After a long wait, TiVo finally shows up on the market in Taiwan!
As a marketing trick, the cable company Cable Giant which runs cable services in Xindian, Shiding, Wulai, Shenkeng and Pinlin is offering 100 TiVo boxes for free tryout in a month. I certainly can't let this great opportunity to play TiVo first-hand for free slip away!
Two men show up at my door to install TiVo today (2006/6/26). The box is installed with a RF-splitter so the existing setup of my TV, DVD player and VCR is untouched. The setup is like this:
One of the men configured the box for me. However, the TiVo could not connect to my Apple airport extreme! After a while I realized that it is the WEP parameter problem. For a linux box to connect to the airport extreme, the iwconfig command line is
iwconfig eth1 essid foo key s:bar restricted
The key point here is the "restricted" security mode. For some reason unknown to me, the airport extreme can be connected to only in the restricted security mode, not the "open" mode commonly seen in cheap (and easy to connect) access points. Since TiVo has linux in its guts, I guess the scripts don't know it has to retry with restricted mode.
I ended up with a long and ugly Cat. 5 line crawling on my wall. :(
This is the first day of TiVo for me, and it hasn't finished downloading the monthly TV schedule yet. Nonetheless, it will record the World Cup games tonight (or should I say this morning). I'm hoping to sleep better knowing that I can get up early and watch the full game before going to work, instead of waking up at the exact hour to watch the game with sleeping eyes. :)
Up next: find a way to ssh/telnet into TiVo to alter the iwconfig command line!
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CategoryTivo
