Category: Tivo

  • The future of Apple computing isn’t all led by Apple

    There’s a great video up on Macworld’s site of a conversation between four highly knowledgeable Mac pundits about the “future of the Mac.” The participants were Daringfireball’s John Gruber and Tidbits’ Adam Engst along with Jason Snell and Dan Moren from Macworld. The discussion was interesting and worth the 48 minutes or so of my…

  • Why can’t anyone compare iTunes store video to Android’s offerings?

    The other day, Josh Topolsky at Engadget published a lengthy and detailed review of the new Samsung Nexus S smartphone which runs the very latest version of Google’s Android operating system. The 3,300 word review seemingly runs through every feature, includes a dozen or more pictures and generally appears to be the most thorough run…

  • Caught up with too many remote controls for the home theater

    One of the biggest problems so far with our home theater set-up is juggling the three remote controls plus keyboard/track pad needed to operate all the various devices. The Samsung TV has a control as does the Samsung Blu-Ray player. Each of those two controls can sort of control some of the functions of the…

  • New AppleTV may be great but it solves nothing

    “I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” Steve Jobs gives great gadget and he was in fine form on Wednesday…

  • Using a new HDMI Mac Mini with my TV: Early days

    This will be the first in a continuing series of posts about using a brand new Mac Mini with an HDMI port (purchased in June 2010) connected to a high-definition television. To read all of our adventures jumping through hoops, losing remotes and forgetting the password to bypass parental controls, see this page with all…

  • Apple’s iPad may be the perfect computer for kids

    I’m excited about Apple’s new iPad for a couple of reasons. While a lot of the iPad’s features and services had been leaked in advance, I found myself gasping along with the audience in San Francisco when the price was announced. This is a product that is going to have vastly more impact for under…

  • The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading

    Well, it’s been almost two months since Apple announced the huge expansion of higher-quality and DRM-free music in its iTunes Store “Plus” offerings and I think it’s fair to say that the upgrade process is an unmitigated disaster. Despite personally paying 30 cents per track to upgrade hundreds of tracks, Apple has erased my metadata,…

  • Amazon-Tivo ecosystem works for me

    Stumbling around Amazon’s Unbox video store looking for a movie to rent last night, I happened across “21.” It’s the film about a group of MIT students who beat the Vegas casinos to the tune of millions of dollars by counting cards at Blackjack as a team. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan…

  • Tivo tip: Shut down everything to transfer shows off a TivoHD

    For a while now, I’ve been trying in vain to move a copy of the film Notting Hill off my TivoHD and onto my iPod. It’s all legit. The TivoHD allows such a transfer using a Mac and Toast’s Tivo Transfer software. The Tivo itself is networked with one of Netgear’s Powerline HDX101 adapters, which…

  • Tivo already connects your TV to the web content you want

    We’ve been happy Tivo subscribers for almost two years now. We started with a Toshiba RS-TX20 model that also has an integrated DVD player/recorder. That was an awesome combination (just one remote!) but its been discontinued. Not just the model — the whole concept. So when we added a high-definition television set and Verizon’s FIOS…