TiVo!

After what turns out to have been wasting around three hours trying to make it work via Vonage, my TiVo is working. Without connecting it to a phone line.

How?

Well, it seems that on newer TiVo models, if you boot them with a supported USB network adapter attached (most all of them are supported) and you set the modem’s dialing string to ,#401 it’ll appear to be dialing the modem and such, but instead it’ll connect via ethernet.

Imagine that…

Well, the TiVo is now all set up with USB network adapter and all. Being a good geek, I didn’t properly cable it yet, because I wasn’t certain if it had worked or not. But now that it did, I’ll fix it tomorrow.

I’ve also subscribed to a season pass of Good Eats, and the episode of Frontline showing at 3:30am should be recorded. We’ll see how it goes.

Regardless, I’m satisfied. I just wish that the Ethernet-based option for setting up the Tivo would have been a bit more obvious.

I must say, it’s a pretty nifty device… There’s lots of things you can tweak, including a built-in guide for programming the remote to control your HT gear’s volume and mute, turning on and off the front LEDs (this is big to me), network settings, internal diags, log access, etc. Definitely a nice box.

…and now I sleep.