The DirectTV with Tivo will be installed on Wednesday. How can I face watching four or five days of the Tour de France on live TV? Did I mention that race was our original reason for purchasing a Tivo? Maybe I’ll have to look in to this remote/infrared sensor issue after all, to get me through those first few days.
Any ideas how to use an old tivo without a subscription?
Our series 1 Tivo has exhibited a potentially fatal flaw. Since the weekend, the tivo has stopped responding to commands from the remote control. Reboots don’t help. Resetting the remote control according to the instructions in the Tivo forums doesn’t help. The remote still sends commands, as it is still able to control the television. The most likely cuplrit seems to be the infrared receiver in the Tivo.
The question now becomes, spend valuable time and effort opening the Tivo, figuring out how to replace the IR sensor, ordering it, and trying it out, when I’m not even 100% sure that’s the problem, or should I just be glad I got exactly four years of service out of a relatively inexpensive peice of consumer electronics, and buy a new one?
DirectTV is running a rebate on their receiver with 80-hour Tivo; it comes out to $50 for the unit itself, with the monthly charge at about $45 including the Tivo fee. That’s less than I’m paying today for extended Comcast cable plus the Tivo service. Andrea and I have been dissatisfied with the quality of many of the channels on Comcast, especially the Sci-Fi channel and the WB. DirectTV also has a few additional channels we’d be interested in having, BBC America, Oxygen, and when Elizabeth gets a little older, the Disney channel.
Seems like a decent idea to me!
Anyone know how I can extract some video from my series 1 Tivo?
John Gruber wrote some suggestions that he called “Writing for Google” in his blog, Daring Fireball. The suggestions are so far removed from the typical “hacking google” articles I’ve seen that I think they’re really general writing tips.
I can summarize it in four words: Get to the point!
I finally figured out how to get Mail.app 2.0 working well in Tiger. It should have been obvious to me, but it took me trying to live with both Thunderbird and Entourage for my mail. If you don’t already know this, let me be the first to tell you: both of those applications SUCK. The really crazy thing about how badly they suck is they’re what most of the world uses for email. Most of the world: How can you STAND it? I would rather use Mutt.
The problem I experienced seems to be related entirely to IMAP. When I first loaded Mail, it imported all my mail archives from Mail.app 1, about 1.5GB worth, without a hitch. Then it started working on synching up with my two main IMAP mailboxes. One of them is small, mostly text and html messages, no more than a couple hundred at a time. The other one, my work email, can get quite large, with up to a thousand messages and lots of large attachments.
My results each time, no matter what gyrations I attempted on the client and server, including starting with a completely fresh Library/Mail directory and an empty IMAP mailbox on the server, always ended up within half an hour with Mail’s activity window showing “[Account ] Synchronizing with server” and “Adding Messages” forever. Yes, I let it run overnight once, just in case. It doesn’t use any network or CPU when in this state. It appears blocked.
The workaround is to use POP on my Tiger machine until Apple manages to fix this bug. I was hopeful that 10.4.1 would do it, but no luck. Radar Problem ID 4105091 remains open and annoying!
For the record, I think it is weak to break such an important application, especially for as long as its been since 10.4.0 came out. I would have reverted to Panther, but I need Java 1.5 for my work and don’t feel like using another computer running Panther just for email.
Every year in the early Spring, we get a notice to pay the dues for our neighborhood’s Homeowners Association. Last year, they took a vote to try to roll membership to the pool in to the annual dues, but thankfully that didn’t happen. The pool membership is on the order of a few hundred dollars, and you can’t take pets there.
Andrea had so much fun at the lake earlier this week that she wanted to take me back up there yesterday. Turns out there was a wakeboarding contest going on at Wildwood Park, which we feared would make the place a zoo, but it actually did little more than provide us some additional visual interest, as our picnicking site had an excellent view of the contest route. We didn’t stick around to see the expert level competition, so we saw more wipe-outs than cool tricks, but it looked like everyone was having a good time so who cares? I took a few snapshots of everyone enjoying the day, but sometimes a baby and a puppy are enough of a handful you can’t really worry too much about taking pictures.
“What do those two paragraphs have in common?” I’m glad you asked! The lake costs only $2.00 per car for a day pass, we can take Elizabeth AND Finley swimming, and it’s got a lot of shade from all the tall trees, which of course the developers cut down when they built our neighborhood. Even if you consider gas and the inconvenience of driving ten miles to the lake, that’s a lot of visits before its cost begins to approach that of a pool membership. Andrea and I talked it over, and we would also like Elizabeth and Finley to have varied experiences as they grow, rather than spending all their time doing one thing, like going to the pool. There’ll be plenty of time for repetition later!
