I don’t know what got into me yesterday, but I had an urge to spend money and, as often happens at those times, I did. I’m now a TiVo customer.
I watch some TV and enjoy it. I watch some TV and hate it. Sometimes it’s just on. The problem I have always have is finding something to watch. Often the stuff I like is on at 11 A.M. on a Monday (some movie no doubt) and I can’t see it. The problem is that I never remember to see what’s on and then set a recording for it.
TiVo, as I’m sure most folks know, is supposed to make all of this easier by giving you a number of different ways of doing your recordings.
- Keyword searches – I like this one. Put in “baseball” and get a list of things that may relate to baseball.
- Actor/Director searches – not so much for me, but when the itch comes, I’ll scratch it. All the Sean Young movies you could ever want. 🙂
- Suggestions – this works for Netflix, maybe it’ll work here.
- I hate this one…what your favorite “star” is watching. Turns out Donald Trump watches Donald Trump. Who knew?
The thing I like about it is that I can record stuff at work over the net. If one of my co-workers asks if I’m going to watch “Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah” tonight, and I’ve no plan of even being home, I can find it and let my TiVo box know I’d like to have it recorded. I might even watch it.
Now I’ll admit this almost never happens at work. The first of the two guys I work with has little children so the only thing he claims is on at his house is “Barney.” The other guy has big screen television, but doesn’t have cable or DirectTV, or even an antenna. He just uses it to watch DVDS. Each to his own I guess.
The hardest part so far is figuring out how to get the TiVo box on my Airport Express network. The problem I had was the TiVo wireless adapter wasn’t accepting the password for my network. It seems that even with a text password (as opposed to Hex), you have to enter the Hex equivalent. Getting that proved to be a pain, or rather very easy, depending on your point of view.
Apple has cleverly (a bit too cleverly maybe) installed a little button (it looks like a lock) that spits out the Hex equivalent of your network password in their configuration software. The thing is, you have to know it’s there. I didn’t, hence a lot of wasted time. I could of been having a V8, but no…
In any case, it’s all up and running now and I hope to watch something tonight that I programmed from work. It turns out there’s this episode of the Avengers and….
Aloha!