Firmware upgrade day.

Every once in a while, usually as a result of using a device that has been dormant for some time the house will get a round of firmware upgrades. The latest cycle began with the second and probably last failure of our TiVo third generation device. This TiVo has been one of the most unreliable machines I have ever bought. It had all started with a Topfield machine back in 2005 or so. That failed several times too; first the hard disk which I replaced and then after 2 years the power supply and it was obvious from their forum that many owners' machines had had the same death. So I didnt buy another Topfield. Life is too short to give that sort of manufacturer a second chance when there are alternatives.

So I bought a TiVo. The Topfield had required kludges to get a 7 day EPG going but the convenience of this feature as well as time shifting had ensured we wouldn't ever really watch our shows live. The TiVo certainly made this even easier. It had a few drawbacks though. It was a closed system. It took forever to boot. It did not allow blind skipping of commercials. You had to fast forward through them. It also had a few annoyances in my setup like not selecting the best resolution, and reverting to the poorer choice whenever the display was power cycled.

Then it developed overheating problems which made it reboot and with the long startup times of 5 minutes made missing programs very likely.

In the end it failed at its HDMI port. Although it wasnt ever unplugged, the small movements of the machine to adjust other nearby things meant the HDMI connector had become very loose and had now failed with handshaking failing or audio being absent.

It had lasted barely 18 months. So I went back to a BeyonWiz that I had picked up cheap for the guest room some time ago. It needed a firmware update and so it started. After doing it, I realised my DVDO and Yamaha receiver had not been updated and sure enough both had updates available. Then the Bluray player, the Apple TV and my computers.

But it didn't end there. There were still the Nintendo 3DS, its cards, and eBook readers to do. The more I looked around the more devices there were to upgrade with fimware and system updates. Altogether I think I wasted around 4-5 hours including fixing little annoyances along the way.

Becoming the home IT person can really begin to be like real work when you need to keep all these things running constantly. I still have to fix up the TimeMachine backups which have gone astray because of the changes I had made a couple of weeks ago when I demoted the MacMini Server from its duties. Configuring Apple stuff has become the least enjoyable part of my home IT duties. Having not worked with Windows for a while (and still having bad memories of it) Apple is probably still better to manage but it too isn't pleasant. In fact I had tried setting up Windows 2011 Home Server as an experiment a couple of months ago but that had reminded me of how tragic that path was when I hit up against very hard walls just trying to get machines seeing each other and following instructions to the letter. But that's another story again.