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Wednesday, 12/03/03

Like my last apartment, the new house has no convenient phone jack for the TiVo, so I've been looking into getting a USB WiFi adaptor. Matt Haughey wrote up a good review of his experience with the Linksys WUSB11 a while back, and it sounded like a fine idea.

Unfortunately, Linksys quickly updated the WUSB11 and broke compatibility with the TiVo. So did NetGear, D-Link and Belkin. I spent some time on eBay looking for a TiVo-sanctioned version of any of them, and started to notice the older versions selling for more than retail as their scarcity went up.

TiVo is now struggling to stay on the ball: there's an OS upgrade in the works, 4.0.1a, to provide support for the current versions of WiFi adaptors from the four above vendors. Those of us who would rather spend $35 on a new unit than $65 plus shipping on eBay can elect to receive the TiVo 4.0.1a update in just a couple of days.

My moving process has put me out of the loop, so I don't know if this is a scoop or not, though Google was clueless as of this original writing.

I neglected to update this entry when the thing arrived because the experience was so anticlimactic. The Linksys device is so small and light that it looks like an empty shell of plastic. Plugging it in caused the Tivo to notice immediately and provide setup suggestions. Setup consisted of picking the right network name out of a list. Since then, I no longer have to unreel a long phone cord and trigger the data collection manually, and it's worked without complaint. 02:10PM «


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