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TiVo Transfers and Snow Leopard

With TiVo^® Desktop broken on Snow Leopard, more Mac users will be turning to the excellent PyTivo for their media transferring needs. I won’t cover the installation here because it’s well documented already. However for those already using PyTivo and upgrading to Snow Leopard, this post will hopefully save you some frustration.

As long as you’re up-to-date, PyTivo should just work. So why wasn’t the Archive folder showing up on my TiVo? I could see that it was running, and could browse the server locally on my computer. Frustration! As it turns out, the answer is in the Security > Firewall > Advanced… settings:

Snow Leopard updates the version of Python, so there are now two entries for Python — one blocking connections, the other allowing them. Hovering over each row shows that one is for version 2.5 and the other is version 2.6. Selecting Allow incoming connections for version 2.6 once again enables the PyTivo directories on the Now Playing screen.

Problem solved! Too late to watch the show I was trying to transfer, but fortunately a simple fix to a frustrating problem.

14 March 2009

Facebook isn't Twitter

In an apparent effort to catch a ride on the latest wave of popularity, Facebook has updated their homepage layout to mimic Twitter. I’m not really sure why — isn’t Facebook still massively popular?

Based on a small sampling of people’s reactions, they seem to fall into the following categories:

People who have never heard of or never used Twitter are confused by the new layout.
People who have tried Twitter and hate it, hate the new layout because of the similarities.
People who use and love Twitter hate the new layout because it tries to be like Twitter, but doesn’t offer anything by way of improvement.

So whatever Facebook’s motivation, it appears to be a net no-win.

30 January 2009

Infant Visual Stimulation Patterns

As new parents, we can’t help but read and pay attention to everything that starts with the phrase “Research shows…” That’s why, when we were told showing our babies black and white patterns for stimulation was a good idea, I went on the hunt for some ready-made patterns.

Among those I found was a set from Babystrology. Unfortunately their downloadable PDF has them all on one page, which isn’t very practical. So, being the geek that I am, I opened up Illustrator and created my own versions. Here they are as individual PDF files:

Checkerboard
Target
Circle Grid
Vertical Lines
Asterisk
Horizontal Lines

4 August 2008

Discerning Palate

Among the things our puppy thinks are tasty treats, that we never thought she’d like:

watermelon
radishes
lettuce
pickle juice (at least when licked from my fingers)
eggs
yogurt
Meloxicam

Things that are perhaps a little less strange, but that she gets just as excited about:

tomato
cucumber
carrots
milk
cheese
ice cubes

I think it’s mostly that these things come from us, but she definitely doesn’t like mushrooms, no matter where they come from.

19 April 2008

Welcome Home, Peanut

The newest member of our household finally came home today.

13 March 2008

iPVR?

Recently published patent documents outline PVR functionality for Apple TV. TiVo still has some unique features (e.g. TiVo Suggestions), but a PVR-enabled Apple TV might seriously give TiVo a run for their money.

Not that Apple cares too much about the Canadian market¹, but if they ever did make this device, and it did high definition, and it worked in Canada… I’d be first in line.

¹ Where’s my iPhone already? And some TV shows on iTunes I’ve actually heard of? And movies?

1 March 2008

Song Chart

Black cars look better in the shade. My contribution to the song chart meme.

13 January 2008

Wimic Fixed for Leopard

My favourite dashboard widget, Wimic, broke when I upgraded to Leopard recently. This isn’t so bad at home, because I already have it configured and can still sort of read my comics. As I discovered with my new iMac at work though, it’s a little challenging setting it up for the first time.

Luckily, widgets are just HTML pages under the hood, and a little CSS diddling fixed the problem. So here it is: Wimic updated for Leopard.

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25 December 2007

Merry Christmas

21 December 2007

Comcast TiVo Available

The long-awaited Comcast TiVo service is finally available, and Steve Garfield is the lucky first customer. He has a Flickr set with pictures of the unit and interface.

I hope Rogers is paying attention.