One of my rare days is when I’m here in the Bay Area on a Sunday. Thus, I had some time to finally hook up my Tivo to the Internet. Supposedly this allows me to schedule shows to my home based Tivo via the Web; I’ve been itching to try it out. Here goes.
Sometimes I just don’t believe that today’s computerized devices can be connected successfully all the time. They don’t seem to work all the time and debugging them can be a nightmare.
But today must have been my lucky day. I plug in a Linksys USB Wifi adapter and the correct menu in the Tivo spins right up.
I am always worried about plugging in these adapters – it’s the same with buying the wrong wireless router. You never know if it’s really going to work or not. This last year I helped my sister setup wireless networking in their house. They have cable internet, something that I’m not familiar with – I’ve setup three wireless networks in three different parts of the country with DSL. Each one was different. I had to go to different websites, search through pages of tech support, and then figure out how to configure my brand of wireless router. Note that each brand has a slightly different way of setting this up, not to mention the different types of DSL across the nation. I thought I was getting good at setting up these networks. Then, I hit this cable internet. But I get lucky again. I note that it was probably an old model of the wireless router that was causing the problem. So we go get a new model of the same one, and of course it works. Why is that? No idea. Two generations of a wireless router and one works and one doesn’t. Go figure.
Devices just don’t work the way they’re supposed to. We gotta be voodoo doctors to know which magic dust you gotta sprinkle with this setup and hardware.
But I get lucky once again with this Linksys USB Wifi Adapter.
In minutes, the Tivo connects with the Internet and acknowledges that it’s working. I then go to the Tivo website, logon, and schedule a show to test it. It receives the request and queues it for my Tivo.
I then go back to the Tivo and tell it to connect and download data. Minutes later, the Tivo has the information as I check it in its recording queue.
AWESOME. Never miss a show now! And now, back to my dust of frog liver and puree of toadstool…