brenda -- if you go to Gris' link, you'll see that they sell a Windows version.

So my only experience with robots.txt is in a fannish context, where we're usually looking to prevent sites from being indexed at all.

Now that I'm more active with the website for my mother's chorus, should I bother specifying any details for robots? We obviously want to be indexed by search engines. We don't have any problems with traffic or bandwidth excesses. Is there anything else obnoxious a robot would be doing that I'd want to stop?

More Tivo "bugs" showing up.

Since I got the lifetime subscription when I bought the box, my Tivo's essentially free at this point, and I have no reason to get rid of it. But this bug that makes the broadcast flag show up where supposedly no broadcast flag exists is not making me happy.

My printer is giving me trouble. Every time I try to print, I get an error message saying "pen failure," while the printer itself keeps telling me to "remove and check color cartriage." It doesn't say what to check it for, and if I take it out, all it tells me to do is put it back in and close the door. Upon which it then says "remove and check color cartriage" again, rinse, repeat.

There's nothing physically wrong with it that I can see. I've unplugged it and restarted it twice. Any ideas?

You might check in the printer properties for a "head cleaning wizard" and try that.

None of the buttons seem to be responding, is the problem. Everything I press just makes it beep at me and tell me to check the cartriages. But I'll keep trying.

[update: Telling the printer "I ALREADY CHECKED IT THREE TIMES SO WORK YOU FRACKING BITCH" does not help. The good news is, my printer is not a Cylon.]

With all the bad Tivo news going around, I thought I'd share some good.

I finally got mine set up with my new cable box, which was a pain as usual. But they've finally stopped pretending they don't have the functionality to do guided set-up over an internet connection. It's now just a standard option, phone v. broadband. They also added an option to let the Tivo assign itself an IP address, which appears to have resolved the connection problems that have been kicking my ass.

Sigh. And we just got a new TiVo because the old one died. The good news is that, with the rebate, we could get a new one right away for about the same price as shipping the old one to TiVo and having them ship a replacement to us.

Haven't seen the red flag yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

Stupid question time: I'm trying to set up Outlook to send email. It's asking me for the names of my incoming and outgoing mail server. I thought I knew where to find this info, but apparently I don't. Can someone tell me how to get this?

Crap. I used to know some shit about computers. Now it seems I can't do the simplest thing.

You need to get that info from your ISP. Howerver, there's a good chance the mail server might be called 'mail.yourispsname.com' or perhaps just 'yourispsname.com' or something.

Your ISP might have a web page telling you how to set up your mail.