I've got a question. My parents' TV setup stopped working last week. The way it was set up: cable into cable box. Coax from cable box to TV. Component audio from cable box to receiver, and then sound to speakers. It had been working fine, but then last week, for no reason we could discern, the video stopped working. When we turned it on, we'd get sound, but a flat grey screen.

The cable company said we needed a new cable box. Tried that, still didn't work.

So today, I tried going through all the cables, to see if I could figure out where the problem was. Connecting the cable by coax from the cable box to a spare TV worked fine. I tried a few different paths, but no way of connecting by coax to the regular TV worked at all.

So I tried using the s-video out on the cable box. Connecting that to the s-video connector on the regular TV gave just static on the screen, which was a change from the flat grey, but still no good.

So, I tried connecting the cable box to the TV using both coax and s-video. And that worked, and with a much better picture than we'd had before.

Anyone have any idea why that worked, when neither the coax nor the s-video on its own worked?

This is crazy. Goatse ipod case, not nearly as graphic as the original:

[link]

I have an anti-Apple friend who considered getting an iPod so he could have that case.

Which bring the goatse tribute page to mind. Categories of tributes include food, games and toys, etc. Those links are worksafe, but the links off of them may not be.

the watermelon is just so wrong!

What kind of sick bastard would do that to a sock monkey???

Okay, so I'm looking at buing some new internal hard drives for my Dell desktop. How do I tell exactly what kind of interface I'll need, and just how much does it matter?

Looking at my device manager, I have an Ultra ATA controller. Does that mean I can only use Ultra ATA drives? If so, Seagate or Western Digital?

Seagate all the way. But, it's been my experience, that everyone you talk to has had a horror story with some HD and swears by the other.

When in doubt, check the warranties on the perspective drives. Many Seagates have 5 year warranties. Last I checked, WD had 2 or 3 year. Just something to consider.

I usually check Storage Review's leader board.

I buy nothing but Seagate currently.

Gah!

SoCal residents, how is your switch to Time Warner Cable going? I'm looking at the channel listing, and that's not what's on the TV. The channels below 100 are not matching the card, nor what TiVo now thinks it knows.

They yammer on their site about the magic of duplicating channels, so I'm telling TiVo that I don't get the ones below 100, one by one. Then it finds them higher and uses those channel numbers instead.

This is STUPID. And I know I just jacked up my TiVo channel settings by trying to correct it in the guided setup.