I’ve been neglecting this website for the past few weeks for a number of reasons.
Foremost I think is that as a side-effect of my main workstation still being down, I haven’t been spending (as) much time in front of a computer outside of work, and hence haven’t had as much opportunity to log any thought that might come across my mind. Also, my work, projects and (dare I say it?) social life have been keeping me rather occupied.

I installed a TurboNET adapter in my TiVo box a couple weeks ago. Instead of getting program information updates via modem, my TiVo now fetches this data via the Internet. What’s more, I can control my TiVo through a web browser; the upshot of this is that with my firewall configured just right, I could make programming changes from any web browser anywhere. (Granted I’ve rarely felt the need to do so.) What’s most interesting about having a networked TiVo is that I can download the recorded video stream to another computer, record it onto a VCD or writeable DVD disc, save it as a video file on my laptop, etc. My experiments in this domain have so far met with limited success—the video stream tends to have extraneous bits of random data. Furthermore, decoding and re-encoding the TiVo data into a format I use (for example DivX) is a rather slow and labour-intensive process. The software for extracting the stream isn’t quite ready for prime-time yet but I’m betting it will continue to improve.