Okay, I think it’s actually heat and not humidity.

A few months ago, I had the same problem with my TiVo. At the time, it was sitting on top of the DVD player. I fixed the problem simply by setting TiVo beside the DVD player instead of on top of it.

Anyway, I’m going to keep track of what it is doing until the air conditioning gets turned back on. And it is recording the choppiness, sadly (I tried transferring the recordings to the computer to watch but if they were recorded when it was choppy, then they were choppy on the computer too).

March 25 - was okay in the morning, became choppy around 3pm, temperature in the apartment was between 85-88F, TiVo’s internal temp was between 43-47C
March 26 - recordings ceased to be choppy around 2:15am (a recording at 2am was choppy, one at 2:15 was not); became choppy again sometime between 10am and 3pm; I reboot at 8pm which cleared it up for about 10 minutes, apt temp was about 83-85F, TiVo’s internal temp was 43C
March 27 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 40C, reboot; stayed normal until about 3pm
March 28 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 42C, reboot; stayed normal until about 3pm (noticing a pattern?); at about 7pm, TiVo temp was 43C
March 29 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 42C, reboot; stayed normal until about 2pm; at 6pm, reboot and taking a suggestion from Ben, I moved the unit out of the entertainment center into the floor, and it has stayed normal since
March 30 - still normal at 7am, TiVo temp was 40C
April 2 - air conditioning is working! TiVo’s temp is down to 37C so I can move it back into the entertainment center

Stay tuned to this post for more *exciting* updates.

Here’s a few posts I found on the subject on TiVo’s support forums that support my theory:
http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10249072
http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10180383

Anyone want to donate a fan?

And now for a real update…

Not a lot has really been going on lately.

The apartment complex is being renovated, and they have been working on it since sometime last fall. From what I understand, they fired the first group of people and then hired some new ones. In the meantime, my balcony was closed off for the entire winter, and supposedly they are adding new doors and windows this week. The biggest problem? They shut the air conditioning off.

It is regularly between 85-90 degrees in my apartment during the day, even with windows open. Now, I’m a naturally cold person and I like heat, so while that’s an annoyance, it’s not THAT big a deal to me. The thing that annoys me the most is that the humidity in my apartment is messing up my TiVo. It’s nearly impossible to watch because the audio constantly crackles. It only does it every now and then, but this afternoon it wasn’t letting up (I was able to watch “Splash” this morning without having any problems). I didn’t understand why this was going on at first, so I spent 20-30 minutes googling the problem. And finally I narrowed it down to: it’s too humid. Today is probably the hottest it’s been in here (at least while I’ve been home) so that would explain why it’s being so relentless today (since I’ve had the windows and sliding door open). As far as I can tell, it’s not recording the crackles, so as soon as the air conditioning comes back on (they say it will be on before April 1…still a week away) I should be able to watch the stuff I’ve recorded crackle-free. And I can usually watch stuff at night when it’s not so hot in here. But I was trying to get some sewing done, and wanted the TV on for background noise. And a staticky crackling sound is NOT good background noise.

As for everything else, I went to Michelle’s baby shower yesterday. I took a few pictures, which I’ll add in a little bit. I went and saw “300″ a couple weeks ago, which I recommend. Ben’s birthday is next weekend. MTAC is in three weeks. I’m doing good on costumes (I think). Right now, I’m at: Misa - 100% done, Celes - 50%, Aeris (Wallmarket) - 90%, Terra - 90% (I need to do some touch-ups), Locke - 5% (I’ve bought some fabric and that’s about it), and Cloud (Wallmarket) - 70%. It’s hard to get motivated with it being so hot in here.

I think that’s about all that’s been going on.

The new TiVo is awesome.

I can listen to my mp3s when my laptop is in the other room. I could buy movie tickets somehow if I wanted to. The interface itself is better organized. My programs can get grouped together so you don’t scroll through and see 500 episodes of Seinfeld listed. Now you can just go to the Seinfeld folder and see all the episodes listed my title. Too cool.

