Let’s get this out of the way first:

I love my TiVo. We have a Toshiba Series 2 TiVo/DVD, a Tivo HD with a TiVo extender, and now a TiVo Series 3. But that doesn’t change the fact that adding the Series 3 was a serious pain.

It is a unfortunate sign of the times that companies optimize the common paths of customer service while leaving no flexibility for leaving the scripted interaction. If you want to activate a new TiVo, then activation is as smooth a process as you could imagine. Activating a pre-owned TiVo, not so smooth.

• If the previous owner has a contract, then TiVo is going to ask you to assume the remainder of the contract.
• In order to assume the remainder of the contract, you need to call customer service and:
  • Agree to the TiVo Terms and Conditions
  • Provide your credit card number to be billed for the TiVo service.
• Make sure you agree to the Terms and Conditions. I discovered the hard way that if TiVo customer service neglects to get your agreement, then TiVo will
  • Reject the transfer of ownership.
  • Keep your credit card number on the previous owner’s account.
  • Not bother to notify you that they’ve rejected the transfer.
• When you call back to see why the transfer isn’t completed, you will:
  • Need to listen to and agree to the verbal Terms and Conditions read by the customer support rep.
  • If you actually pay attention to this sort of thing (which I do), then you’re going to hear that early cancellation may cost you:
    • Up to $155.40 (early in the T’s and C’s).
    • Up to $200.00 (midway in the T’s and C’s).
    • Up to $155.40 (towards the end of the T’s and C’s).
  • If you ask when the $155.40 applies and when the $200 applies, then your customer service rep is probably not going to have a satisfactory answer.
  • If you ask to see a written copy of the Terms and Conditions, then you’ll be directed to the TiVo web site - where you’re not going to find T’s and C’s matching the verbal ones.
• At this point you’re going to need to decide whether to:
  • Just accept the Terms and Conditions even though they appear to be internally inconsistent and you’re not able to see a written copy.
  • Assume that the online Terms and Conditions are the ones that really count.
  • Write off:
    • The cumulative hour spent with TiVo customer service over two calls.
    • Shipping costs.
    • And hope that:
      • You get back the purchase price from the previous seller.
      • You don’t get billed for TiVo service now that TiVo has associated your card with the previous owner’s account.

All in all, the money saved with the used TiVo wasn’t worth the aggravation it came with. I didn’t find that out until I was already committed. Now, you know better.

PS: Yes, I know this would have been easier if I was less AR about terms and conditions. But TiVo made a big deal out of me listening to the terms and conditions. Is it too much for me to expect that confusing points be clarified before I agree?

Scroll to the top of scrollable content by tapping the status bar at the iPhone display (status bar shown below).

Courtesy of 10 useful iPhone tips and Tricks

My complete list of iPhone usage tips.

In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good … So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones.

The music industry may wish that we would sate our music needs with albums rather than singles, but that ship has sailed. Now that listening to singles is both easier and better than listening to albums, we’re not going back.

Music Sales of CD’s peaked at $16.4B in 1999. In 2008, music downloads were about 10% of that. Some of that difference was due to piracy and some was due to streaming. And some of those CD sales in 1999 were for replacement of vinyl. But a big piece of the difference was that CD’s forced us to buy the dross with the gold.

Now, we’re only buying the gold.

Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

I’m not sure about the ingredients, but I’m sure iTunes Genius is brilliant.

My need for music is closely tied to length of my commute. And the soundtrack of my current 10 minute commute is sports talk radio combined with obsessive repeats of my favorite track of whatever CD is loaded in the player.

Make that past-tense. The soundtrack of my commute was sport talk radio combined with obsessive repeats. Because I’ve discovered how easy it is to make and burn a Genius playlist to CD. And now the soundtrack of my commute comes courtesy of iTunes Genius.

