Plus one, Tivo HD ESATA, HD Heaven

So yesterday at the gym I am doing my 300 routine.  About halfway through doing the box jumps I decided to dedicate the work out to Buttons.  I memory of her I did plus one reps for each of the remaining exercises.  So for one day and one day only, it was the Buttons Memorial 305 Routine.  Not that it means anything to anyone else but me.

Years ago during my first marriage I did something similar after a young cat we owned that had all sorts of health problems died.  At that time my torture exercise of choice was the Versa Climber.   The Versa Climber was the most tiring piece of aerobic equipment I ever used.  I would be dead after a 10 minute session.  Well after the cat died I was very upset.  That day I went to the gym and I PUNISHED myself on the Versa Climber, covering more distance than I ever had before or ever did afterward.  I practically fell off the machine when I was done.  I’m not sure how it computes in my head that pushing myself physically does much to honor the memory of anything.  All I know is it made me feel a bit better. Even after Maggie died Ali and ran an extra hard run the day afterward and deemed it the Maggie Memorial Run.

One of the cool things that Tivo HD’s allow you to do is plug in an external SATA hard drive to easily expand the amount of recording time.  Western Digital sells the official external drive but it costs close to 200 bucks.  I figured I would be frugal and build my own external SATA rig, it’s simple enough.  I bought the parts and spent less than half of what the WD rig costs.  Well it looks like I should have done some more research ahead of time.

Apparently only the higher end, more expensive Series 3 units will allow you to plug in any ESATA drive into the port.  The less expensive Tivo HD that I have will only allow you to plug in the branded WD drive, anything else will be spit out as “unauthorized” and not work.   Damn it.  Now there is a hack work around for it.  Using a method similar to what I did years ago to expand the storage space on my original Tivo’s I can get my homemade esata set up to work.  It requires cracking open the Tivo and slapping the original Tivo drive and the new one into a pc and running a utility.  It’s not very hard to do, like I said I have done it before.  I just sort of like to keep things “factory” on this unit.  I’m not sure what I will do. I can either bite the bullet and buy the official kit that allows you to just plug in and go, relegating the rig I just got to use on my PC or try to hack the unit.

Yesterday after work I stopped and bought a powered amplifier from Radio Shack to boost the signal to the Tivo HD in order to address some of the picture glitches I was seeing.  The amp seemed to do the trick.  The signal level jumped from the mid-60’s up to the 87-93 range a big improvement.  I flipped through all of the HD channels and everything looked great.  I got sucked into watching the last half of a Modern Marvels show on the History Channel.  I found that show while we were out in Vegas and loved it.  It love it even more in HD.

HDTV truly lives up to it’s hype.  Last night we watched the American Idol results show on the FOX HD channel with the surround on and it was pretty damn cool.  I looked over and thanked Ali for letting me make this pricey but truly awesome purchase.