Monthly Archives: October 2010

Reviving the old TiVo

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The last couple of nights my TiVo has become noisier and noisier. There are only two moving parts in a TiVo, the fan and the hard disk, but you can bet it’s always the more expensive item, the hard disk, that’s failing.

After disassembling the box and removing the hard disk, my first thought was to clone the disk using a freeware program from MFSLive. Eight hours later, the new drive was installed and the TiVo went into a continuous rebooting process. Not good. So I reinstalled the old hard disk to see if I could couch *another* clone out of it. No such luck – I think the cloning process had worn it out.

Into my bag of tricks to dig up an old copy of the ultimate disk restorer, Spinrite. Spinrite works by reading and writing every sector and refreshing the disk. After an overnight run, Spinrite announced all sectors readable, but I still had a boot problem. Let’s face it, the disk data was corrupted.

My TiVo box is out of warranty as I had voided it by upgrading the hard disk to a larger size. Additionally, what TiVo wanted for repair wasn’t much less than a new TiVo would have cost.

Plan C was to do a clean install with DVRUpgrade’s InstantCake software. $40 later I found out the software only worked with PATA CD-ROM drives. Guess what, both of my PCs are SATA only. So what follows is a patch to get InstantCake to work with SATA CD-ROMs:

  • Create an InstantCake CD-ROM from the ISO and boot from it.
  • After it finishes the boot process, type Ctrl-C and drop into the Linux shell.
  • Type the following:

# mknod /dev/sr0 b 11 0
# vi /usr/sbin/PTVbake3

  • Scroll down to line 232, type “i” to enter insert mode and change lines 232 and 234 as shown:

Old code:

echo ” other ——> other”
echo “”
prompt_in ” Please select from the following:” “sda” “sdb” “sdc” “sdd” “other”

New Code:

echo ” other ——> sr0”
echo “”
prompt_in ” Please select from the following:” “sda” “sdb” “sdc” “sdd” “sr0“

  • Type “esc”, “:” and then “x”
  • Restart the script by typing “PTVBake3″

When the prompt asks for your CD-ROM’s address, tell it sr0 and it should execute perfectly!

Obviously you lose all your saved programs and season passes, and have to perform another 30 minute self-guided install. And it will also take a day or two for all the EPG and OS updates that had been collected to be re-installed, but after that, you’ll be back up and running for a lot less than TiVo wanted!

(Oh, and since I had a huge hard drive in my inventory, I used the opportunity to upgrade to a 1TB drive – Now I have 140+ HD hours of recording space. Voila!)

Internet Brands is evil!

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Today’s my birthday and I’m not altogether thrilled about it. Partly because I’m no longer 21, but also because for the last several years I’ve awoken to mailboxes brimming with “Happy Birthday” SPAM.

Many websites have forums to share experiences, ask questions, get help and so on. Typically, you register for an account, confirm you’re over 13 (for COPPA purposes), select or receive your password and you’re on your way. And over the years I’ve availed myself of forum resources for car questions, computer questions, and much more. Usually someone in the worldwide community has faced a similar problem and can assist. It’s pretty amazing how well it works.

Webmasters setting up these forums can choose from a dozen major forum types, but two are much larger than the rest, Internet Brands’ vBulletin, and phpBB Limited’s phpBB. Both comply with COPPA by asking you to input your birth date. If you’re over 13, you’re admitted to the forum. If not, you aren’t. Simple, eh?

If the webmaster selected vBulletin for his forum, there’s a setting that allows him to have the forum retrieve your birth date and send out birthday wishes. We all like warm birthday wishes from friends and relatives, but who really wants to receive an anonymous script output containing a couple dozen ASCII characters from a server run by a fan boy in Kansas? Worse, who wants to receive hundreds of them?

And the birthday emails don’t all come at once – They go out at midnight local time, so if you’re registered with a Singapore tourist site, an American football fan site, and a German automotive site, you’re going to be receiving “Happy Birthday” emails all day long.

The real problem is there’s no easy way to stop the emails. Internet Brands doesn’t allow individual addresses to be disabled – Either the webmaster has turned the ”birthday wish” functionality on or he turned it off. There’s also no way to unsubscribe from a forum. Some webmasters automatically delete your account if you haven’t logged in for X days, but others just leave you in their database forever. Either way, you can’t “unsubscribe.” The *only* way to stop these emails then is to email the individual webmasters (if you can find their email address) and ask them to delete your record. Of course that deletes your ability to ever go back again, but since I’m receiving emails from sites whose product or services I stopped using years ago, it’s a “don’t care” for me.

The genie’s out of the bottle – Even if Internet Brands were to delete the functionality tomorrow, that won’t stop the millions of websites who already have your birth date. But I have to wonder - Exactly what were those numb skulls at Internet Brands thinking when when they created this “birthday wishes” script?

So, in my mind, Internet Brands (NASDAQ: INET) is simply evil!

Subverting HOV lanes

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Diamond, Commuter or HOV lanes don’t make a lot of sense to me. Originally conceived to “reduce pollution and congestion” by removing vehicles from the road, California has subverted the original goal a couple of times. First was the 50,000 HOV stickers provided to early hybrid buyers – These stickers allowed hybrid buyers to use the HOV lanes solo. It’s unclear how that helped achieve either of the two original HOV goals.

But now California has pulled a real doozie – A new HOV lane along a 14-mile stretch of IH-680 includes a “solo” option. Essentially any FasTrak equipped car can pay a fee to use the HOV lane, even with only one occupant. But seriously, an HOV lane with a fee? Huh?

And this just keeps getting better:

  • If you are a FasTrak account holder, but have two or more people in the car, you’re instructed to remove the FasTrak device from its windshield mount and place it in the Mylar shipping bag (What? You didn’t save your shipping bag?) while in the HOV lanes so you don’t get charged.
  • The best is last – Solo drivers can use the HOV lane for a fee. In this particular case, the morning commute fee is a minimum of $1.00 but rises as much as necessary to maintain a “40-50MPH average speed.” The county’s website offers no maximum fee and some outraged customers are already complaining about $5.00 charges appearing on their FasTrak bill.

So let’s call this what it is – It’s not reducing pollution nor congestion – It’s a revenue grab, pure and simple. And in an area known for its poor public transit infrastructure, it’s opportunistic and greedy. I would like to shame the California legislators who subverted the intent of HOV lanes, but I doubt it would do much good.