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Tivo successfully hacked
Thursday, October 28 2004
This metaphor will probably confirm some suspicions some people already have. My slab project was the making of a world, a flat provincial little world, the kind with an edge off of which an enterprising Christopher Columbus among ants could easily fall. My slab-world started out without form and I gave it all that I needed to give it over the course of a week. Today, though, I rested. This brings up an important (though completely tangential) point about Genesis. I understand God resting on the seventh day after six days spent creating everything in the entire Universe. But my question is as follows: did He really only rest for a single day? What was left to do after creating the entire Universe that required any more than token appearances at the office? Sure, He had to come back and make Eve out of one of Adam's ribs. Later He had to return to drive Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. But from then on, vast amounts of time passed between his appearances. These days, of course, God is pretty much AWOL, outsourcing the Universe to the clockwork of Newtonian forces (with their Einsteinian amendments) and Darwinian selection.
Most of my efforts today went into hacking the Tivo. I pulled out its 40 gigabyte hard drive, backed it up to a 120 gig hard drive, applied a bunch of Linux hacks to the backup, and swapped the new 120 gig drive into the Tivo. It all was amazingly easy - there were very clear instructions available online and of course I had all the necessary equipment lying around. Now the Tivo is on the house's ethernet and I can communicate with it as I can with any Linux box using FTP and Telnet. It can serve web pages or files. I can even control it across the network using a web-based version of its remote control. The potential for future experiments is enough to whip my blood into a foam. The only trouble with my plans is that my particular model of Tivo (the Tivo 2) stores its video in an encrypted form and there is no known way to make its captured video playable on a PC. I have a feeling, though, that someone is working on this problem.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?041028 feedback
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