You can see a demo of it on CyanogenMod’s Wiki. And see the Terminology source page. (and contribute to it!)

Anyway, hope it helps someone else.

The TiVoHD is a much different device from the Series 1 TiVo I received 7 years ago. The Series 1 was intended to be connected to your cable box as a pure DVR addition.  The TiVoHD becomes your cable box and your Internet/TV media center.  It’s hard to compare them since they are very different devices.

The Verizon FiOS cable box with DVR is a lot closer, and the TiVo is worse in some ways:

• you don’t get On Demand or Verizon’s pay per view: This is working with Comcast now if you live in the Boston area.  I shed no tears for pay per view, but On Demand had a lot of free content.
• the TiVo interface is almost unacceptably slow: When you press a button on the remote, it takes anywhere from a half second to a full second for the device to register it.  To make matters worse, with a Dolby receiver, the TiVo sometimes doesn’t make a confirmation sound.  This problem makes the device feel cheap and hard to use.  I’m amazed that they released it without solving this problem.  Other people think so too.
• entering text using the remote (for searches) is much, much harder:  Verizon had the ability to use the letter substitutions on the number keys to enter text.  So 228 matched CAT and BAT, but searching was easier and faster.
• the guide doesn’t show which shows will be recorded already: this didn’t work reliably on the Verizon DVR, but it was nice to look through the list of shows and see that The Daily Show was going to be recorded.

It’s better in a number of ways too: the channel guides are much much nicer; scheduling shows is easier and more understandable; fewer bugs; the TV picture seems better somehow (maybe a better MPEG decoder?); easier to use; expandable storage; ability to record shows to DVD or VCR; closed caption support; a better remote; swivel search; and Guru Guides which help you find interesting things to watch.

But the most interesting thing about the new TiVoHD happens when you give it a broadband connection.  TiVo seems to be trying to make their device a full media center.  You can listen to Internet radio stations, (on your stereo!) log into online photo sites and view them on your TV, purchase and play movies from Amazon, etc., etc.  It will also allow you to download recorded shows and movies to your computer, (and then to your iPod, etc) stream photos and music from your computer, and transfer videos from your computer to your TiVo.

And finally, TiVo has released an API to design new applications and do cool and interesting things. And here again things fall down.  There are some developers creating interesting things, but development seems to be slowing or stopping.  A grand community doesn’t seem to have formed.  In fact, the forum is fairly quiet.  Obvious ideas like Youtube videos, Facebook monitors, or networked games aren’t even being discussed.

So, what’s going on?  Is TiVo too hard to obtain now?  Is there not enough of an audience?  Are the hackers all using the open source equivalents?   Is it too hard to install and use third-party software?  Or is this just a community management or advertising problem?  Or am I missing a vibrant community of people? Does it cost too much for developers?  (The monthly price seems to be much cheaper than renting the Verizon box…)

That said, I have a Google Calendar that I want to view in Evolution (if just for the nice reminders) but I don’t want to make public, and I can’t use the private URL. I need Evolution to authenticate to Google, and download the calendar. If you can use a private URL, there is already a good solution.

To that end, I made a terrible, horrible, no good patch to allow Evolution to authenticate to Google so I can download my calendar. The trick is to pre-auth with Google, get the auth token from the result, and store it in GConf. From there, the patch will make evolution-data-server recognize Google Calendar URLs and send the auth token in a special header.

Before I get to the patch, here are the problems:

• Seriously, it’s an ugly patch
• You have to recompile evolution-data-server
• Adding an auth token to GConf?! What are you, nuts?
• Evolution may not be able to understand the appointments set by Google’s calendar
• The calendar only updates every once in a while
• You can’t edit the calendar in Evolution

Here’s how to make it work:

First authenticate with Google to get your auth token:

curl -D - https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin -d accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE \
-d Email='username%40domain' -d Passwd='password'  \
-d service=cl -d source=evolution-testing-0.0.0

Replace username with your email username. Replace domain with your email domain — this will usually be gmail.com. Then replace password with your google password.

