Never mind the election. Let's talk about important stuff. Let's talk about TiVo.
Since Jay, Dave and Conan were all in reruns last week, I seized the opportunity to have my office TiVo upgraded. On Wednesday, I took it in to a company called Weaknees and on Thursday, I went by and they handed it back to me. When it went in, it had a maximum capacity (on the slowest speed) of 80 hours. Now, at Basic Quality, I get 322 hours and 18 minutes.
I found Weaknees by asking about on some TiVo-oriented Internet forums. Their main stock-in-trade is selling kits with which you can upgrade your TiVo at home with very little technical expertise. I could probably have bought one and done the conversion myself but since the Weaknees office happens to be not far from my home — and since I'm busy and they'll do the installation for fifty bucks — I decided to let them handle it. Their website, as you'll see, explains the process in a pretty clear manner…and the site's also chock full of info about TiVos and how they work and what to do when they don't.
The neat thing here, beyond the fact that I can now record every stupid show I could ever want to watch, is that my TiVo is reborn…but it's still the same one with the same lifetime subscription. As you surely know, a TiVo requires a sub to the TiVo service and that will run you (currently) $12.95 per month or $299 for the life of the machine. I bought the latter…but that means that when this TiVo wears out and needs to be replaced, I'll have to buy a new subscription. The TiVo upgrade I had done installs two new hard disks and since that's the part most likely to wear out on the machine, I have an almost-new machine which continues the old sub. So far, I'm very happy.
In other electronics news around my house: My favorite digital camera is my Nikon Coolpix 990 — it's the one I use for all those fabulous raccoon pics — or at least, it was my favorite. Today, I found that a tab on the battery compartment has broken off, making it impossible to close the door…which makes it impossible to use the camera. A quick search of our beloved Internet yields the info that this happens an awful lot on the Coolpix 990 — a design flaw that has been corrected on later models. And of course, it's one of those design flaws that usually doesn't show up until the thing is out of warranty. Lovely. I'm told Nikon will fix it if I ship them the camera and $150 and wait a few months to get it back…and there's no guarantee that little tab won't snap off again. You can imagine how happy I am about this.