I am such a looser¹. I'm terribly suggestible. All you have to do to get me to want something is mention it a couple times in my presence, with the added bonuses that if I know you I'll probably give more weight to the mention, and if you actively recommend something instead of just mentioning it, I'll be all over it.

I do this with music a lot. This is why the Amazon Quick Picks thing gets me so much. Most of the time, all you have to do to get me to spend 12 bucks on a CD is tell me I'll probably like it. You could even lie. But if there's even the remotest probability of that being true, I'll probably buy it soon enough (cf. all the Belle and Sebastian I own now). Case in point is Moby, Play. Nicole told me twice that I'd like it. I listened to a couple of her MP3s and bought the CD the same night I downloaded them.

Do you own it? If not, buy it. You know how in the movie Alien when the Alien inserts himself into your stomach and there's not really way you can get him out? Play did that to my CD player.

Anyway, Tuesday morning when the NPR was going and I was in my usual stupor, something caught my ear and I found myself wide awake listening to the announcer talking about a member of Luscious Jackson and a member of the Breeders who had recorded an album under the name "Dusty Trails" (sounds like a great porn star name to me). They played several tracks and an interview with the chyx, who said that their goal was to emulate the movie background music of B films of the 60s. They hit it pretty close.

So I bought the CD last night. It's not bad, but the best tracks on it are the ones where they do the movie soundtrack thing, and not the ones that sound like Luscious b-sides. Anyway, it wasn't Dusty Trails that sent me to Circuit City.

It was TiVo.

I never met a gadget I didn't like (not true, but true enough for the purpose of this diary), and the TiVo does some spiffy things. But it costs too much and there are some interface things I don't like, and frankly the box is too big too. But I've been keeping my eye on the whole TiVo thing for a couple months now, as I randomly discovered while looking for some basic geeky information that there were some people who were working on hacking the filesystem with the goal of allowing you to use your own, larger disks in place of the ones you can buy.

Not long after I found that topic of discussion on a board, they'd done it. You can't replace the main drive with a larger one (you can replace it with an identical one, or with a larger physical disk imaged with the original's image - but inefficiently losing the extra capacity you paid for), but you can "bless" a new drive and pop it into your TiVo, thus magically adding capacity it didn't have before. Once you've done this you can't go back though, and you can't replace the disk with a different add-on disk, so you have to proceed with caution. I noted this, but the machines were still too expensive, and there was the announcement of the forthcoming DirecTV/TiVo combination unit, which will incorporate one or two DirecTV tuners and record the MPEG stream off the satellite directly, thus ensuring that the recorded product is pristine.

So the DirecTiVo (as it's sometimes been called) was the one I wanted, and I've been waiting. It's supposedly due in September, but I saw something else that said October, and I'm not holding my breath. They also say now that it will only have one tuner enabled, but it seems the second tuner may be there, just disabled. We'll see.

Anyway, the price of the basic, 14-hour TiVo has been $299 for a while, but it's now being discontinued in favor of a 20-hour model (there's a 60-hour one on the way, too). So it's on sale, sorta. If your local Sears has one, it's $199. Or you can go to Circuit City and get one for $299 with a $100 mail-in rebate from the store. Plus (but wait, there's more!) there's another $100 rebate from TiVo themselves, making that $299 unit cost $99 net.

Oh, and instead of the "blessing" process being long and convoluted and involving rebuilding a linux kernel ... it's now down to a boot floppy. Put the new drive in a machine, boot it from the floppy, run a little app on the floppy, and you've got a blessed disk. This whole thing has gotten trivial.

I only made it two days without buying one. Bought it last night after checking the web and finding out that two convenient Circuit City stores were out, but others in the area had them in stock, and then trying Sears first.

Brought it home, opened up the box, unscrewed the Torx screws on the back, and promptly voided my warranty. Ordered a couple disks (one to replace the original TiVo disk, saving it in case of emergency and for further copy generation if I want to do any additional hacking) which I'm hoping will be here tomorrow, and set about backing up the drive into segmented files on my local linux partition.

And since I didn't have the drives today, I did the segmented image again with different settings, just to compare (complete in half the time, only 2% larger). I'm a geek, it seems.

Of course, this means that I'm now short of ports on the new teevee, which was bought largely on the strength of the absurd number of ports it had.

Anyway, the TiVo at $99 fit below my impulse purchase threshold, so it was hard to avoid. The total with drives, rebates, and shipping is $267 for a 52-hour TiVo, which is much better than $299 for a 30-hour one (except for the pesky voided warranty, but I'm knocking on wood here).

Similar recent purchases due to the power of suggestion have included my Visor (ordered just a few weeks after seeing them at Internet World, when I couldn't stand it anymore), my Cannondale, my card wallet and money clip, and most of the shoes I own. Oh, and my DVD player. And I'm sure there's more.

 

 

 

 

loose v. loosed, loos·ing, loos·es.

v. tr.

1. To let loose; release: loosed the dogs.
2. To make loose; undo: loosed his belt.
3. To cast loose; detach: hikers loosing their packs at camp.
4. To let fly; discharge: loosed an arrow.
5. To release pressure or obligation from; absolve: loosed her from the responsibility.
6. To make less strict; relax: a leader's strong authority that was loosed by easy times.

Notice that none of these mean to fail. My biggest pet peeve on the net. The word is lose, (or loser), people.

link (18 aug)