Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

24

If you didn't watch Monday's episodes of 24 ... STOP READING THIS NOW!!

For those of you that did ... let's have a moment of silence for Edgar.

I sat there in shock with my jaw dropped for quite a while ... I've grown to enjoy his quirky character and will miss him.

I'm not so glad to see Kim is back.  She was good in the first season ... she needs to go away now.  Perhaps she'll get a small dose of the nerve gas to ensure she's gone from the show for good.

So let's see ... how many prior season characters have been eliminated so far this season?  Pres Palmer (he did an awesome job as pres), Michelle, Edgar ... and someone else bites it next week?  I'm guessing it's Tony in some heroic effort.

For kicks I went over the 24 website and skimmed through the forum ... there's some pretty funny stuff in there.  Here's a very long thread where people take a scene from the show and change it around for some laughs.  Here's a good one:

Season 5: Ep. 7:
Lynn and his sister are talking in the parking lot.
Lynn gets knocked out by his sisters boyfriend:
Boyfriend: Where issss it my pressssioussss? They stole it from usssss. Nassty CTU agentssssss.
The boyfriend steals Lynn's money and CTU card.
Boyfriend: I have it! My Pressssioussss. He sstole it from usss. *He sees a ring on Lynn and takes it* We have it! Itss mine, my own, my Presssssioussss. We musst kill him now!
Sister: No, don't kill him! Lets go.
Boyfriend: Yessss, letssss. Bye nassty hobbitssess, er, I mean CTU agentssss. *Leaves*
Lynn: Where is Mr. Frodo when you need him?

The "I didn't see that coming" moment and Quote of the night: Jack - "I shot her above the knee caps ... she'll walk again."

The Next Apprentice = Randal

Tonight Trumph crowned Randal as the Apprentice.  And as my wife predicted last week Trumph was ready to hire both Randal and Rebbeca.  But when Donald asked Randal if he thought Rebecca should also be hired ... well, Randal said something like, "there should be only 1 apprentice!"

I think that was a poor decision on Randal's part and it seemed that even Trumph was take aback as he asked Randal if he was sure.  It'll certainly generate a lot of media buzz tomorrow and I'm interested to her more from Randal on why he wasn't willing to share the limelight.  I totally agree that Randal is an excellent pick, but come on dude...share the love!

my prior apprentice posts here here and last year

Anyone else looking forward to the next season of 24 ... it's the only show that I truly look forward to and the only TV show that I fire up the surround sound system for.  Now if only I had an HD over-the-air tuner/antenna.  The fun begins Jan 15th!

Tivo: new features and now $20 on Amazon

Amazon.com has got the 40hr Tivo unit for $20 after rebate.  Pretty sweet deal.  Then buy yourself a 320GB hard drive for $138 and follow my upgrade directions and you'll have more room to record stuff than you'll know what to do with :-)

Jason over at bnpositive got his new Tivo update before I did ... lucky dawg! :-)
He's got a great rundown of all the new features.  Tivo appears to really be trying to do everything they can to overcome the onslaught of all the other DVR options.  The ONLY thing I think Tivo MUST do is get a dual tuner model out NOW!  I'm half way tempted to get one of those $20 Tivo's just so I can record to shows at once.

Apprentice - the final 2

So far my pick from way back on Oct 15th is still in the running.  Rebecca has made the final 2!  Between her and Randal ... well, it's just hard to decide as they are both very strong.  I think though I'm going to pick Randal to win.  He's 34 and she's only 23 ... so he should have a lot more experience under his belt.  I think Rebecca's age would hinder her effectiveness as a leader in a corporate setting regardless of her skills...I mean come on she's only 23!  Of course look at Caroline.  She's only 37 and Donald hired her at 25 to run one of his new golf courses.  So I guess Donald isn't worried about age if he believes you're the best candidate.  This should be an interesting end to the season.

The Next Apprentice?

I know it's very early in the show, but I'm ready to make a prediction.  On the women's team I'm putting my money on Rebecca.  She handles herself so well in the boardroom...you could tell even Trump was impressed.
On the guys side...well, nobody sticks out yet...except for that Markus dude who won't be around much longer.
Who are your pics?

DIY tivo hard drive upgrade

I've mentioned it before ... but I really love my Tivo!

BUT the more I love it the more I want to use it ... and it's 40GB size just won't let me record everything I want.  The way I watch TV now is on my terms.  I can go 2 weeks without watching a single thing ... then when I finally have some down time I'll go on a mini-marathon of catching up on what I've missed.  With the 40GB drive it would overwrite shows as it needed space for new shows...not good.

So I've been reading the Tivo forums over the last few months and made several bookmarks to threads and sites on upgrading your Tivo drive.  With the new TV season started I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the Tivo.  The online instructions made it seems very simple so I ordered up a 320GB Western Digital hard drive (WD3200JD) for $138 from ZipZoomFly.com

There are several free online guides for upgrading your Tivo ... I choose the guide from WeaKnees.com ... they also sell simple replacement or add-on drive kits for the Tivo ... for my model though the cost would be about $300 for a 300GB replacement drive.  They use Maxtors QuickView DVR hard drives and it's a simple plug-n-play whereas I'm using a regular old consumer drive and will have to do a bit of labor and run some linux commands, but I'm saving $162 and getting 20GB more space.

