Posts Tagged “TiVo”

It’s no secret that I have a movie theatre for a television and that we enjoy watching movies at home. But I’m also the parent of a small child and we have a fairly strict policy of what we allow our child to view. Still, we enjoy getting cozy on the couch for a good family movie. So the issue becomes WHAT to watch. The challenge is to find movies that are clean and appropriate for her while at the same time are able to hold my interest.

As I said, we’re careful about what television shows she sees. I’ve even vetoed some Blue’s Clues episodes because of the way they often handle conflict, encourage entitlement, and promote drama and whininess. And don’t even get me started on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and how they routinely teach ’scientific’ principles that defy the laws of physics.

Everything she watches is played off TiVo, giving us the ability to skip over commercials. Although I must admit that it is mostly so we can avoid her falling for kids advertising and wanting every cheap toy that is pushed in her face. So we simply remove the pushing. We also don’t watch any non-kids shows when she is around, which basically amounts to ‘when she is awake.’ And if the TV is playing live-tv, it’s always on the food channel – which has proven to be a completely kid-safe channel.

For movies, as a general rule I believe in the MPAA rating system. G-rated movies are probably fine for her.  PG, or Parental Guidance, means that it might or might not be appropriate – and we need to pre-view the movie to know if it’s cool before she sees it. And I figure she can probably watch PG-13 movies when she’s 13 – but we’ll see when we get there. With only G movies to choose from, the short list gets stale fast. The problem with the PG rating is that it’s too wide a range – movies can be fine for 6 year olds or barely appropriate for 12 year olds. Overall I think there is a serious shortage of good family movies. And it’s a genre that is not target by indie film makers, which is why I have a passion to try to eventually fill that gap.  But I digress…

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My buddy Andrew sent in this photo. He has the same HR10-250 that I have, but his days-without-a-daily-call count trumps mine by almost a year. He was wondering if he gets a prize. Hey, maybe as a reward I’ll play some Xbox with you.

UPDATED: Almost 3 years ago (on 2/18/06) I spent WAY too much $$ for an HD DirecTV TiVo. Then a few months later on 4/8/06 (1000 days ago) we moved into a new house and the TiVo was no longer connected to a phone line. I expected that, like the Series 2 TiVo’s, it could use an internet connection to get it’s programming information – but it can’t. I’ve tried several times over the past few years to get it to connect but it’s never been able to. Not in this house anyway.

The good news is that since it’s a DirecTV TiVo it gets it’s programming information from the satellite signal and doesn’t really need to make a call. Yet every day it gives me a message that ‘The Recorder has not made a successful call for the past XXX days’. I suspect that DirecTV wants it hooked to a phone line so they’ll know if I’ve watched any PPV that they don’t know about. Well, we’ve been counting down to today to see if my HD DirecTV TiVo will sucessfully roll over from 999 days to 1000, or if something bad will happen. Read… »

Happy New Year! About an hour ago there was a roar outside that sounded like a 747 driving down my quiet residential street. It was the constant and combined blasts of thousands of fireworks going off 10 to 15 miles away at the Las Vegas Strip. It was so loud that it could even be heard over the phone. My buddy David and I were discussing our predictions for 2009. At this late hour I can’t remember all of them, but here are a few to get the ball rolling. Jump in and add your own predictions down in the comments…

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Ok.. I’m fairly certain that in 25 days this thing is just going to say “The Recorder has not made a daily call in 1000 days.” But what if it doesn’t? Gotta keep counting down the days just in case.

As a coder I would say that it’s more likely for it to choke at a more ‘binary-based’ number, like 1024. OR to really think it through, maybe at the maximum value of a integer. We know that it didn’t stop at 127 or 255, so it’s more than an 8-bit value. A 16-bit SHORT INT would max out at 32767. But it’s rare for a coder to use a short, I always use ints. Obviously, I didn’t write the code, but first of all we know this is Unix based. It could be C, C++, or maybe Java. Either way, most likely the value for the number of days is calculated fresh every day from the date of the last phone call sync to today.  This is how I would do it… Read… »

Has anyone else noticed lately that the industry hasn’t quite figured out the whole 4:3 vs 16:9 thing? This is one of many ads I saw last night during Chuck that completely ignored the fact that the majority of american televisions are still 4:3.  I have an original HD DirecTV Tivo and an HD projector. I don’t get local channels in HD yet and was watching the 4:3 NTSC feed of Chuck.  I don’t know if DirecTV is just taking the HD feed and cropping the sides off or what.  But either way, it is the responsibility of the people making the ads to protect any important information inside of 4:3 title safe.  (By that I mean the Editor or the Producer or the Ad Agency or the dude at Microsoft who said “sure that looks awesome”)  In this case (see photo) the Windows ad “Life Without Walls” the “S” is completely cut off and on most TV’s the word “WALL” would also be cut off due to the 10% action safe. In another major ad last night the on the screen talent was half outside of 4:3 safe – literally one eye on screen and one off.  Again on an older TV that probably means you can only see his arm flapping around.

Here’s a message to the dude (or chick) at Microsoft who paid millions of dollars for that mess… if the majority of people watching the ad can’t see the last half of your tag line, how is your message getting across?  Surely the tag line “Windows – LIFE WITHOUT” is not what you were hoping to communicate.  But that is the message that 80% of viewers saw Monday night.  Maybe you need a new editor/producer/ad agency to give millions of dollars to. Call my people and we’ll talk.

My HD TiVo now hasn’t made a daily call in 950 days.  Only 50 days remain until it either rolls over to 1000 or dies in a fiery blaze of unhandled exceptions.

Oh and yes that’s me taking a picture of me casting a shadow from my projector onto my wall.

Funny I was chatting with a buddy yesterday who said that his HD TiVo was at around 900 days when he finally hooked it up to a phone line.  Apparently there’s a huge software revision number jump to be made and it will speed it up.  But at this point we have to wait it out and see what happens.

My HD DirecTV TiVo has not made a daily call in 940 days. We’re counting down the next 60 days until it reaches 1000. Will it roll over to 1000 or is there some sort of Y2K programming bug that makes it blow up?

Two years ago I tried to make a daily call but it could never connect.  I’m not sure it has ever connected to the TiVo Service. Of course that hasn’t stopped DirecTV from charging me a DVR service fee every month.  You’d think after paying about $700 for the box they’d include service. Since it is a DirecTV TiVo it gets programming information from the Satellite, so I’ve never been without show information.  However when this latest television season started all my season passes showed “no upcoming episodes” and it was weeks before we figured out that we were missing the new shows.  This was when we coined the term “TeVil” which is what we call it when your TiVo screws you by not recording something or by cutting off the final critical moment of a show.

This is by far the slowest TiVo I’ve ever had. When the system is cold it takes about a full minute to pull up the main menu. I suspect that the sluggishness could be from all the messages.  Each day it stores a new message telling me that it didn’t connect.  Every 4 months or so I’ll delete a bunch of them, but it’s a very time consuming task and there are probably hundreds of messages in there now.

I’ll post update photos every few weeks as we count down the next 60 days. It should be about as interesting as waiting to see if Archer Quinn ever makes a perpetual motion machine.