Almost 4 years ago I became a DirecTV subscriber. It was SOOO much better and cheaper than my local cable company, which became part of Comcast shortly before I canceled. Plus they offered a real dual-tuner integrated TiVo unit long before anyone else considered such a thing. My, how things have changed…
This is a combo Rant and Geek Out article… Continue reading
I just got DirecTV installed yesterday. I can’t tell you how much better it is than the ancient cable system I had with crappy video and lacking channels I had 10 years ago. Now I have something like 150 channels. And what do I discover? I can watch Dances With Wolves 24 hours a day; I can relive all those lost afternoons in the mid-80s glued to MTV, thanks to VH1Classics; and my wife will probably set up a Season Pass on the new DirecTiVo for MacGyver.
Well, this weekend I went and upgraded my TiVo with a second drive. I had a Phillips single-drive 312, which had a 30-hour basic capacity. Well, I just upgraded it with an 80Gb Maxtor/CompUSA drive, along with the mounting bracket from 9th Tee (after a strange incident where they lost my order because it had a duplicate order number – and the owner of the other order was none other than Lukas, who I work with). I had absolutely no problems, and now I have a TiVo with 128 hours of basic quality available – and 35 hours of best quality. SWEEEEEET.
I also finally picked up a UPS for my home Linux box. I’ve been looking around trying to figure out the best support without shelling for a SmartUPS. I finally picked up an APC Back-UPS CS 350. I’m not looking for a ton of runtime – I just want a clean shutdown because the software RAID driver doesn’t recover well.
Turns out they only supply a USB cable, even though it supports serial as well. But, I had a USB 2.0 card that came with the motherboard. Tossed it in, and voila, with RedHat 7.3 all was detected. I also downloaded apcupsd, and after some aborted attempts managed to get it to work. So, if I lose power for more than about a minute, the system shuts down cleanly. Yippee!