This will return three lines, the last one will look like this: Auth=DQAAAGgA...dk3fA5N

Then run:

gconftool-2 --type string -s /apps/evolution/calendar/gauth authstring

You’ll need to replace authstring with the 180+ character string returned by the previous command.

You should only have to do the above once. Or whenever the auth string
expires which seems to be very rare, if at all.

Then quit Evolution and kill the data server with this command:

evolution --force-shutdown

Start evolution after applying this patch.

Go to the calendar component and add:

webcal://www.google.com/calendar/ical/username@domain/private/full.ics

as a web calendar. You’ll need to replace username with your email username and domain with your email domain, usually gmail.com. You’ll need to check “Use Secure Connection” and I recommend that you cache the calendar locally.

Happily it works for me until the real solution is available.

The Bonsai project helpfully wrote a nice perl script which emails check in information in a machine readable format. To use it:

1. Check out the CVSROOT module on your CVS server
2. Copy the perl script into that directory
3. Add the line: ALL $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/dolog.pl -r /cvs cvs-watch@stage1.example.com to CVSROOT/loginfo
   1. where /cvs is whatever your cvs path is and stage1.example.com is your staging server
4. Add the dolog.pl script, and check in the file and the change to loginfo.

It’s simple to make the staging server respond to these emails.

1. Edit your /etc/aliases file and add: cvs-watch: "|cvs-robot"
2. Check out your CVS module in the appropriate place
3. Create /etc/smrsh/cvs-robot

So what goes in the cvs-robot script?

#!/bin/shexport CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@cvs.example.com:/cvs'cd /var

touch /tmp/checkin-errors.log

grep 'www' | grep '. HEAD .' | cut -d" " -f3- | xargs -r cvs update -P -d &> /tmp/checkin-errors.log

This file is only an example. You’ll obviously have a different CVSROOT, and you’ll likely have checked out into a different place than /var. Your module might not be ‘www’ and your branch might not be HEAD. Edit as appropriate.

Bugs

So what doesn’t work? Well, if you add a new directory, this script fails. I’m not sure why. You’ll need to log onto stage1 and do an update manually to get new directories. Luckily, adding a directory is usually rare.

The update is checked out using the root account. I’m not sure what the security concerns are about doing that, and it’s possible you may have permissions issues. You can create a simple wrapper script that calls the real update command:

#!/bin/shsudo -u apache /etc/smrsh/cvs-robot-real

If you guessed that you click on the dropdown that says: “Normal” and select “Preformat,” you’re right!

Most people seem to assume that the second toolbar doesn’t do anything when you’re not write an HTML mail.  But that’s not true.

I recently filed this bug report against the Evolution composer. The problem is that the composer is too confusing to use.  Here is the composer editing an HTML message:

I propose that the main toolbar lose the “insert” capabilities that only work in HTML mode and gain a toggle button which switches between HTML and plain text mode. When the button is pressed in, you’re sending an HTML message.The secondary toolbar should only contain the controls that are currently active. So text color, font size, font decoration, and font style will not be shown in text mode. And instead of “normal” the default mode should be named for what it actually does: “Word Wrap.” Something like this:

With this scheme, HTML mode looks like this:

See the bug for more mockups.

This service is really amazing. The free installation is intense and lasted all day because they seem very concerned that everything work perfectly when they leave. The technician stayed until the network service was exactly as fast as what I’d paid for, and the television was playing HDTV and standard TV perfectly.  All the cables were free.  All the equiptment except for the cable box rental is free.  Very very impressive.

The picture quality on the television is amazing.  Standard TV looks better than DVDs.  HDTV looks so good it almost doesn’t matter what you’re watching.  And the 5.1 channel audio is great.

Oh. And this is all cheaper than what I was paying RCN without HDTV.

So far, the only problem I’ve seen is two 1 second audio drop outs during the Super Bowl.

Now if only my TiVO Series 1 could record HDTV.