HD TiVo

Tonight I ventured into the realm of trying to set up the HD Tivo. This turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would, party because my crazy setup of 1 DVD Player, 1 DVD Recorder, 1 Regular TiVo and a regular cable input results in a maze of wires that can sometimes even leave me scratching my head as to where the splits occur and what's suppose to go where. At first I was able to get the new TiVo set up and working, but in the process lost access to regular cable. One cable splitter later I fixed that problem. Getting the cable splitter took some doing. I thought it was in the furnace room with all my other tools, but instead it was in my office (for those that have seen my office in it all it's cluttered glory, you may know why finding it was a tad difficult). Luckily Ginger had gone through and cleaned up my office a couple months ago before we had company for Thanksgiving, so I had only had two months worth of clutter since then to sort through, so it was easier to find than I was expecting it to be.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that at first each TiVo remote was controlling both TiVos. So that took a while to sort out although at the current time I think it's still a problem, even though we went through the steps that was suppose to fix it. Other minor issues are they changed where the "Select" button on the TiVo remote is. I realize this is just an aesthetic change, but it's annoying. The "Select" button is now the center of the Arrow navigation and the "Mute" button is where the "Select" used to be (it's going to take me a long time to unlearn that aspect of the remote). All that pales in comparison to what I see as the big problem. The big problem as I see it is that the HD Tivo didn't seem to locate the digital channels that the regular HD TV can see. In particular 4-1 (NBC) and 7-1 (ABC). It found FOX (5-1) and CBS (9-1), but from what I've seen in general nothing is ever broadcast on those HD channels. It did locate all the WETA channels (26-1, 26-2, 26-3 and 26-4) and the CW channel (50-1), so I know it can actually display HD channels, but for some reason it just won't pick up NBC or ABC. I had originally believed that these HD channels were coming across on the regular analog cable, but now I'm not so sure. Now I believe these may be off the air channels. Not sure how the TV can pick them up though since I don't have an antenna input to the television (unless it's got a built in one inside it somewhere). But even so, if the TV can see the channels, and the TiVo can see some of the channels, I'm not sure why the TiVo can't see all the off the air channels that the television can. Not sure what to try next, I may end up having to talk to TiVo support or something (there's a conversation I really don't want to have since I just know I need level 2 support and the level 1 support guys will just annoy me to no end).

And finally let's have a Blogger shout out. While I've been known to complain sometimes (okay, a lot of times) about things Blogger is doing that I disagree with, I wanted to make sure they know when they do something I like (not that I believe for a second anyone from Blogger or the Blogger team will actually see this). The new automatic spell checking as you're entering text is nice (as is the suggestions when you right click on the offending word). And while this feature has been around in word processors for ages, it's new to Blogger's text input.

Ben pointed out that this is actually a feature that's part of Firefox 2.0 (which I recently installed) and not Blogger. And here I was trying to be nice to Blogger for once.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting for a moment that it's going to eliminate all my errors, nor will it do anything to fix the plethora of grammatical mistakes I make from rewriting sentences and leaving out / adding words, but it does catch some stuff quicker than having to use the spell check option.