Friday, December 27, 2002

Niek has blown away his blog and started anew. I wish he had kept his post from yesterday because he had some very interesting comments regarding RSS. I don't use RSS and to be honest, other than the geeky gee whiz factor (which at a certain level is spiffy), I just don't get the whole fascination with RSS. RSS feeds, to me, are sort of like ticker tape news items. I think the ticker tape paradigm is fine for news headlines. But I've never liked it for blogs. Half the fun, and a good part of the meaning, of blogs are the blog sites themselves. An RSS feed is simply a text only feed of the latest post. A blog's look and feel, its je ne sai quais, its essence, is totally lost with RSS. I find the blogs I like and I visit those blogs regularly. I do not use an RSS feed to filter my view. 9:53:05 PM    comment []

The TiVo saga continues. We got a Linksys Wireless Router and a Wireless Bridge. But we also need an ethernet-usb adapter which does not appear to be available in Anchorage. So I ordered one that should be here on Monday. In the interim, I've set up the new Wireless Router and it's very nice - it's signal is stronger than my very vanilla Wireless Access Point it replaced. Next up is to get the bridge working this weekend so everything is ready for the adapter on Monday. 6:24:54 PM    comment []

So the exchanged TiVo can't dial out either. I think our phone line is soooooo noisy (nearby radio station interference) that the TiVo modem won't work. So Peter and I are off to Best Buy again. We're either going to get a Wireless Modem jack (the wireless should clean up the interference issue) or we're going to implement a hack: TiVo Series 2 boxes have USB ports. It looks as if we can set-up a wireless bridge to hook in with our wireless network and everthing will magically happen. Actually that's probably not quite the case. It looks as if we need a Router with a built-in DHCP server and NAT. Which is fine - we need to put in a firewall anyway. All of this is a hack and not sanctioned by TiVo. However, the Tivo community site documents it quite well here. 2:35:44 PM    comment []

Off to Best Buy to exchange our TiVo for a working model. Wish me luck! 10:01:12 AM    comment []

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