Day: 20 April 2003

All this tivo hacking makes me thirsty!

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If you don’t watch the Simpson’s you don’t get the title of this blog. No big deal. I still thought it was funny. I actually did it. I was able to extract video from my tivo. I am working on the assumption that it is legal to do what I am doing since I am truly archiving my video for my own use. Like I had 50 video tapes with old TV shows on them. I have no plan on distributing anything. That being said, I was able to export video to my PC, and then encode it to a mpeg2 file. I have not yet been able to get it to a DVD and watch it in my DVD player, but I was able to view them on my mac. I used a program called tystudio. It is a Windows or Linux based client and a program running on your tivo called tyserver. Once configured you can even encode right off the tivo without copying files off of it. I have not let the indexing complete yet to do that, so I am extracting what they call the ty stream file and then converting to mpeg2 on my PC. it takes a while for an hour long show but it is worth it.

To get this extraction to work you do need to have done previous hacks to your tivo. Such as install and configure a network card, FTP, and Telnet. I had my hard drives upgraded and the network card installed for me by PTVUpgrade last year. It is cool. I can program the tivo over the network, or telnet into it. But this is the best feature so far.

So I am sitting here extracting video’s while doing my laundry and the dishes. This sunday is shaping into clean my apartment day. I am cleaning up the mess from a week of neglect, and cleaning crap off my tivo. Even with 120 hours or so you can fill these things up. I have been waiting for a solution like this for a while so I can get stuff off the tivo. I am a sci-fi fan. Yes, I like computers and science fiction, what a shock! I don’t like all sci-fi though. I am rather picky. So I liked this show that was out this september called firefly. I have most of them on Tivo, and I have not deleted them since the show was canceled. I figured keeping the tivo files was the only way I was going to see this show. Well I am extracting them now to save like 8 hours of space on the tivo. I also have like the past 10 24’s that I have not watched yet. Can you tell I am excited about the new found ability?

What I cannot seem to do is get simple html to show up in these entries. Not sure why. I am looking into what to do.

I just turned on the pinging options, so maybe someone will read these things now. I have not advertised this blog’s existence until now.

Gadgets good, shopping bad!

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We went drinking Friday night. A bunch of us from work went out. Rajive was back from the caman’s so he wanted to drink. Also out was Sam, Aaron, Miguel, & Vijay. All those guys are in my company’s development team. Also out was jennifer, from our call center. I had a good time. I did not drink though. I had a headache around lunch time so I took to butabital (aka furiset) and that is not the correct spelling. I am actually getting slightly concerned that I am taking this stuff like twice a week. I used to suffer and not take the drugs, but over the past 2 years I have taken some med or another whenever I get the feeling that I am getting a migrane. Going out and not drinking is always interesting since you see everyone all stupid. At least friday no one got sloppy drunk.

Miguel and sam were thinking of going to Las Vegas friday, but Miguel has to run a softball practice for the company Saturday so they are not going. They are planning on going one weekend soon. I think some other guys are going to try and go with them. I am interested in going but the weekend they are looking at right now is bad for me. I will be in chicago that monday so I cant do a redeye sunday night back to NYC.

I got my HP Ipaq thursday. It is really small. So far I like it allot. I just haven’t needed the bluetooth internet connection yet. Then I will hate it. I just went out and bought a cheap case at bestbuy on Saturday. It didn’t come with one. I am ordering a nice metal case but it does not come in until may 15. Those people at rhino skin are awsome. they make great PDA cases http://www.rhinoskin.com. I also got a 128 meg CF card. I think I could have gotten a cheaper one online but I was at the store already. I put a bunch of eBooks and documents on it. I will see if I need a bigger one.

I goto the BestBuy near the Roosevelt field mall in garden city long island. If you are from NYC you know what I am talking about. So since I was there, I decided to hit the mall. Man I cannot stand the mall anymore. I used to love to goto the mall. My friend Jayson and I would hang out there a least once a week. This wasn’t in college or high school. We were already out of school and just liked to go. Now it is so crowded and people have no manners. I was in J Crew and I saw some shirts I liked and I actually stopped and thought, hey I should get this online. The funny thing was I actually didn’t get the shirts. The line was really long and I figured “i could get it online” and not wait on line.

So now I have to go online and do some shopping for clothes since I didn’t buy any at the mall. Actually I am on hold with the online shopping. The union that represents the doormen in my building are thinking of going on strike Tuesday. if they do I won’t be able to receive any packages, since fedex and ups wont deliver. I guess they wont cross someone else’s picket line to deliver stuff. I don’t get it, but I am screwed by it. I am waiting and seeing until Tuesday.

Frontpage site fried!

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While trying to relay traffic from my apache server to my IIS server I caused IIS to stop responding. It probably just needs a reboot. I also realized that by pulling out pages from a front-page web and putting them into an apache server causes behind the scenes problems. Even after stripping out lots of frontpage code, more html remains that tries to reference the frontpage extensions. I knew that frontpage wrote bad html, but not this bad. It is not a big problem on my main site. I am working on my photo site now. That is a bigger problem. I have tons of pages, and hundreds of megs of images. I decided to do it from scratch even though I have a backup of the site. That backup has all the frontpage code. I am now generating page templates out of iphoto. Each category is exported separately and all I need to do is tie all the pages together into a cohesive site, and I have a new photo site. Sounds easy, but it will take some time.

While I am making these changes, I took it upon myself to clean up my photo album images. While doing this I realized that I have been taking less pictures over time, not more. I thought with a digital camera I would be taking more, but I guess I have not had much travel or stuff to take shots of.

I also need to learn how to do virtual sites in apache. that way I can keep the photo site name of photo.sitename…