Anyway, I just bought tickets to the Tom Petty concert in Atlanta in September. The Strokes are opening. This concert is going to rock.

RIP, Mr. TiVo.

I came home from work today and turned on the TV. Seinfeld was on, so I started watching that. Sabrina called me, so I talked to her for awhile. College Championship Jeopardy came on. At some point, I looked over at the TV screen and it was black. Maybe I accidentally sat on the remote and turned it off. I checked. The TV was on. Hmm. Maybe TiVo was being weird. I unplugged him, waited a bit, and then plugged him back in. The “Almost there…” screen came up. Then rebooted. Then the “Almost there…” screen. Then a reboot. Repeat. Repeat. I was scared.

Then Frances called me, so I told Sabrina I would call her back, since I hadn’t talked to Frances in awhile. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out why TiVo is scaring me. As much as I can figure out, he’s had a hard drive failure.

Now, I’m sure most of you know, the sweat, blood, and money that I have poured into TiVo in the past two and a half years. I upgraded his hard drive to a nice 120 gigs. I reworked his silly series 1 box into being able to use the Internet instead of the phone line. And all of this I did, using a faulty motherboard on my old desktop. So I spent many hours yelling and throwing things to get it to work.

So, what are my options? I could get a new hard drive, maybe a bigger one, and try to salvage the stuff that is on the drive. Or I could get a new TiVo.

If you haven’t looked at TiVo lately, they’ve come a long way. My series 1 box….records stuff. That’s about it. With a series 2, you can download the files to your computer, burn them to DVD, set up recordings online, check the weather, etc. I go to TiVo’s website just to see how much that would set me back, since I figure a new nice sized drive would be about $80.

Well, right now, they have a deal where you can get a refurbished series 2 TiVo for free with a year’s subscription. Well, of course, I’m going to have TiVo for a year. I can’t live without it. So, I ended up ordering a free TiVo, which should be here in about a week.

But first, let’s have a moment of silence for TiVo #1.

I suppose most of the recordings on there are replacable. There will be reruns and whatnot. It’s just going to take a few months to find that great episode of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and I’m sure they’ll never show that little animated short “Drink” on there again, but maybe I can find it online.

Or, if anyone knows if there’s a way to maybe transfer recordings from a potentially bad hard drive from a series 1 TiVo to a series 2 TiVo, let me know.

Finally got my TiVo set up on my network.

Which required installing a special ethernet card, installing crap on TiVo’s hard drive (and all the annoyance that comes with my defunct motherboard and unlocking the drive, etc etc), and all that. But it’s done now. So I have no need for a home phone any longer.

TiVo has hit a new low.

I got up this morning at about 10:00, walked into the living room, noted that TiVo was recording something, and turned on some music.

Two hours later, I note that TiVo is still recording. Now, I’m curious, since I figure it must be a movie or something equally exciting for TiVo to have been recording for two hours. So I turn on the TV.

TiVo has been taping the TV Guide channel, with two more hours to go. Yeah, I deleted that recording.

Anyway, it’s less than six hours before the Jewel concert! I’m working until 4:00 and then I’ll be on my way to Asheville. Yay!

My Illustrated Guide to Upgrading Your TiVo’s Hard Drive

I received my 120 GB hard drive today and I immediately went out and got myself a #10 Torx screwdriver so that I could install it.

So using this screwdriver and after a little bit of struggling (that thing was on there good!), the case came off.

Then I removed the 20 GB hard drive that was currently in there. I stuck both the old drive and the new drive into a PC.

After that, I put in the mfstools cd that came with my Hacking TiVo book and booted up the computer. However, it was showing that my TiVo drive was only 10 GB. After doing a little research on this, I found out it was locked. I had to get a DOS boot disk and copy over qunlock.exe to unlock the drive. After doing all that, I was finally good to go. So with a little Linux magic, everything on the old drive was copied over to the new one.

Then after about two hours, it was done. I took out the new drive and put it back into my TiVo.

And now my TiVo has 120 gigs!