So here's how my upgrade experience went...

After reading over the how-to guides and reading other peoples experiences on tivocommunity.com's "upgrade forum", I ordered up a Western Digital 320GB drive.  This drive was recommended by many others as being a quiet and cool running drive.  Pricegrabber.com showed ZipZoomFly.com to have the lowest price.  This is the same online store where I just purchased 8 Western Digital 320GB SATA drives recently and the experience was great.  2 thumbs for ZipZoomFly!

I noted that there were some tweaks to the WeaKnees guide that people were mentioning if you went with a drive larger than 250GB...hopefully WeaKness will add that to their guide down the road.  After my research I posted on the tivocommunity forum HERE asking folks to double check what I was about to do.  2 folks responded with modifications to my command lines...thanks winders and slaponte!!!

While waiting for the drive to arrive, I burnt the Weaknees linux boot CD and downloaded tpip1.2.  You need a fat32 drive if you want to backup your current Tivo drive...which I did...so I found an old 15GB drive and slapped a barebones XP image on it using fat32 format.  I put the tpip1.2 software in the root of the fat32 drive so it would be easy to find using linux commands.  I played a little with the boot CD and fat32 drive just to get familiar with checking drive sizes and such.  When the drive arrived I created another boot CD with Hitachi's drive tools...connected the new drive to my PC and changed the acoustic settings on the drive from performance (aka LOUD) to quiet.  Made a HUGE difference in the seek noise.  You probably wouldn't want to use this drive in a Tivo without making it quiet.

Saturday morning I had everything ready ... unplugged the Tivo and began the upgrade.

Unscrew the back screws and lift off the top cover...there's not much to the Tivo when you look at it's guts...  (note: this image actually shows the new drive in the Tivo with the old drive sitting beside)

Remove the old Tivo drive ... and setup drives (fat32, old Tivo, new Tivo) with correct jumpers in PC.  In my case I'm using old Tivo hd as Primary Master, new Tivo nd as Primary Slave, CDROM is Secondary Master, and fat32 hd is Secondary Slave.

Boot everything up and check that linux sees the drives all as their correct size...

Now run the modified backup command to make a backup of the old Tivo hd to the fat32 drive:  mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda (It took some experimenting to figure out how to mount the /dos directory)

Now run the restore command to put the backup image onto the new drive:  mfsrestore -s 192 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

Now expand the restored image to utilize the full capacity of the new drive:  mfsadd -x -r 3 /dev/hdb

SWEET !!!  From 40 to estimated 366 HOURS capacity!!!
Now run a command to modify the swap file for the larger capacity:  tpip -1 -s /dev/hdb ...but it couldn't find the tpip app...doh!

OK...so I still don't get how to mount paths correctly in linux.  I AIM'd a guy from the forum that seemed to really know his stuff and asked if he'd help me out.  THANKS azitnay!!!
He suggested using:  ./tpip <switches> which from the screenshot above did the trick.

Powered everything down ... put the jumper on the new drive to Master ... slapped it back in the Tivo and powered it on while holding my breath.  It usually takes a minute or 2 to boot up...after 10mins I had a bad feeling something was wrong...the drive wasn't making any read/write noise...NUTS!!!

But all the commands had returned normal responces...what happened.  So I unplug the Tivo and start to take the new drive out and notice the jumper diagram on the drive shows 2 possible "Master" configurations...one with slave and one without.  Yep...I put the jumper on Master with Slave.  I moved the jumper...held my breath and powered it back on. 

I could faintly hear the drive doing stuff ... then the normal Tivo startup screens appeared.  Then I went to check the recording capacity ... that's the final check ... and here's the sweet result of my efforts

HOORAY!!  From 40-ish hrs to 363hrs.  I did a happy dance :-)
Then I checked all my season passes .. yep, still there.
Could it see my PC .. yep, it could read the shows I'd moved over the to PC.
Did it save the programs that I didn't care about but were left on the drive before the upgrade ... yep.

KEWL!!  The new drive is just a tad noisier than the old...but I had to put my ear right next to the unit to hear anything. 

I then spent some time tweaking all my recording settings...up to best quality for our favorite shows and high quality for everthing else.  I also turned on the "Tivo Suggestions" for kicks.  This is supposed to auto-record stuff that's similar to the stuff you Tivo.

There ya have it ... $138 buck and about 2 hours combined time ... and you've got a fat Tivo :-)

FREE TIVO!! Ends 7/27!

 Wow, what timing!  I just posted about how much I'm enjoying my free Tivo and I just found this...

Tivo is giving away their 40GB unit if you pay for a year's service subscription upfront!  Deal ends 7/27!!  Details right on Tivo's front page ... www.tivo.com

So another "free" Tivo deal surfaces...excellent!

If you do go for this deal...I would...please use my email address when asked if anyone referred you to get a Tivo.  I think I get a free month of service for anyone I refer.  email is gccjason(at)gmail(dot)com    :-)

The next Apprentice = Kendra

For those of you that are Apprentice fans ...

Once Alex was out of the picture I picked Kendra to take the gold ... and after tonight's episode I think she clearly has it in the bag.  Somebody give Tana some of Maxwell's leadership books...she needs help.