March 10, 2007
Speaking of cheap patches for the Daylight Savings Time thing...
I was looking through the program guide on my DVR (a Dishplayer 622) last night, and I see that they “solved the problem” by offsetting the guide data by an hour. I assume that this will go on until the first Sunday in April.
Not a bad solution, but not exactly smooth and subtle, either.
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Comcast DVR ComcastropheOver at "KGB Report", Kevin Barkes details his woes with a brand new Comcast DVR... What a Comcastrophe. It took three visits from the installer and two different DVRs to get the service working right- well, not right, but at a level which did not invoke rage when attempting to watch anything. Ah, where to begin? The digital cable box/digital video recorder itself: a hideous, silver, retro-styled device manufactured by Motorola which throws out more heat than a toaster oven and sports a hard drive that sounds like a fully loaded, out-of-control freight train going downhill through a tunnel. It goes downhill from there... Ah, Kevin, Kevin -- Comcast is a Cable company -- you're supposed to use those for...
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Better Media Guides NeededThomas Hawk thinks that media guides need an overhaul. Although his examples are specific to MCE, Thomas is quick to point out that pretty much all PVR guides suck, and he's right. They all have content provided by one or two guide sources, and that content comes from the broadcasters themselves (and is usually pretty lame). But there's better metadata right in the content stream... What is needed first off is to begin indexing closed captioned text for all television that is repeated. Much of television is actually repeated. News shows will play the same shows over and over, programming will show on East and West Coast feeds, syndicated content has already been captioned, standard network repeat stuff, etc. By...
That’s okay… I got a message from TiVo. It said: “Your antiquated series 1 piece of crap will just be off by an hour for 3 weeks. Buy a TiVo that was built this century or deal with the inconvenience.”
I smiled, and thought of this http://www.nonliteral.com/articles/percussive-repair-for-tivo-freeze-up/ — knowing that its days are ultimately going to come to an end.
Although *it* will probably dictate when it stops working… not me. Bastard machine.
Yeah, I got one of those too — apparently I’m still on their mailing list…
Well, the “Y2K7 scorecard” is slightly interesting –
The iHome iH6, bought last week, didn’t catch the non-traditional time change.
On the other hand, a cheap little Oregon Scientific “thermometer clock” (it picks up signals from a wireless sensor in the back yard, and time sync from one of the atomic clock radio signals) did, despite that I bought it well over a year ago.
In fact, I figured that it wouldn’t, and at about 1:15 am I decided to set its time zone to Eastern (so it would display right; it’s about the first thing I see when I’m awake enough to care about what time it is, so it was the only one I tried to adjust beforehand), it immediately flipped to 3:15 instead of 2:15, so it damn well knew today was the day…
Macs , XP boxes, Smartphones and servers all worked as expected, since they were all patched (either manually or automatically).
Still had to adjust the Zen Clock by hand, of course…
The cat woke up an hour early; apparently she adjusted her clock the wrong way.
I thought on the iHome systems (the iH5 at least) you just flipped the button on the back and it jumps ahead an hour or falls behind and hour depending on how you set your clock. (When you first got your clock, and it’s winter, you needed to set the time while the button was set to -1). Not sure how the iH6 does it though, but that’s how the iH5 is.
Verizon decided to go all out and set my boxes ahead 2 hours. I haven’t turned on a TV today to see how that’s working out.
With the exception of the computer, I’ve had to manually adjust everything… including my cell phone.
The iH6 has a button for clock adjust, and a button for time zone adjust. Holding down either of them for a couple of seconds puts it in “set” mode, just like setting the alarm — you spin the volume knob forward or back to pick a setting. After you’ve stopped changing it for a few seconds, it beeps and locks on.
When I opened the box, the time was already set, and the TZ was Eastern; I just had to change the TZ to Central.
This morning, I just adjusted the time forward an hour; doubtless I’ll have to turn it back in 3 weeks or so.
The DVR thing has me slightly bemused — yesterday the guides were off by an hour for programs past 2AM today.
Today, the guides are correct, and the time is correct.
My best guess is that the guides and the unit run on GMT, and the TZ change just changed the GMT offset used to show both system time and program times in the guide.
That would be the simple way to do it, although it did make for some funny listings when looking across the far side of the change.
Maybe they always do it this way; I can’t say that I’ve ever paid attention before.
Personally, I think the whole DST nonsense is asinine anyway, and I always have… Just leave the damn thing alone and let us sort it out for ourselves.