With my birthday around the corner I’ve been scouting out potential gift ideas for those who are more inclined to purchase a gift for me than a simple money exchange. Some people feel that it’s impersonal to slip a few dollars into an envelope and others would rather take the “money route”, not knowing what to get the person. The fact is, there are some people that are hard to shop for and some, like me, are exceptionally easy.
Truth be told, my interests fall into three categories; books, games and movies. Games being the video game type and not necessarily the cardboard type and books generally having to deal with movies and fantasy peak my interest and fuel my imagination. My wife, however, feels that video games are a complete waste of time unless it’s SimCity, in which case she enjoys immensely — especially with the infinite Simoleon cheat.
For my pre-birthday this year, my wife and I took a trip to Staples and purchased a Linksys router and adapter. Afterwards we picked up a shiny new Tivo at $249 with a $100 rebate. Configuring the wireless network for our apartment was painless. Setting up the Tivo was an entirely different experience. You see, the Tivo, while touting its advanced digital video recording technology, needs a phone line to set up the channel lineup and other necessary items. The problem was that our apartment does not have a landline, therefore I hauled our Tivo to my inlaws, hijacked their phone and let it configure itself overnight (a total of 5–8 hours since it uses the internal 56k modem).
This morning I picked up the Tivo, brought it back to our apartment and hooked it up. The reason it needed “x” amount of hours was to upgrade the OS and add the channel lineup for the next two weeks. There is supposedly a hack where you can bypass the Guided Setup by phone and use your broadband network instead, but despite numeorus tries we couldn’t get it to work.
All said and done the unit itself works fine, perfect even. It’s a blast setting up shows to tape during the day when we’re at work and coming home to the shows we assigned. One of the cooler features of Tivo is the Season Pass, which allows you to configure Tivo to record the entire season of a specific show specifying whether you want reruns, first runs or both.
Aside from my vicious head cold, it’s been a great pre-Birthday for me.
Return it, go to Circuit City where you can get an instant $100 and an additional $100 MAIL-IN rebate. $50 bucks for a Tivo! You gotta get it before Sept. 30th though.
I have wanted to get a DVR for a while now, especially with new season of Survivor and The Apprentice. This Tivo for $50 deal (after rebate) does look quite nice.
I would definitely work on hacking it so I could extract video to my PC, and/or add a larger drive. Does anyone have any recommendations as to a site or book that discusses that accurately, so as not to destroy the system?
Happy pre-birthday.
Good for you! As the Tivo goes though, I’ve never seen the need for one with my less-than-meager TV watching habits. Or maybe I could watch more with it, who knows (provided it comes with a time-extending feature or something).
In any case, I guess you can now geet a kick of the biggest TiVo junkie I know online (Matt Haughey) who even runs something called PVRblog. And it seems to be pretty popular.
Colin: Thanks for the heads up. Too bad we won’t have the time to do the exchange as I would have much rather spent $50 than $150, but you live and learn.
Mike: We figured that we don’t spend a great deal of time in front of the television, however, when we do we’d like to only watch specific shows. Dealing with network lineups can be a pain and without a DVR it means you have to sift through all the muck. With Tivo, it’s easy to set up the unit to record a season’s worth of a show not to mention it’s a breeze to skip through the commercials and pausing live television is just awesome.
Donnie: Thanks man. It’s become a tradition for my family to get me gifts for my pre-birthday.
Beto: As noted above, we aren’t TV junkies, we just want to watch TV in its purest form.
Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.
Pre-birthday? Man, some guys just never grow up, but good for you Erik, you were a great son to raise and we had many happy birthdays together. So, happy pre-birthday and be safe and happy.
Love,
Dad
The techie-freak in me wants to get a TiVo, but the pratical side of me tells me to knock that crap off. I want one, but I don’t watch that much TV. Everyone tells me you end up watching more TV than you previously did with it, and I could definitely see myself eating up my weekends with beer and whole seasons of cartoons off of Adult Swim.
That could be bad.
The geekside will be interested to hear of your experiences, though, so as to convince the practical voice to buy one anyway.
Trust me, you’re going to LOVE it! TiVo was the best birthday gift I ever received. I don’t know how to watch regular tv anymore (I’m pondering why I can’t utilize the hotel’s broadband to connect to my machine at home when I travel and watch my selected programming… maybe it’s to come soon). I just can’t wait until the TiVo NetFlix partnership is final…
[…] I must blame Kartooner, (friend of Max) on this one for planting the bug a couple weeks ago.The decision came down to the Tivo for the base unit price and monthly subscription and Cox’s DVR service for an extra $13/month on my bill for hardware and service. After checking a couple sites filled with reviews, both positive and negative, I ended up going with Cox’s service for the simple reason that setting up a Tivo without a landline is a royal pain in the ass. While hacks are available to by-pass the landline setup, they don’t work reliably and my list of friends with landlines is slowly being diminished every time someone goes wireless only; never mind the fact that I’d probably be looking at hijacking their phone line for a few hours.Bottom line, I came home from work and had the unit up and running in 10 minutes. Granted, I’m not a card-carrying member of cult Tivo, but one has to wonder how much longer Tivo can stand on its own facing the threat of the non-technical, plug-and-play masses having easy access from their cable company.The model on my unit is a Motorola DCT6400, let the hacking begin. ——– […]