This season of Galactica has pretty much blown so far. They haven't made me give a shit about anybody or anything that has happened. Bring back Sarah Connor.

So, apparently since the last DST change, my DirecTivo is confused about what time it is: it thinks it's an hour earlier than it really is. Fortunately, the program data is also off by an hour, so it's still mostly* recording the right things, but having the clock be wrong is annoying.

It's a hacked Philips 7000/17 S2 box (apparently running 4.0.1b-02-2-240), so I can't apply DirecTV's software update. Any idea how to fix this? There is no zoneinfo directory on the Tivo file system, so I don't know where its DST rules live. The clock is correct w.r.t. GMT, it just doesn't know what the new DST rules are.

I don't understand why this didn't happen last year. I think I would have noticed.

* It stopped recording The Daily Show at the proper time because I use a "manual" recording for that one (to stop getting a dozen copies of it a day when Comedy Central botches the metadata, which is often).

Nude buttocks may cost ABC $1.4 million

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $1.4 million fine against 52 ABC Television Network stations over a 2003 broadcast of cop drama NYPD Blue.

The fine is for a scene where a boy surprises a woman as she prepares to take a shower. The scene depicted "multiple, close-up views" of the woman's "nude buttocks" according to an agency order issued late Friday.

ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Co. The fines were issued against 52 stations either owned by or affiliated with the network.

FCC's definition of indecent content requires that the broadcast "depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities" in a "patently offensive way" and is aired between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The agency said the show was indecent because "it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs -- specifically an adult woman's buttocks."

The agency rejected the network's argument that "the buttocks are not a sexual organ."

I'll be expecting one of you commenters to find these alleged buttocks on the youtubes.

Hello, my name is jwz and I am a pathetic fanboy. ("Hi jwz.")

Ok, I'm hesitant to say this, but the first three episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles have been pretty awesome, despite my strong expectations to the contrary. It could easily go steeply downhill from here (after all, the first 1¾ episodes of The Bionic Woman weren't bad either) but so far, it really has me hooked.

(Normally I expect the first two or three episodes of any TV series to suck, since usually the writers and actors haven't figured out what they're doing yet, and those episodes are chock full of exposition of the backstory, which always makes for terrible television. So it took me by surprise when BW started off ok and then immediately ratcheted up the suck.)

Anyway.

(Extremely minor spoilers:)

Sarah's character seems a lot less crazy and homicidal than she was in T2 just after she broke out of the asylum, but it is set four years later, so I can buy that maybe she mellowed a bit. John is still a whiny little bitch, but that's exactly like in the movie. I'm glad they seem to be setting up a long arc story and not the obvious "Terminator of the Week" plots. The River-800 is awesome, even though she's totally typecast now. I'm liking the half-Mulder-half-Scully FBI agent too ("Oh, didn't she tell you? It's because of the robots. The robots from the future.") The Oppenheimer stuff was great, and I enjoyed the shout-out to the Singularity.

And I really liked that they used time travel to delete the third movie in its entirety. That was a very, very, very good decision.

I expect to hate the high school subplot, but we'll see.

Here's a page with a decent breakdown of the timelines and timeline-revisions of the various Terminator movies: Terminator Wiki. It's not nearly as obsessively detailed as the Back to the Future timeline, which is surprising, but it lays it out pretty well. (Both of these would be easier to follow with a graphic; the BttF page used to have a chart, but it seems to have been deleted.)

Dear Lazyweb,

Let's say I was thinking about upgrading the second monitor I have attached to my iMac from a CRT (SVGA) to an LCD (DVI). I want that second monitor to run in 1600×1200 or so, and yet be mirrored onto my TV (projector) via an SVideo cable. Right now, I am accomplishing this by having the iMac's mini-DVI going into a mini-DVI-to-SVGA converter, and thence to an AverKey 300 SVGA splitter, which gives me an SVGA pass-through plus a downsampled SVideo output. (As discussed earlier.)

So, there are cables like this which split DVI into DVI-plus-SVGA, but they only work with DVI-I... and as far as I can tell, the only mini-DVI-to-DVI adapters that exist are DVI-D only (suggesting that perhaps Macs don't do analog DVI output at all?)

So, what's the cheapest way to do it?

Dear Lazyweb,

TivoTool stopped working on 10.5, and mail to the author bounces. It's looking for this "CamelBones" library that no longer exists. I installed some newer version of it, but that didn't work either. What are my alternatives for getting video off my Tivo without an analog phase? (If you're going to point me at some forum page on tivocommunity or dealdatabase, please try harder: I can never figure out how to download shit from there.)

Update: So, here's one semi-horrible way:

To get the show ID number:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/llist

To download that show as an MPEG2 file:
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vstream-client tivo://hostname/number -o tmp.ty
/Library/Application\ Support/TivoTool/vsplit -m tmp.ty filename unused

Things to do before the writers' strike takes its toll:

Loving these:

Pushing Daisies
Journeyman
Dexter
Californication
Weeds


Mostly enjoying these:

Heroes
Torchwood
Robot Chicken


Awaiting more of:

Battlestar Galactica
Venture Brothers
Doctor Who
Lost


Why am I still watching this shit:

Stargate Atlantis
Bionic Woman
Supernatural
Eureka
Blood Ties

"I Am So Funny: My brief and wondrous career at The Daily Show consisted of making jokes about the Amish and trying to get Jon Stewart to love me."

Someone wrote that thesis. "William the Bloody" by Lydia Chalmers. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Watcher's Diploma (W.D.), Watcher's Academy, London, 1998.

You may be un-shocked to know that she also has a LiveJournal.

PS: Thank you, LiveJournal, for completely screwing up the formatting on this post with the complementary fifty pixel border you put around the videos. That's awesome.

This is so not what living in the future was supposed to be like. Not even twenty minutes into the future.

Max Headroom Season 1: 7 hr 36 min remaining
Max Headroom Season 2: 64 days 3 hr remaining.

Every time I've ever tried to use BitTorrent for anything, this is how it goes. Based on past experience, I expect that each of these will get to 98.2% and stop there forever.