Item: This TiVo I got the other week looks to be worth every penny I paid for it. I installed a new drive (a 160Gb, double the original size, ostensibly gives 160 hours of recording time), but it still fails to come up to any useful screen. I suspect the power supply may also be flaky, but I haven’t been convinced yet. I’m going to let it chug along overnight and see if it has gotten anywhere by morning.
So I may have added 160Gb of storage to my local network, if nothing else. Fixing the box through TiVo is $159. Not sure it’s worth doing if I have never actually used the service. Similar boxes are selling for between $100 and $600 on eBay right now, so it may not be a dead loss. Ordinarily, selling something I got for free would give me a twinge of conscience but since the person I got it from knew it was dead and neglected to mention that, I don’t feel all that charitable about it.
Item: my new RAZR V3c phone is BlueTooth-enabled but only in the most minimal way. You can use iSync but that’s it. No file transfers or browsing: the OBEX (Object Exchange) protocol is inactive. Allegedly, a trip to the local Verizon store will put this right, but I’m not holding my breath.
And people wonder why I still shoot film and process my own negatives, make my own bread, and bind books by hand. Because those things work, consistently, reliably: any mistakes are my own, not due to the caprice of some marketeer or the incompetence of an engineer.
<update> I called Verizon, both the local store and the national call center, and got a firm but polite “no” for my trouble. The national guy was trying to tell me that the phone doesn’t support OBEX over BlueTooth but I smacked that down gently and made it clear that it is not a technological problem, but a business decision. The other kids who have RAZRs can do this, but my choice of Verizon means I can’t. By the end of the call, he sounded relieved that a. the call was over and b. I hadn’t shouted at him or called him names.
In the meantime, you can do OBEX over a wire like this one:
eBay has ’em as cheap as $3 but do I really want a cable?