Word: tivo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like many other couch potatoes who take their quality TV time seriously, I hailed the arrival of TiVo as a liberator. Back in the dark ages of TV watching--about four years ago--there were two ways to catch your favorite shows. You could run your life on the networks' schedule, or you could enter VCR-programming hell. Then came TiVo, a miraculous device that remembered what I liked and let me watch it whenever I wanted. But, as I soon learned, TiVo could be tyrannical...
...problem occurred when the machine ran out of room on its puny 30-gigabyte hard drive (space enough for about 10 hours of TV at best quality). Loath to delete or miss anything TiVo had saved especially for me--who wants to disappoint a machine that has worked so hard?--I lost a lot of sleep watching things I wasn't quite in the mood for. Take the night I stayed up bleary-eyed through the three-hour Russian version of Solaris just so TiVo could cram the next day's Simpsons and West Wing onto its NOW PLAYING list...
Luckily for me, there is a whole subculture of TiVo users who squeeze better performance out of their boxes by hacking into them. Two how-to books on the topic will be published in August (TiVo Hacks, O'Reilly; Hacking the TiVo, Premier Press). There's also a step-by-step guide at tivofaq.com/hack Or you can do what I did: install a ready-made upgrade from WeaKnees.com All hacking will, of course, void your warranty. But what you get in return is a supercharged TiVo with three or more times the recording capacity. The larger the hard drive...
...this sounds too perplexing, you can take the easy way out. The drives at WeaKnees.com - although pricey at $159 for 80 gigabytes, all the way up to $449 for 320 gigabytes - come with the software installed, all the equipment you'll need to wrench open your TiVo, and blessedly lucid instructions. I took longer than the estimated half an hour to finish the job but only because I have a hard time remembering which way you turn a screw to loosen it (lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, just in case you're wondering). If you're similarly home-improvement challenged, WeaKnees...
...Result: my TiVo can now record 80 hours of TV at the best-quality rate or 145 hours at the lowest quality. That isn't anything like the limit - you can get up to 344 hours on the 320-gigabyte drive - but it's enough to record every single West Wing ever broadcast. And maybe I'll have space left for a nice long Russian movie...