Tyler Nichols Weblog » Technology

Tivo on Comcast Sucks

tyler — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:03:30 +0000

So we have had Tivo on Comcast for a full month now and I have to say, it sucks. It’s terribly slow and often gets a green screen of death. Can you say beta? Seriously, what is Comcast thinking releasing this buggy POS? It give’s Tivo a bad name.

The most annoying bug is the aforementioned green screen, where the entire screen fills with a bright green color and stays that way, seemingly frozen. After many times rebooting when this happens, I have learned a trick to recover from it, at least on my DVR. It usually “green screens” when watching a hi-def signal. I have found if you type a non hi-def channel on the remote keypad, the TV will change to that channel and come out of the green screen state. Then you’ll be able to change back to the HD channel you were previously watching.

Thinking of getting Comcast Tivo? I’d wait…

Getting Rid of Yahoo in 2008

tyler — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:47:49 +0000

One of my new years resolutions is to free myself from using ANY Yahoo! products and services in 2008.

Why? Yahoo! Mail is now almost unusable due to the fact that their spam filtering has become so poor. YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) continues to suck and not deliver ROI (at least in my experience). And of course, YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) is a complete flop, with piss poor targetting of ads. On top of all of that, I am starting to get random spam on my Yahoo Messenger account on a regular basis.

And to top it off, Yahoo! search results flat out suck. They are certainly slipping into the # 3 search engine in my book behind MSN/Live.

See ya Yahoo!

Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X

tyler — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 02:48:25 +0000

One of my gripes when I switched to using a Mac full time was that I could never get my mouse to track fast enough. Here is a solution that worked for me.

Open a Terminal Window
Enter the following command to see what your current setting is:
```
defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling
```
This will return a numeric value. To speed up (or slow down) your mouse tracking, you can simply change this number accordingly by typing the following command, replacing the “your_mouse_speed” with a new number such as 5.0. Notice that read has been changed to write:
```
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed
```
The maximum mouse speed on mac desktops is 3.0 (when maxed out in system preferences). I changed my speed to 5.0 for my 24″ iMac and it was noticeably better.
```
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling  5.0
```
You may need to restart your mac to see the changes take effect.

Update Jan 2010 : This method also works with the new magic mouse as well.