Dancing About Architecture

I have been a devoted follow of TiVo since getting DirecTV service in 2000. The DirecTV-TiVo combo units have served us well for six years now. In the early days, I really enjoyed hacking the TiVo boxes. We have two Series 1 boxes and one Series 2 box. I haven't touched the Series 2 box, but the Series 1 boxes have two upgraded drives and one of them has a network card that was a gateway to all sorts of fun hacking.

Well, I haven't touched the boxes in a few years ... just lazy I guess. Our main receiver started acting up a couple of weeks ago, though, which I took as a sign to get back into the game!

It looked like one of the hard drives was going bad, so I went out and picked up two cheap quiet 120GB IDE drives from Best Buy, which happened to be having a deal on them ($50 each ... not bad at all). I didn't want to lose our recordings, so I went to the tried-and-true Hinsdale guide and went with "Upgrade Configuration #5", which involves putting all four drives in a PC carcass and running the magic command:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

Well, after about 20 hours there were some bad sectors on /dev/hdb that screwed the pooch. Time for Plan B: do a dd_rescue from the fried drive to a new drive. So, I switched around how the drives were mounted and gave this command a try:

dd_rescue -B 1b -b 2M -A -v -l /var/dd_rescue.log /dev/hda /dev/hdc

After about 36 hours, it finished. I have since had the drives running in the TiVo for over a week and everything seems to work. As an added bonus, the new drives are much quieter.

So now I'm thinking I'm going to soup up the unhacked Series 2 box. I think I might go the easy way out and just do The Zipper, rather than gather all the hacks myself. I picked up a 300GB Maxtor drive for $90 that should serve nicely. At least until we make the jump to HD -- we're planning on doing that next summer.

Posted by Eric at 02:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My current ThinkPad T42 is starting to huff and puff a bit with the current FeedBurner codebase, so my eye is starting to wander and I'm thinking about updating to a new machine. Rick's post just added some fuel to the fire. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with a ThinkPad -- the machines are just so well built, even if they're not the sleekest models on the block.

A Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM and a 7200 RPM drive ... those are really the only core requirements. Well, a big screen and an optical drive too. I'm really torn between a Z61m and a T60, though ... there are pros and cons for each:

• The T60 is a little lighter and not quite as thick ... nod to the T60
• Z61m has a 15.4in 1680x1050 screen, while the T60 has a 15in 1400x1050 screen. Who wouldn't like an extra 280 pixels wide?
• Z61m has an integrated webcam and S-Video out ... nice
• I'm already familiar with the T-series

I'm leaning towards the T60, mostly because of the form factor -- I toss the notebook in my backpack everywhere, and having it be a smaller across every dimension I think will win out. I really wish the X60 came with an optical drive. I ruled out the Z61t because of the integrated video, but otherwise that looks like a nice compromise.

I'll probably agonize over the decision for a few more days. If anyone has any advice, let me know.

UPDATE: I decided to go with the T60, model 2613HNU. I'm hoping to get it before Christmas!

Posted by Eric at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)