One man's trash...

A couple of weeks ago the boy and I came back empty handed from a gear quest. Not that we have any money to actually buy gear, but the hunt is fun.

As we pulled up closer to our driveway I noticed that our neighbor had put a small guitar amp to the curb for trash collection.

The boy grabbed the amp and brought it in to the house for inspection. It turned out to be a DOD Grind IT practice amp. At first look the amp didn't seem to be in bad condition. The terminals on the speaker were missing, just broken off. The wires connecting the amp to the speaker were just twisted together. Also the clean/dirty switch was broken and unable to latch to dirty. Other than that the amp was dirty but in good physical condition.

After attaching a speaker terminal and soldering the leads from the speaker coil to the terminal I powered it up. The sound was pretty lame; as in very bad indeed.

Since I don't need another amp I gave it to the boy to use as a very terrible/experimental keyboard amplifier.

So I guess the moral of this story is "One man's trash is another man's".

EDIT / UPDATE:

So the amp sounds cool with some effect and a crappy keyboard going through it!

Also, I offered the amp back to the neighbors and they didn't want it.

TiVo skip commercials hack!

filed under:TiVo

In an effort to end my TiVo n00bness, I started searching the web for all things TiVo and found a whole world of TiVo hacks. The hacks ranged from the pretty hard like upping the hard drive for extending recording capacity to the very, very easy.

The thing that I hate about watching recorded TV is the commercials (ironic, no?).

When I stumbled on the 30 second jump hack I jumped for joy! Not really...

So in an effort to spread the word, here's the "TiVo commercial skip" hack I found at bigmarv.net.

Grab your TiVo remote. Bring up any recorded program. (I believe you have to be watching a recorded program rather than "Live TV" in order to enable the feature.) On your TiVo remote, key in the following sequence:

SELECT PLAY SELECT 3 0 SELECT






If you've successfully entered the code, you should hear three "bings" in succession to let you know that you've successfully enabled the 30 second skip feature. The skip-to-hash button on your remote will now skip forward 30 seconds during playback. The previous function of the skip to hash button (that is, jumping to the next "hash" mark on the playback progress bar at the bottom of the screen) can still be accessed by first pressing fast forward or reverse. Press the fast forward button and then press skip-to-hash and the playback will advance to the next hashmark (or the end of the program if you're close to the end of playback.) Press the rewind button and then the skip-to-hash and you jump back to the previous hash mark, or the beginning of the program depending on your place in the playback. Skipping past the end of the program takes you back to the start of playback.
Note that you'll have to re-enable this feature any time your TiVo is rebooted (such as after a power outage or a software update.)

Should you not like the 30 second skip, you can disable it by re-entering the Easter Egg exactly as you did to enable it.

Olbermann's Decision Oh Six, OH YEAH!

filed under:Politics, Bush and Olbermann


This is nice little video montage that aired on Countdown.

A big thanks to greats at CrooksAndLiars.com for having the video and for the hard work they do.

Soon to be TiVo Diva.

filed under:TiVo

So after years of battling with numerous VHS VCRs (one dies, pick up another for 30 Washingtons at the grocer) we've finally dragged into the New Meleni... New Millenie... into the 2000s and finally purchased a DVR.

We went for the TiVo instead of our cable company's DVR for a couple of reasons.

Reason numero uno: the mooks over at Teh AAF said I should get one.

Reason numero dos: I didn't want to be tied to the cable company. After a few months with a cable/phone/broadband provider we typically call them up and ask for the "Retention Department" and threaten to leave unless we get a better price. It doesn't matter if we're getting good service at a good price, it's about getting a better price. The thing is that if you threaten to leave, sometimes you have to follow through. So I wanted a DVR that I could take with me

Reason numero tres of a couple: The interface is supposed to super badass.

But for now we're waiting the 4-6 business days for the box to be delivered which isn't bad at all. I remember being a kid sending off for stuff from the back of cereal boxes. Delivery time was always 4-6 weeks, which in kid time seemed like 4-infinity centuries.

For those keeping count, the TiVo will bring the remote control count to 5.