Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Q: What do you feed your children for breakfast on Saturday morning when their mother is away?
A: Bacon, buttermilk biscuit, candy corn, and a life saver.

Q: How many college graduates does it take to fillout the paperwork selling two cars?
A: Six

Here’s the best present I was given today:

Many loyal Cruft readers had questions about the size of Tivo “hours” storage in relation to hard drive size. I have stolen this paragraph directly from the Weaknees site, a place you can buy upgrades to your Tivo.

How are the number of hours calculated on a TiVo?
TiVo standalone units (i.e., TiVos without a built-in DirecTV receiver) have four levels of recording quality. At the best recording quality, the rule of thumb is that the number of hours is equal to 0.35 times the number of gigabytes. At the lowest recording quality (basic), the number of TiVo recording hours is 1.2 times the number of gigabytes. Because drive sizes vary slightly (an 80 gigabyte drive may be 81.9 gigabytes or 80.0 gigabytes, for example), the exact number of hours in any given TiVo cannot be calculated precisely in advance. DirecTiVo units generally get about 0.875 hours per gigabyte of storage space. The hours reported on a DirecTiVo is a maximum amount; the actual number of hours yielded will vary based on the type of shows you record (eg. sports take up more space on a hard drive than do, say, soap operas, due to the amount of motion).

So, let’s do the math here. We’ll do the simple case first.
If Martin has a DirecTivo with a 40 GB drive, he should expect 35 hours (40 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 35 hours). If Martin was to upgrade to a 120 GB drive, he should expect 105 hours (120 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 105 hours)
If I have a standalone Tivo with a 30 GB drive that I use in High Quality mode, with a 30 GB hard drive there should be about 18 hours (30 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 18 hr). If I upgraded to a 120 GB drive I roughly have 72 hours (120 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 72 hr).
So the rough effect of my upgrade was to take me from 18 hours to 72 hours of recording time. The actual amount of storage will vary depending on the quality I choose to use for each show. Most of the kids shows record at Medium quality and most of our favorite shows record at Best Quality.
Make sense?

Not me mind you, but many people are having them recently.
Several of our family friends are having trouble with computers (1 Mac and 1 PC) and people like Ernie and Dave are having them too.
Almost inevitably the question of switching operating systems raises it’s head in these times. PC people consider Macs and Mac people consider PCs.
The truth is that all computers have trouble. I’m a trained engineer and run a damn IT department and I still have trouble with things. How non-techical people manage is beyond me.
I get calls all the time to help with friend and family computers when problems pop up. Usually the problem is PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair), but I can’t really blame people for problems.
Computers are confusing. Someone is always trying to see you something or take over your computer. It’s difficult for people to know what’s safe and what’s not. Whay software will solve my problem? What to believe?
When ever I look at someone else’s computer, they almost always have stuff installed that cripples their computer. Spyware, unnecessary apps, inappropriate settings, no anti-virus, no firewall, etc.
The truth is to run a computer that has good performance, reliablity and security, it takes a bit of knowledge and work. It’s a constant struggle for me to maintain good working condition on the computers in the house. Updates, patches, scans, they all need to be done.
Most people simply don’t want to do this. Mac, linux, or Windows, you need to be vigilant to maintain the computer. Most people don’t want to be vigilant and with good reason. It’s a pain in the ass.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The truth is that every lawn has problems. Switching operating systems isn’t going to solve the fundemental issue that computers are still not household appliances.
The fault lies in two places. The people that make invasive web pages that hijack your computer, and the operating system makers. Switching brand of computers won’t solve the issues about computer reliability. Linux, Mac, and Windows users all encounter problems regularly and I hear about it. They all get the job done, but there is no ‘best’ solution.
Switch computers if you want to try something new or like the hardware, but don’t expect the world of computing to get easier just because you buy a different brand.

Too many people are lazy when it comes to sharing links on places like Metafilter and Slashdot. They post links to places like the New York Times that require registration to view the article. People seem to accept this, but it’s fargin’ wrong.

There is a simple way to distribute links to stories at places like the NYTimes.com without registering all your friends.
Follow along, it’s simple.

Continue reading “I’ve had enough…”

Tonight I finished the Tivo upgrade.

After spending two hours making sure I was going to enter the correct command, I expanded the Tivo and everything was good. As you can see, I have plenty of storage now.
The thing that freaked me out was that the original 30GB drive literally smoked today. I had it hooked up to the computer. When I powered up the computer with the old drive and the new drive, the old drive smoked. Literally. One of the surface mount chips glowed bright orange in a classic failure mode with smoke.
This made me nervous that I had done something wrong. I guess it was just the old drive commiting suicide when it learned the new drive was working.

I was reading Joi Ito’s Web and saw a post about Blogstreet’s thinking about sorting out ‘What’s a weblog post’ and what’s not and how to anaylze posts.
Interesting thinking and a nice little hack, but in the bigger picture, it shows the problem with people being too close to blogging. The problem is that they can’t seem to see that a person’s weblog content may not be inside a Content Management System (CMS) like Movable Type, Blogger, and Radio. Or that the content on a weblog may not be in the form of a post.
I saw a lot ot this thinking at SXSW. The idea that if you can just gather up all the weblog posts in the world and index them, you will have captured the blogosphere in totality.
I call bullshit on this.
Many, many people don’t put all their content into their CMS and post as a ‘traditional’ blog post. Look over at my front page. The Cruft Adventures are all links to full html pages. Those pages are the most hit places on this site. I get plenty of hits to direct weblog entries, but the top pages are How to wash a baseball cap and How to make a cantenna.
Theoretically, I could have put this info into a blog entry but there are two large limitations to putting all content directly into your CMS/blog post system. First, the content has to fit in with the scheme of your front page. You are limited on what you can do in the post. With a a fresh clean page of HTML, you can do anything you want, without limitation. Second, CMS/weblog permalinks are not really permanent links. They are links that last until you switch CMSs or time makes the system you use antiquated. Some may say, I’ll always use MT or Radio, but it just ain’t so. In 10 years we’ll be using something completely new and unimagined now. When you move your content to Apple’s new iBlog in 2013, they will have a new set of permalinks.
A weblog is more than just a set of posts from your CMS. In all deference to Anil Dash, a weblog is more than what can be shoved though an XML feed to an aggregator.
The more that the big thinkers in the blogosphere rabbit hole into CMS -> XML feed -> aggregator thinking, the more they exclude people from their purview. Many will say “If you don’t have an XML feed, you aren’t part of the blogosphere.” That’s like saying, “If it isn’t printed in a newspaper or magazine, it isn’t journalism. Those weblogs aren’t journalism because they don’t publish in the formats I like.”
[/rant]

I woke up early and walked into the study to find the drive copy was complete.
I placed the new drive back in the Tivo and carefully reconnected it to the TV system.
Power was applied and happily the Tivo booted up just fine. All my content is intact and everything appears normal. My original Series 1 30GB Tivo now has a 120GB drive in it! The Tivo only thinks it a 30GB drive though.
Tonight I ‘grow’ the drive partition to the full 120 GB size. Hopefully it will go just as smooth.

It’s two hours later and the hard drives are still cloning.
Go to sleep and get up early to finish? Or stay up and finish before sleep?

As I type this, my Tivo drive is being mirrored to a new 120GB hard drive. If everything goes successfully, tonight I will have the new drive installed and working back in the Tivo.
*knocks on wood*
If you want to try this yourself, go read the Hinsdale How-To on upgrading Tivos.