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September 7, 2005

Quick Hits: School, BDFL Draft, Tivo

Been away from the blog the past few days due to real big stuff. Ryan started kindergarten this week, so, well, you know, we did too. ;) He was great getting on the bus for the first time yesterday; he was really ready for it. It's different not to be dropping him off at daycare or picking him up from there. One thing Melissa and I are doing that's different is that we're picking him up from school on alternate days as opposed to using the after-school program. More quality time.

We got together for the BDFL 2005 draft last night. I just put together a podcast featuring our first two rounds and some post-draft conversation. It'll be posted soon. Scott was a great host and made us all feel at home. Thanks for the wings and Foster's! (I was stuffed!)

I bought a Sony Series 1 Tivo unit (SVR-2000) on the cheap, mainly to see if I could use it as a digital VCR, manually setting up recordings without using the Tivo service. I also wanted to connect in to its serial port and play with some of its Linux underpinnings (after backing it up to another hard drive first). It's looking like it'll complain if it can't check in with the mothership via the modem. Anyone that has experience with even lightly hacking the Series 1 Tivos, please weigh in. I'm reading as much online info as I can, but most of the hacks seem to be geared towards those actually using the $12.95/month Tivo service (which isn't for me).

I might tweak my templates here a little more over the weekend. We'll see.

Posted by Alex Harden on September 7, 2005 8:03 PM |

Comments

Yep, TiVo's willing to allow only so much with regards to hacking, but they are certainly not going to allow people to use the box without forking over some money.

Before you do anything, you'll really need to buy a network card from someplace like 9thtee.com. It'll make things so much easier than going over the serial port (which is a lot harder to get into on later versions of the software).

Posted by: Don | September 8, 2005 6:30 AM


I've got a Series 1 Tivo, but I've never hacked into it... too much $$ to risk.

With the earlier versions of the Series 1, calling in wasn't required, but I remember that Tivo changed that to discourage people from doing what you're trying to do.

Maybe you could find an image of an earlier version of the software?

Posted by: Spot Toxic | September 8, 2005 9:09 AM

Yeah, I've been doing some searching on this scenario. Including "downgrade" in the searches actually pulled up some info that I think supports the hope that I'll be able to do what I want. I need to go through Guided Setup (and have it dial in) to change the input from Satellite to Cable. It's been disconnected less than a week, so I think its account'll still be active. Once I've successfully done that (my first attempt to do that upstairs over a very long, coupled-twice phone line failed) and disconnected it, we'll see if I continue to have manual record even after it stops getting the guide data.

Posted by: aharden | September 8, 2005 4:14 PM

I got through Guided Setup earlier this evening and successfully set up my channels. I moved the unit up to the bedroom and will enjoy the schedule until it expires. ;)

Posted by: aharden | September 8, 2005 7:39 PM

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