Thanks for the suggestion, jimi. I'm not sure about the electrics of the whole thing, though.

I thought pyTiVo was supposed be easy! I just compiled ffmpeg on my box and am running the pyTiVo software--the downloaded files show up on TiVo but won't play. I don't even know where to start troubleshooting.

Are you using pyTivoX? I don't remember having to compile ffmpeg or anything else to get it to run.

is there anything like this TiVo stuff for U-verse?

Are you using pyTivoX?

No, just pyTivo. For some reason the web config tool doesn't save changes to the configuration file, so it wasn't finding the location of ffmpeg.

Not sure how to fix the saving issue, but I can edit the file manually to work around it.

Now to focus on migrating my sister to her new Gateway laptop.

Now to focus on migrating my sister to her new Gateway laptop.

For a robot body, it doesn't seem very mobile. Attach it to a Roomba, at least.

Great. After all that, I have bollixed up the power connector for the Powerbook, so now I can't power on the laptop. It might be over for it, finally.

Sad now.

Um, I can't be coherent in this question because I don't play with PCs much. But so. My SIL's laptop. Windows XP. All browsers render as if for mobile. Changing the contrast (??) fixes it, but only per boot up. I have no clue. We're mac logic people, which means we're either useless or rude (my dad.) It's got to be some setting somewhere, but I don't know where. I told her to find a PC person in my brother's gearhead friends, but thought I'd check here too.

Huh. What an interesting problem. (Sorry, that's all I got.)

Does this happen no matter what network she's on? Or just one? Is it wifi? or a cellular data network?

Hmm... I just read that there's no standard way for web server code to identify if a client is a mobile device (so the server can then send different code to the client).

In case anyone's interested: Detecting Mobile Browsers

This is browser specific, but an interesting example of how some esoteric setting could cause the server to think it's talking to a mobile device.

I wondered why my Firefox (on a regular Windows PC) was detected as "mobile" by a lot of sites, that wanted then to display me their "mobile" version.
Turns out that I had once an extension to enable it to wiew WAP, so the option (in "about:config") "network.http.accept.default" was set to "text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5,text/vnd.wap.wml;q=0.6".
I reseted it to default value and all works well since then.