Today's TiVo News Big announcements

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Today's TiVo News Big announcements from TiVo today:

http://www.tivo.com/5.3.1.1.asp?article=166 TiVo and DirectTV will offer a box later this year to let you record HDTV signals from DirectTV, as well as standard resolution signals, PLUS ATSC HDTV signals over the air (OTA).

http://www.tivo.com/5.3.1.1.asp?article=164

TiVo is also coming out with a standalone HDTV recorder, that they're going to license to several manufacturers. HDTV eats disk space like crazy though, even with a 120GB drive, you're only going to be able to store around 20 hours at HD resolution, but of course you can store a lot of standard resolution stuff too.

http://www.tivo.com/5.3.1.1.asp?article=165

TiVo and Toshiba have created a DVD/DVR product, so that you can record your TiVo programming off to a DVD to keep it.

http://www.tivo.com/5.3.1.1.asp?article=162

And, finally, TiVo has the new "Home Media Option" in which they hit you up for another $99 for your first recorder, and $49 for every additional recorder, so that you can listen to MP3s and view digital photos on your TV, retrieving that media from your home PC via your home network. You can also schedule shows remotely via the web, so if you're away from home, you can tell it what show you want to record for you, and last, but not least, you can share recorded shows between two TiVos in the same household, so that if you recorded a show in the living room, you can watch it later in the bedroom.

They're also adding wireless and wired ethernet support via Linksys devices, and give you access to Corbis' collection of music and photos via broadband.

My take on it: The $99 fee is to high for what they give you, make it $49, and the second TiVo is $25, and I'd pay for it. Right now, I'm going to plan on buying one of the new HDTiVos at the end of the year, and getting rid of one of my Series 2 boxes. I'll probably wind up getting the Home Media Option put on my boxes, simply because I'll get most (if not all) of the price of it back when it comes time to sell them on eBay, as the service level doesn't depreciate, so you essentially get to use it for free, assuming you're going to sell the box and upgrade.

I'm knee-deep in upgrades this

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I'm knee-deep in upgrades this week. The Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP has gotten several faculty members to convert, and I'm upgrading one professor from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 so that her shiny new USB Digital Camera will work with her system. I don't mind this kind of work, it's easy enough, just time consuming, routine enough to be comforting, but not mind-numbingly boring. Everyone wants to do their upgrades this week, because classes start next week, so there is some time pressure involved, thank goodness for my KVM switch, I can do 3 machines at once. I did find time to watch Apple's annoucements yesterday. I'd opt for the new 12" Powerbook over that 17" behemoth. It's an even smaller version of my old iBook, which was a svelte little machine to begin with. But, since I'm cursed with more brains than money, I won't be buying either one anytime soon. My trusty (if somewhat boring) 2.2Ghz Dell Latitude C640 is pretty darned fast, even if it's not made out of Ti or Al, which is okay, since I'm not made out of Au.

The Holidays are over and

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The Holidays are over and it's time to go back to work. My temporary job at Software, Etc. has ended, the Christmas tree is on the curb, and I'm going to try to get back into posting here regularly once more! I'm trying out my new copy of Microsoft Picture It! Digital Image Pro 7.0, which arrived today. So far, it's pretty user-friendly, but not to the point where I can't use it. I'm quite capable of using Photoshop, but I'm always evaluating new photo manipulation programs to give my faculty. Photoshop isn't exactly user friendly, but some products, like the failed Photodeluxe, simplify the process to the point where I can't use them, because the interface handicaps me. So far, this looks like a good compromise, but I've only used it for a few minutes so far.

What I really want to do, is get something like this added as an option to the Microsoft Campus Agreement, so it will be relatively cheap and easy to provide it to all my users. I've e-mailed my Microsoft rep about that, but I'm sure that the Hive-Mind of Microsoft won't have anything like that as an option, so I'll probably wind up buying some concurrent licenses of Photoshop Elements 2.0 for them to use.