Liveblogging Halloween

Well, so far Halloween in the suburbs has been underwhelming. Only three visits by trick-or-treaters in the hour or so since sunset, and only the last group was at all enthusiastic about it. Best costume so far was a girl dressed as the squid-faced guy from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Probably a store-bought costume, but still pretty well done.

I think I'm going to have a lot of candy left over. I guess it's the lack of sidewalks and streetlights in my neighborhood, or it's just a little too far off the beaten path from other larger and more densely populated zones around the lake.

Aha, doorbell number 4. Black robes, glowsticks, and some unidentifiable plastic mask. Should I be asking what the costumes are? Or is it insulting if I can't tell what it is?

TivoToGo for Series 3

Tivo finally enabled TivoToGo (and Multi-Room Viewing) for Series 3 HD models. This means, in theory, that I can transfer recordings from my DVR onto my PC. In practice, though, almost everything is copy-protected, which means you can't transfer them. Right now the only things I can transfer are episodes of Heroes and The Unit and 3 non-HD movies (out of about 50 currently sitting there). I transferred the Heroes episode to my laptop (running Windows XP; the Tivo Desktop program doesn't run on Linux and there's no compatible program that I could find) and it took about 2 1/2 hours (for a 1 hour episode, which is about 7GB). Not sure if that's because my laptop only has wireless G (my router, which the Tivo is plugged into directly via ethernet, has wireless N) or if the Tivo just has low outgoing bandwidth for some reason. Also, apparently my not-quite-three-year-old laptop is too slow to play HD videos smoothly. And I'm going to guess it will be non-trivial to get them to play on my Linux machine. Still, uh... it's a start!