Today (and a little bit of yesterday) was good with my tech goodies. With the DST situation, my hacked Tivos were about to have some problems. Yesterday they flashed up a message that said something like:
DST is three weeks early and your Tivo will work just fine, but the time displayed will be an hour off and any manually added recordings will need to be adjusted.
At work, there has been a mad dash to update all the machines that are affected by the DST change. My FreeBSD and linux boxes are all okay. So, last night I found the following link for my Directv tivos:
Hot damn! This worked flawlessly. For those of you that don’t know, if you have a Directv Series II tivo and have hacked it, you can’t have it dial in for its updates… otherwise any downloaded updates will whack your hacks and you have to start all over again. So I, and many many people, can’t simply have the DTiVo dial in and get the updates. You’ll have to do it manually. This worked nicely.
While I was at it, I also upgraded “tivowebplus” to version 2.0 which is a release candidate. I actually had to “downgrade” to 1.3.0 from 1.3.1. I can tell already I need to reinstall hackman. That’s easy (if you have done it before).
I also have an update on my cheapo HTPC. The CDROM/IDE drive issue never worked out. But I did find this link to install Ubuntu via Knoppix. This worked good, but I must have foobarred the grub portion since I am getting kernel panics when booting. I’ll have to monkey with it later, but I did spend a good bit of time on it this weekend.
Here’s some other “advanced” ways to install Ubuntu:
I also got some “eval” networking gear from a person in my office. Therefore I think I might be able to help my brother-in-law with his networking issue and the ultimate location of this HTPC. More on that as I work on it and his situation.
I’ve been thinking what’s the best thing to do with the gear I got from the company. I really want to do an honest eval, but the challenge is trying to come up with real world situations. I’ll sleep on it and see what comes up in my head in the morning.
I knew my tivo was doomed because it is really old but I though Kelly’s tivo was going to be ok and I didnt want to update it if I didnt need to because we actually have very few phone outlets. Kelly got a call on the answering machine from a computer at DirecTV telling her about the need to make a daily call. Well I woke up and checked and saw that zaboomafoo was on and that the schedule said it was on so I was of correct and we were all set. She asked what time it said and I went back and found it was wrong. I strung the phone cord all across the house and did the daily call and fixed hers and then I hit mine.