and it’s already 2, no, wait, 1:15. Cool, daylight savings dealy is working it’s magic!

Tivo Tivo Tivo!

TurboNet card arrived yesterday. It’s an amazing feat of engineering – a tiny little custom-made ethernet card that fits into Tivo’s ISA slot and is powered by the motherboard. Install took 3 minutes (good hearted Tivo engineers included drivers for it with the latest version of software) + 5 minutes to staple cat5 to the wall. Well, and half an hour contemplating Tivo’s insides.

What am I gaining from having an ethernet card in Tivo?

Well, for one, it will not be phoning home every day. 30 calls per month at 5 cents each is not a huge saving, but I will not have to unplug the phone cord during thunderstorms.

I already had a burned out modem once. The nasty thing about it breaking was that it kept phone line “of the hook” so that nobody could call me. I had to send my Tivo to a Texan who goes by the handle Electriclegs. He figured out how to fix Tivo modems by replacing a few parts and even made a repair kit available, but I was not brave enough to solder surface mount components myself. The repair cost me $50 + shipping, but the worst thing was being without Tivo for a couple of weeks. Brrrr.

Things left to do:
1) Install bigger hard drive (not simple because I have a double drive model)
2) Mount the ethernet jack flush in Tivo’s case (cold not do it this time because my nibbling tool broke during cutting a hole for exhaust fan on my computer)
3) Install TivoWeb, other neato hacks
4) Learn to solder surface mount components, install memory kit from Electriclegs

Some quick nerdy news

Ethernet card for my TIVO is on it’s way. I wish it was available when my TIVO’s modem got killed by a surge from a lightning storm (I had to ship it to a guy who fixed it for $50). I’ll probably install TivoWeb because Yahoo! seems to be pretty slow in rolling out online TIVO programming that was promised.

Powershot G3 is available for preorder. I can’t believe they used the same moronic silver color for it. Again. Didn’t they get enough angry letters from photographers (so many that the actually made a black color version of G2).

By the way, it’s interesting to watch the progress of design of G1, G2 and G3. One thing that I noticed is that the grip handle gets progressively bigger and more comfortable.