My mate asked me to setup his TiVo for him today.

I took the tivo, and my tools, and cable etc with me.

We stopped in at an electrical supplier on the way to his place, and bought a couple of wall mount RJ45 sockets, and some double sided tape to stick them on the wall.

We got to his place, and I grabbed the ladder, and got up in the roof with the torch.

I had a quick look around, saw where I was running the cable, it didn't look too bad.

I got back down, and dragged out enough cable to run across the ceiling, and down the walls, and a bit more, to make up for my crappy estimation skills.

I got back up in the roof, chucked the cable across towards the side of the ceiling, and then I moved the ladder around the back, got up on the roof, and moved a couple of tiles out of the way.

There was already a phone cable going down the wall here, so I knew I could get the cable down. I put a fair bit of it down there, and then I went inside, and I started trying to get the cable out of the wall.

I only needed a small hole to pull the cable out, but it would be impossible to find it or get it out without a bigger hole.

My mate had the good idea of taking the phone wall plate off, which I did, and then fished the cable out.

I pulled it out through the little hole I'd made, tied a knot so it couldn't go back in the wall, and went about getting the other end sorted.

I brought the ladder back in, got in the roof again, and I dragged all the rest of the cable across to the other side of the house.

This required a bit of gymnastics to get through the roof trusses, and back again, and it was nice to get out of the roof, because it was a sunny day, and the heat was picking up in there.

I went to take the ladder around to the other side of the house, but found that there was nowhere to put the ladder.

I climbed up off the fence, like I was doing when I installed the satellite dish a couple of years ago.

I moved another couple of tiles, found the cat5, and worked out where I needed to run it down the wall. I wasn't sure if this end would go down, when I worked here before, we ran the cables outside the house, and put them in through a hole in the bricks.

I didn't want to do this with the cat5 though, because I didn't want it in the gutter, and then a bright blue (not rated for external use) bit of cat5 running down the wall.

I spent a fair bit of time trying to get the cable down the wall, my mate took the aerial wall plate off from behind the tv, and tried to fish the cable out.

Eventually we got it done, and I put the tiles back, and then wandered across the roof to the other side, and put the other tiles back.

I got off the roof, and went inside. I sorted out the cable at the tv end, noticing that the aerial termination was a bit dodgy, and fixed that.

I went in, and put the RJ45 socket on the pc end, and patched it into the ADSL modem.

I went back to the loungeroom, booted up my laptop, and tested the line, I immediately got a link up, sweet, and found that it worked fine, DHCP worked, and I was able to browse the internet from my laptop.

Good stuff, the tivo should work then.

At this point, my mate started making lunch. I interrupted him from this, and showed him the process of installing the image on the new hard drive he'd got for his tivo.

Once that was done, I went about replacing the original disk from the tivo, the one with Jaws recorded on it. I realised that I hadn't brought my torx bits with me, so I didn't have any tools to get the hard drive bracket out.

We found a small flat screwdriver that fit pretty close, and because they weren't too tight, I was carefully able to use it to get the torx head screws out.

I put the new disk in, and all back together, and setup the tivo, in front of the tv cabinet, with the digital stb attached, patched to the internet.

I booted it up, and found the display was black and white on the tv, hmm, the tv mustn't support NTSC properly.

We sat and had lunch, and I ran through the guided setup. I setup the IR codes for the STB, and everything worked.

Once the guided setup was finished, and the tivo was indexing the guide data, I decided to reorder the channels on the STB, to where they would be, if the unit supported LCNs properly, instead of moving them on the tivo.

Once I'd done that, I waited a little while, but then got impatient, waiting for it to index, so I shut it down, and moved it into the cabinet, with the STB, and attaching the second set of outputs to my mate's DVDR unit.

After doing that, I found that the digital STB was acting really glitchy.

Eventually I decided to move it outside of the cabinet again (my mate had it installed on top of his speaker before), and once I did this, it was less glitchy.

I suspect that his aerial needs a bit of work, I think there's a corroded junction between the balun on the aerial, and a master amplifier, and then the aerial runs to a splitter, and a wall jack, and another couple of wall jacks back to the tv.

I told my mate I'd get that sorted at some point, whenever he wants to get a length of aerial cable, and have me pulling tiles off his roof again.

Once it was all setup, I went into the computer room and checked that the web interface was accessible, and used it to install the logos.

While I was doing that, the company that I bought the disk from that failed recently called up my mate, and wanted to speak to me.

It was a bit weird, it was just that they wanted to let me know that they'd decided to replace the disk, and it was ready to be picked up.

I setup my mate's ADSL mode with some port forwarding, and password protected his tivo, so that I can configure things on it for him, remotely.

After that, we sat and went through all the shows, and setup thumb ratings, so the suggestions would work properly.

My mate dropped me home after that, and he asked me about a disk usage bar on the tivo, I told him about autospace, and said I'd install it for him.

Once I got home, I logged into his tivo remotely, and I installed autospace, and then when my mate got back, he told me that the tivo had gone a bit wobbly, the web interface wasn't responding, and I saw the same thing remotely.

I rebooted his tivo for him, and then it seemed to be ok. It was probably because I installed autospace.tcl and started it, and found that it needed osdcons, so I installed that, and then it worked, it might have caused an issue when I tried running it without osdcons installed.

I got an email from the cheap electronics place I order stuff from, apparently they had more digital STBs. I thought they were the same as one they stocked a while ago, which were supposed to be pretty good.

After I ordered it, I realised it was the same as the one I bought for my parent's, which doesn't use LCNs properly, and you can't skip channels. Oh well, if it picks up ABC, then I don't care, since that's the only reason I need another one, since the first one I bought doesn't.