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My Hughes HDVR2 DirecTivo had been acting up on us lately. We’d turn the TV on and the TiVo would be locked up with just a black screen on a freezed frame from a show.
Most forums generally agreed that these symtoms were the signs of a dying hard drive, so I decided to order a new drive for the box and replace it.
The TiVo originally had a 40GB hard drive in it which I had replaced/upgraded a few years ago with an 80GB hard drive. Well I figured if we’re replacing, might as well go bigger right? So I bought 160GB hard drive and off I went.
It had been a while, so I refreshed my knowledge of how to do this by re-reading and downloading the tools on the Hinsdale how to site here

1) pulled the old drive
2) hooked up the old drive and the new drive in my pc
3) booted the mfstools CD that I downloaded from the site listed above
4) typed the mfsbackup | mfsrestore line showed in step 10 option 3 of the how to above
5) ERROR!!!

I found out after I had already bought the hard drive and started this process that you cannot upgrade to a larger hard drive if you’ve already upgraded once IF you want to keep your recordings. After a bit more reading I discovered it has to do with TiVo not being able to read more than 2 partitions on a hard drive. Well, the original 40GB hard drive had 1 partition. I then replaced it, copied everything over to an 80GB hard drive and told it to expand recording space and to do that the tools create a 2nd partition.
Bammo, when you then attempt to copy over those 2 partitions and create a 3rd it bombs out.

My two options were:
1) copy over just the OS and the settings, lose all my current recordings, but gain the additional 80 Gigs.
2) move everythig over as is and only have 80 gigs of the 160GB hdd used.

Well, some people probably think I’m stupid but I just went with option 2. We haven’t had any problems staying under the 66 hrs that 80 gigs gives us and I didn’t feel like taking the time to dump to DVD the couple things we wanted to save at this moment.

All this being said, we’ve been running on the new drive for several days now and so far so good. Now the lock ups were not very frequent so I don’t feel out of the woods yet, but I thought I’d share my experience and how to link in case you were interested. All in all, if you are at all familiar with hooking up IDE hdd(s) and can grasp linux hdd references (hda, hdb, etc…) then there’s no reason to not upgrade/fix your own TiVo.

Good ol’ Uncle Gary back at Compunizzle sent me this photo and was wondering what I thought about creating some Tech Olympic games. What do you think?

Saw this on digg and figured it’d just be easier to post the pic and story myself since it’s likely digg could kill the original post. The picture below is to an actual HP printer. I got the picture off their website here. This blows my friggin’ mind! That thing on the right is a full pc. Look at the PC next to that thing!

From the product specifications:
up to 4,306 sqft per hour
holds media up to 65″ x 145″
“For 110V countries, the system will be supplied with an adequate transformer”
Machine: Size (HWD): 80″ x 158″ x 128”
Weight: 5,952lb
Total site requirement size: 10.5′ x 25′ x 62ft’

I have a young son and more importantly I have a heart. This video below is one of the most touching videos I have ever seen. It’s a video of a father who returned home from serving 7 months in Iraq and his 6 year old son found out when he showed up at school.

It’s a wmv file I got from email and I haven’t converted it yet so you need be using Windows, sorry Phil

I did a lot more coding on the Wetstein Christmas exchange program today. Anybody on that side of the family, feel free to start posting your lists. It’s listed as a link on the right hand side of the page and here’s another
Wetstein App
I guess this could be called v2.0 after last year and holy geez what an improvement!

This version uses a mysql database instead of flat file storage (geeky people (read Phil) will understand).

It has a built in html editor so you can make your list look fancy, so unlike some weird code screw ups last year however you see it when you type it will be exactly how other people will see it and that’s also how it will appear in people’s email(see below). With full html support, if you link to other sites you can insert pictures of your items next to them (could be useful to get that exact ice cream scoop, or whatever it is you desire).

You can put your email address in and if your person edits their list you will get an update.

The most fun and un-necessary feature I think is posting a pic of yourself next to your name and then that pic can be viewed in a “lightbox” window. Check all the features out and post away.

I wanted to try inserting a youtube video in wordpress so here goes.

This vid is one of my current favorites:
(warning, f-word present)

Eric asked me this in my comments and as I just found out on his page too so I thought I’d post about it, why not.

If you’re running wordpress, or any CMS for that matter that supports comments you need some type of automated system to sort out spam comments. Everybody wants to have the freedom of letting their guests use anonymous comments but when you do that the flood gates are opened to spam comments getting posted.

The default installation of wordpress includes the akismat plugin which will remove these comments for you. Just login to the admin panel and activate it!

Eric was asking how to display the spam counter, it’s just one line of php as a function call. If you want it to show in a post you’ll need to install a plugin for wordpress that allows you to execute php in posts. I use exec-php .

Then just insert the following line:

<?php akismet_counter(); ?>

I’ve used lightbox before but it’s been a while and I haven’t done it editting wordpress themes before so here goes:

test

I recently uploaded a TON of new pics, over 430 approximately.
New gallery albums include (but not limited to) some halloween 07 pics, Zoo 07 trips, a Pere Marquette trip, and the Ozark vacation from this past summer with Jeremy and Laura and DJ and Collin. Here’s a few highlight pics: