refried.org

Last week I bought the first four seasons of "House M.D." from Amazon VoD for a total of $20. It only took a little over a day to download all 22 episodes to our TiVo. We talked about starting to watch the series before, so when I saw this deal, I couldn't pass it up. Needless to say, we're addicted to it and we're watching at least one episode every night.

One thing we noticed immediately is that the video is so much clearer than anything we record off our analog cable. I've been thinking about subscribing to Netflix just to watch movies with good video and surround sound. Perhaps watching "House M.D." will push me far enough to just do it.

I saw on PVRBlog that TiVo and Amazon launched their video download partnership. Now you can go to Amazon Unboxed and buy or rent movies and TV shows. After you link your Amazon account with your TiVo account, they'll download directly to your TiVo. I got a $15 credit for signing up before April 30th so I rented The Devil Wears Prada. Heather and I watched it Friday night and it was great. The sound and video were great. Keep in mind that we still haven't joined the HD generation yet. I think this is a great way to rent movies.

I found something else cool while looking through the video selection. Smith season one is available for download. This show only made it three episodes before being cancelled. You can download episodes four through seven.

My fantasy football season is officially over. I ended the season with a depressing 3-10 record. But what's worse is that I had to follow the season on the web. The TiVo application I was so excited about when I signed up was a complete disaster. Some days it didn't think I was on a league, other days it would give me old data, and the rest of the time it would just say it couldn't talk to its data source. Since I'm not a fan of football to begin with, I certainly won't be wasting any more time with this TiVo app.

I've never played Fantasy Football before. I rarely watch real football. When I saw the menu option "Play Fantasy Football on TiVo" on my TiVo I just had to try it. I signed up on CBS Sportsline.com and created my team "Refried Beans." Then I created a league "TiVo Players." It's a public league with a live draft. I probably should have selected the automatic draft because I really don't care who the players are. I just want to see the results on my TiVo. I think this is the perfect kind of application for TiVo's Home Media Engine.

UPDATE: I created a new league, "TiVo Players 2," which has an automated draft.

Now that I have a TiVo Series 2 (Humax DRT-800) and TiVo Software version 7.2, I can start playing with HME apps. The most popular apps is Galleon, an HME server and collection of apps all written in Java. After a lot of tinkering and beating my head on the desk, was able to get Galleon to run and use the GUI management tool. I was not able to get my TiVo to see it. Then I saw this post in the Galleon forums. It turns out the beacon is only turned on when Galleon is running on Windows. I was curious to find out why that was so I dug into TiVoBeacon.java. Huh? CLSID? COMException? jawin?

The Java/Win32 integration project (Jawin) is a free, open source architecture for interoperation between Java and components exposed through Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) or through Win32 Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs).

That sure kills the benefit of using Java, eh?

Lots of people like to think that TiVo is a dying company. Perhaps that opinion will change. Today TiVo signed an agreement with Comcast to make the TiVo software run on Comcast's DVR. Does anyone know if Comcast's current DVR runs Linux?

I'm an avid TiVo fan and FoxTrot reader. That's why I'm really enjoying a recent FoxTrot series on the MomVo. It's a TiVo-like device made especially for moms. I wonder if it would be possible to write an application for TiVo's HME to covert a TiVo to a MomVo?

Here are the strips for safe keeping.