Category: Uncategorized

I hate to post a blog item about another blog, but this one’s pretty good. It’s from John Battelle, author of “The Search,” a book about Google, and pretty much a big shot in the search engine world. He’s also good friends with the people at BoingBoing (an excellent blog of strangeness) and started a blog advertising company.

Anyway, it seems that he’s a TiVo user from way back, and his TiVo just died. It sounds like all he needs is a new TiVo upgrade kit (the “replace” kind) but nonetheless he tried out a Comcast DVR. And hated it.

See the post.

Update: Thomas Hawk had some thoughts on this post also.

Several months ago, Seagate bought out Maxtor and began to phase out the Maxtor product line. As we had been using Maxtor QuickView drives up until that point, we had to make a decision on which drives to use going forward. We chose the Seagate DB35 line of drives, and we couldn’t be happier.

The Seagate DB35 drives are specifically optimized for use in DVRs, and now over 90% of the drives we ship are from this family. To see if the drive you’ll be getting in any upgrade kit is one of these drives, just click the “more info” link in the list, and the type of drive supplied will be shown on the next page.

We are really seeing pretty excellent performance with these DB35 drives. Way back when we started out, the majority of the drives we shipped were Samsung drives. These weren’t optimized for the DVR world, and whether it was because of that or just general drive issues, we had an unacceptable amount of problems. So as soon as we could source them, we switched over to the Maxtor QuickView line. This reduced the failures very significantly – plenty, in fact, to compensate for the fact that the drives themselves cost significantly more than the Samsungs we had been using.

Now, this latest transition is repeating the previous one. Seagate DB35 drives do cost substantially more than the Maxtor QuickView drives we had been purchasing, but we’re having an even further reduction in problematic drives, so we’re very happy. And so are our customers.

If you get our email, you already know about the coupon codes we sent out for Series3 TiVos. Starting last night, we added a new, simple way to save on just about any purchase on our site. For a limited time, if you use Google Checkout to pay for your order, you will automatically save $10 off of any $30+ purchase (before tax and any expedited shipping charges…ground shipping is free).

If you’ve been reading the blog, you know about the ADDITIONAL $10 off $30 coupon available (for a limited time) if you use Google Checkout.

I’ll do the math for you: That’s $20 off a $30 purchase!

And, to make things even better, the $20 off $30 can be used together with the coupons we emailed! You can use THREE DISCOUNTS in one order.

Want specific instructions? Here we go:

1) Add items to your cart that equal or exceed the total required by the coupons you want to use ($30 for the two Google Checkout coupons; higher for our coupons).
2) Enter the coupon code we emailed to you (either $25 off a $750 purchase or $50 off a $1000 purchase). Enter that in the “Coupon Code” box that appears BELOW the Google Checkout button on our site. You MUST enter that coupon code BEFORE you click the Google Checkout button.
3) Then, click the “Google Checkout button. You will immediately see one of the $10 off $30 coupons applied.
4) After you log in to Google Checkout, enter the other $10 off $30 coupon, which we posted in the blog (link above).

Didn’t get the email and want the coupons? Just sign up for our email list by October 12th and put the words “need coupons” in the comments/questions section and we’ll email the coupons to you.

The Google Coupons could expire quickly; the current round of weaKnees coupons expire 10/15.

Thanks for reading.

We just received our inventory of Series3 TiVos. We’ll be working furiously over the next day or two to get our pre-orders out, so if you have a pre-order in, watch for your tracking number by email. The first round of boxes (stock only) went out tonight…. (We got the boxes about 15 minutes before UPS showed up, so we had no time to get anything other than the stock-box orders out.) Tracking numbers for those who bought upgraded TiVos will start rolling out tomorrow night. Stay tuned!

Yesterday marked the start of a new tradition – or not. It was the first annual WeaKnees Rib-Off! Like Iron Chef but with different ingredients, no narration, and lots of other differences, the competition was as hot as the ribs.

“Dry-rub” Kap and “Test rack” Power duked it out in two rounds, adjusting the sauces and heat to gain extra votes from a margarita-soaked crowd of major TiVo upgrade fans.

Due to the long cooking times involved in perfecting the rib, the panel of judges sought alternative forms of entertainment. But even the hardiest of judges couldn’t figure out what this guy was doing:

Hours into the battle, the first racks come rolling out. The early news was that a 50/50 salt/rib ratio wasn’t a crowd pleaser. But juicy meat was, and the lingering remembrance of it stuck around. Test Rack’s beer entry had a few fans, and round two gave the crowd another chance to get porky.

In the end, though, the real battle was between the mac’n’cheese and the peach pie. The more you eat of one, the less you can eat of the other. And there’s still no easy way to get enough.