Tag Archives: Video iPod

Computers/Technology, Movies & TV

TivoStatus

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Now whilst it may be up there with the legendary Internet Connected Coke Machine on the list of pointless but cool technology, Howard’s TivoStatus WordPress Plug-in is definitely pretty clever.

For those of you who have no idea what a Tivo actually is, it is a particular brand of Digital Video Recorder, the best known example of which in the UK is the Sky+. One of the advantages that a Tivo offers to a UK consumer over the closed Sky+ system is the all round hackability, allowing the geeks and techies among you to plug your box into a network, and stream much more than just status details!

Just take a look at talk around the Slingbox in the US. With this you can do much the same thing. Fancy watching your favourite UK shows when you are away from home – all you need is find an internet connection and a Tivo recording them all for you, and stream them down onto your laptop. On the other hand, if you’ve got a video iPod and are wondering what to play, take a look at this guide for putting Tivo recordings onto your iPod.

Computers/Technology

Typical Part 3

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Isn’t this just always the way. Within a month of getting a new iMac, Apple update the range.

Looking over the specs of the new machine, they have merged the bottom of the range 17 inch CDRW machine, with the middle of the range 17 inch Superdrive model that we got. However a look at the technical specs makes interesting reading, although the headline is that they now only do a Superdrive equipped machine, the detail is a slightly different, so whereas we got a 17 inch screen with the top of the range processor speed, bus speed and graphics card, to get all of that you now have to go to the £1199 20 inch model. Indeed although the processor speed is increased compared to the old bottom of the range model, it is actually slower than ours. There are some new toys, like supplying the Mighty Mouse instead of the classic single button Mac mouse (maybe I should frame our mouse as a collectors item or something), plus a built in iSight, and a fancy media interface and remote.

So moving on from the annoyance at the upgrade, putting the realistic hat on, at the time we had to buy a new Mac anyway, as it was our main machine for e-mail and the like. Looking at the new toys, the Mighty Mouse would have been nice, but the built in iSight and media interface probably wouldn’t get much use from us. The updated graphics card would also be good, but again, the main use we make of the Mac is not for stuff that really needs it. The regular upgrade cycle is pretty normal, however it was still a bit of a surprise as the processor speeds had only fairly recently been tweaked. The new Mac isn’t suddenly going to cease to work just because the new model has come out, and to be honest it would have ended up costing me more had these been around when I upgraded as I probably would have gone for the higher spec 20 inch model.

Looking at the other new release, the video iPod, it has been long denied, but again is another example of Apple trying to throw the competition off the scent. In the UK the availability of legal video is probably going to be limited for a while, however I expect with that and the iPod Nano they should keep their place at the top of the media player market.