Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > May > 25 > Entry
Great feats of incremental upgrading
I never understood why people whittle; taking a knife to a piece of wood for hours and hours to make a duck’s bill or a scary wood figurine.
It just seemed like an inordinate amount of work for very little gain to me. Unless, of course, you’re in prison making a shiv. Then, I could see the utility.
Of course, the whittling people could find many reasons to think I get even fewer results from pursuits I spend a good deal of time on. Sure, video games. I’ll give you that one.
On Saturday, I even freaked myself out with the number of hours I spent doing something that was geeky even for my house. (You get a +3 savings throw against being called a geek in my home; +4 if it involves karaoke or “Dance Dance Revolution”) I spent the better part of a morning using my PC to interface with the two TiVo boxes in my house to download software updates in lieu of doing it over a phone line (which I don’t have; we’re all cell phone at home).
I first researched this a year ago before I made the DirectTV-TiVo jump; the TiVo box needs to make phone calls to order Pay-Per-View or to get software updates. Without a phone line, I didn’t know if I’d be able to use their TiVo box.
It turns out you can, with some finagling. First, you need a serial-to-stereo null modem cable, a wire you’ll only ever use for this specific purpose, and that you’ll need to get online or from a wiring savant at Radio Shack. Then you mess around in Windows XP for hours trying to get your TiVo to talk to and through your computer out onto the Internet, bypassing firewalls and networking settings. Then it dials out online and spends 45 minutes “Negotiating” the connection (especially if it’s been a year since you did your last update, which is the case with me).
If your’e lucky, it then downloads sweet, sweet update data. Then the TiVo restarts, installs its new updates from a separate disk partition and BOOM! You have a very, very small change in features. In this case, my standard TiVo box can now do folders (it can group, say, 21 episodes of “Smallville” into a single folder instead of showing them all in the Now Playing menu) and the menus themselves are a little faster.
The upgrade to my other box, an HDTiVo was even less noticeable; I’m not even sure what issues the latest updates addressed, but I’ve yet to see any major difference in using it.
What humbles me, though, is that my little mid-morning of moving set-top boxes around the house and connecting a cable to a computer are small potatoes in the world of Extreme TiVo Upgrading. People are swapping their hard drives for ones with hacked extra goodies, adding high-speed network connections where there aren’t any and adding enough store capacity to keep yourselves in “Simpsons” reruns for the rest of your life.
One guy, who doesn’t even consider himself a hard-core TiVo hacker, has got his TiVo networked and continuously online to display all the shows on his machine and even the ones he’s got scheduled to record.
So my little feat of upgrading magic, which manages to stump quite a few TiVo fans, is just a little bit of tech whittling; a lot of movement for just a few shavings off the home geek block of wood.
I’m sure the guy in prison carving the shiv is making much better use of his time.
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