1. Select a song in iTunes.
2. Click on the Genius button in the lower right.
3. Modify tracks as needed (delete for an audio CD, or increase for a MP3 CD).
4. Click on the “Save Playlist” button on the upper right.
5. Find the Playlist (named for the original song), right-click and “Burn Playlist to Disc”
6. Enjoy

Symptoms of Failure

Our problems started with Time Machine backups starting, but not completing. We were also having difficulty shutting down. When I dug deeper, I had similar problems with the sparse bundles in Disk Utility. The problems went away when I switched Time Machine over to a different hard drive.

Why Repair?

Our backup strategy called for hard drive cloning every two or three months with Time Machine for incremental backup. I considered staying on the external drive, but it was an effort to even get a weekly backup on the external drive. And the Time Capsule is so nice when you have laptops. This was also an opportunity for me to upgrade to a 1TB hard drive.

The Repair

The repair went smoothly with an assist from the internet. Brandon Hansen’s Hard Drive Repair for Time Capsule was particularly helpful. If you are comfortable installing a hard drive or card in a computer, then you probably have all the skills you need.

After Action Report

My fan power connector was found disconnected during the repair. I may have done it myself during the disassembly, but I can’t help but wonder if the problems were caused by over heating after the connector came loose.

I had no problems accessing the old hard drive using my USB hard drive adaptor. Disk Utility reported a bunch of errors when repairing the sparse bundles, but was successful in the end. I don’t expect to need the old data, but I’ll keep it for a few months just in case.

All idioms are learned; good idioms are only learned once.

Display song lyrics on your iPhone by touching the cover art while the song is playing.

Which raises the question of how to populate lyrics data: use Needle Drop to cycle through songs in iTunes and Harmonic or GimmeSomeTune to retrieve and store the lyrics of the current song.

My complete list of iPhone usage tips is maintained in a TiddlyWiki.

Previously:
19 July: iPhone Newbie: ScreenShots and Lists
5 July: iPhone Newbie

All idioms are learned; good idioms are only learned once.

It seems obvious once you know it, but it took me a while to remove Cupertino, CA from my list of cities in the Weather app.

1. Take a iPhone ScreenShot by selecting the home and sleep buttons simultaneously.
2. Reorder items in a TableView control by touching the grab bars on the right (circled in red) and sliding up or down.
3. Delete items in a TableView control by selecting the red circle with a horizontal bar. The circle will rotate and a Delete button will appear on the right.

My complete list of iPhone usage tips is maintained in a TiddlyWiki.

Previously:
5 July: iPhone Newbie

If you’re a techie with an iPhone, then you need to get Prowl. Ostensibly a client allowing Growl to push notifications to your desktop to your iPhone, the 3rd party API allows push notifications from any computer connected to the internet.

I’ve been too cheap for SMS, but a one time investment of $2.99 in Prowl fits into anyone’s budget. Now I just need Zac West to make enough money to keep the server going.

Thanks to Tivo, I’ve started watching Classic Albums. And after watching the show on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I felt the urge to pick up some classic Elton John.

Back in the day, I had allowed myself to be deluded into thinking that songs should be kept in the context of their original albums. That delusion faded about the time it became trivially easy to cherry pick the best tracks off a CD.

Unfortunately, that leaves me the problem of selecting a version. The iTunes music store has about 10 versions of Rocket Man, 10 versions of Daniel, and 5 versions of Levon. It’s pretty safe to rule out any non plus versions, but that doesn’t really make a dent in numbers.

The last, lingering traces of my old delusions bias me towards songs off the original album. The technologist in me wants to look into remastered versions. And the procrastinator in me says maybe next week.

All idioms are learned; good idioms are only learned once.

That’s the goal anyway. And it helps to have a photographic memory. My memory is more along the lines of finger painting, so I like to keep notes online:

1. Make a ringtone from a DRM free song in iTunes.
2. Hold down on an applications until the icons start wriggling to arrange application icons.

I’ll be keeping my complete list of iPhone usage tips in a TiddlyWiki.