Day: November 20, 2005

TiVo Nearly Has IPTV

TiVo Won't Transfer Downloaded Content

TiVo won’t trans­fer con­tent that has been down­loaded over the inter­net. Click image for full view.

Just recent­ly, TiVo announced they would pro­vide week­ly down­load of prod­uct reviews by CNET. While not near­ly like hav­ing C|Net back on the air again (I miss Richard Hart and Gena St. John talk­ing tech on C|Net Cen­tral), it was pret­ty cool to be get­ting their con­tent via my TiVo. TiVo has also announced a down­load­able doc­u­men­tary about Hong Kong movie stunt­ment called Red Trousers (the film, not the stumt­ment). All this is very cool, and I’ve signed up to receive both. I actu­al­ly watched the first C|Net review of portable dig­i­tal music devices ear­li­er today. It was breif, but no less so that most tele­vi­sion reviews. The pro­gram was about twelve min­utes, total, I think. Now, just to be clear, so every­one under­stands. Nor­mal TiVo con­tent is sim­ply record­ed over the cable to the tele­vi­sion, just like a VCR would. This con­tent, how­ev­er, was down­loaded over the inter­net straight to the TiVo, like you might down­load some­thing to your PC or Mac.

Now, here comes the bad news. (P.S. — There’s always bad news with TiVo).

When fir­ing up my TiVo Desk­top to trans­fer some pro­grams (over my new, secure Home­Plug net­work con­nec­tion), I found that I was­n’t able to trans­fer the C|Net con­tent. I’m not say­ing I was even want­i­ng to trans­fer that, but what about when they have some IPTV that I do want to save. If they’re not going to let me save a twelve minute long C|Net piece, some­thing tells me there’s lit­tle chance I’ll be able to trans­fer and burn-to-DVD Red Trousers or any oth­er full lenth film. What if, in the future, I can buy con­tent via an online store to have down­loaded to my TiVo? Oh, say, like an iTunes Video Store? Will they let me have that con­tent to keep, or even for more than a week? TiVo, do the right thing here: let the con­sumers have the stuff. They’ll love you more for it.

What’s In A Name

I could­n’t ever use super_structure.com (or .org, .net, etc) because it was­n’t an allowed name.

About a year ago, I decid­ed I’d put a new face on my crusty old web site and start blog­ging. You’ve heard the sto­ry about how I start­ed on Blogger.com and then moved to host­ing my own Word­Press blog (okay, so Jason John­son & Dreamhost do most of the heavy lift­ing as far as that goes). Well, back when I was sign­ing up at Blog­ger, I need­ed a name for the site. It felt an awful lot like nam­ing a band, for some strange rea­son. Some peo­ple just use their own name, oth­ers come up with stuff that I have no idea what it means. Oth­er’s use some com­bi­na­tion or play on their names, which I real­ly like.

How­ev­er, I want­ed some­thing that sort expressed my engi­neer­ing side as well as the idea that this would still be a per­son­al site. Some­where, I decid­ed on the term super­struc­ture, which of course is the part of a build­ing or bridge above the foun­da­tions. How­ev­er, just the word seemed bor­ing and not quite tech/geek enough. Some­how, in my mind, adding a bit of ran­dom punc­tu­a­tion was just enough of a twist to make it dif­fer­ent. So the word super_structure was born. Lot’s of web pages, image files, and e‑mail address have under­scores instead of spaces to pre­vent that whole   or %20 thing. I thought that by sep­a­rat­ing the words, the word just had a dif­fer­ent empha­sis.

Lat­er, I real­ized that while you can have an under­score char­ac­ter in the direc­to­ry or file name, you can’t have one in the domain name. I could­n’t ever use super_structure.com (or .org, .net, etc) because it was­n’t an allowed name. So, I just stuck with jasoncoleman.net while con­tin­u­ing to use super_structure as the title.

There was cri­tiquing, to put it nice­ly.

I final­ly decid­ed to try and make a change today. You’ll notice that the under­score has been replaced by an en dash char­ac­ter (ful­ly sanc­tioned for domain usage). I have also reg­is­tered super-structure.org Yeah, I know, would­n’t it be nice if they were both .net or .org, but just like dates to prom, the good ones are always tak­en when you get around to ask­ing.

So, you’ll notice the uni­verse, at least as in regard to this Jason Cole­man, has now moved from super_structure to super-struc­ture, and what’s more, you can now just type super-structure.org into your web brows­er to get here. The re-direct is on me.

Note: Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as of writ­ing this in the wee hours of Sun­day morn­ing, super-structure.org was still just being parked by GoDad­dy. Hope­ful­ly, that will be cor­rect­ed soon. It’s all good.