We see a lot of unusual boxes come through here, but this is something we haven’t seen before. A customer sent his hard drive in like this:

It looks pretty strong, but I don’t think it’s too feasible for us. They’d be rolling all over the office.

I can’t believe the surgeon general isn’t all over this (or maybe it should be the technology czar?) but check out what secondhand smoke has done to the fan in this poor TiVo:

And that’s just the fan! I can’t even describe the hazmat situation of the rest of the unit.

Notice that your faithful hero is bare-handed on this one. That was a mistake.

So next time you’re enjoying a cigarette and relaxing, come on – think of the TiVo!

There’s always something new coming through here. Check out this one:

Amazingly, given the age of the unit and the drives, it seems to have worked like this for several years. That’s pretty shocking to us, considering how that foam below the Maxtor would just hold the heat right against the drive. And the duct tape (haven’t seen it in that color before) keeps the whole thing vibrating nicely.

People, PLEASE! Spend the $14 for a TiVo Series1 upgrade bracket in the future!

Well, it finally happened. DirecTV enabled dual live buffers on the DirecTV HD DVR. So that’s the HR20, HR21, HR22, HR23, and HR21 Pro. If you’ve got the latest software update, you can now have a buffer of two shows at once, without any fancy remote gymnastics.

If you’ve gotten the latest OS update, you’ll be seeing this screen soon:

Then, when you’re watching your first show, you just press the Down arrow, and you’ll see this screen:

Of course, I chose a bad program in the background there, because these results DON’T last. For whatever reason, DirecTV implemented this in a way that it dies on its own after two hours. So the next time you sit down at your TV, you’ve got to re-enable the feature. That’s as simple as just pressing the Down arrow and then OK again, but it seems silly, and it means that if you’re recording two shows at once, you don’t really get live buffers.

Here’s the screen with those details:

Anyway, even with a bit of a hitch, it’s still a great feature.

We previously posted about switched digital video adapters coming to Time Warner systems, and it looks like Cox may finally be rolling Motorola adapters out in a big TiVo market close to the weaKnees home–Orange County.

Happy TiVo / Cox Subscribers

From this article, it appears that Cox is starting to Beta test adapters, so if you are in The OC and have a TiVo, it might be worth a call.