Tivo Expander Drive Internals

Everybody wants more space in their DVR right? And if you have TiVO you can purchase one of the ludicrously overpriced hard drives with the custom partitioning scheme called a “tivo expander” that western digital sells to pair with the drive in the TiVO. When I first decided to do this I was appalled that they should cost so much more than the cheapest drive from WD that I could find. They can’t be any different can they? It didn’t seem like online at the time people were having very good luck creating one for themselves with a regular disk and it turns out the plug on the TiVO is not a standard SATA plug but something slightly different, or at least the plastics are keyed differently meaning you can’t plug in the same cable you got with that el-cheapo drive.

So I gave in and bought one. It ran happily for years and then died. It’s been in the bottom of a drawer with dozens of other dead or now unneeded pieces of kit that I’ve been unable to part with. Recently I’ve been cleaning out my flotsam but rather than throwing them out I’ve been pulling them apart and hanging the boards up on my bathroom wall as a kind of geek wallpaper. So I tore into this drive to get the board out and the platters to hang up on the wall and was surprised to see that it actually is considerably overbuilt compared to other disk drives I’ve torn apart. The first thing that clued me in was the thickness of the platters themselves. They are twice as thick as a non-TiVO platter from WD.

when I picked it up I knew I should be taking a picture of this for posterity. Here it is compared to a disk from a more recent WD disk that failed:

By caliper measurement it’s actually twice as thick at 1.75mm!

the other WD platter at .82mm

and the TiVO expander at 1.75mm.

Additionally there were these odd spacers between each platter, just machined pieces of aluminum:

What purpose they could serve I don’t know but I’ve never seen them in any other drive I’ve torn open, though I’m far from an expert on disk drives.

So it seems to me that these drives are actually built to a higher spec than the cheaper drives we get for most other things. I dont know if that helps, this one still didn’t last as long as it should have, but it does explain why they are more expensive, it’s not just a branding issue with TiVO.

Steampunk Photo Cube Lamp

A little over a year ago a friend of mine saw This Instructable for the “Architectonic Photo Cube” and I offered to build it for her if she ordered the pictures printed to glass. That was not long after we had moved and what with life in general the pictures sat here for a year before I got around to putting them together. I decided to use brass fittings rather than the standard zinc plated and build a nice oak/brass base for the lamp. Since she had waited so long I spent some extra effort on the switch putting in a little knife switch to control the lamp and since it had a second position that would have been boring as just “still off” I put a Candle Flicker LED on the second position so that the lamp can be operated in either lamp mode, or candle mode.

Assembling the photo plates I did pretty much according to the instructable. They look really nice in brass. The corner braces that I got in brass were larger 2” than the ones called for in the instructable so my angle brackers are closer together in the middle a bit, but it wasn’t a problem and looks just as good.

The springs are completely decorative and serve no purpose other than decoration. I was thinking I’d have to wind some copper coils to make them look good against the brass, but I just bought a couple of packs of assorted springs at HD and they were enough to fit. I might have gotten shorter screws than these too as the whole thing is rather more spiky than it technically needs to be but it’s still a stylistic approach.

The base is cut from a piece of 3/4 oak with oak molding around the bottom piece and the top piece has a small routed ogee at the top. The bottom has a cutout under the top part to fit the electronics.

This is a 7 watt Phillips LEd bulb, but we ultimately went with a 3 watt one to just illuminate the photos without trying to actually cast light, it was a better look. The 10mm candle flicker LED is also visible in this picture as well as the brass shelf brackets that I used to hold the top in place. Since the angle brackets I used were 2” ones the tab from those brackets fits perfectly between the nuts on the bottom 2 screws and do an excellent job of holding it to the base but still allowing you to easily lift it off to turn around to show the other pictures.

The corners I used these brass corner brackets that are also just available at HD, they are supposed to go on the top of a box, but I thought they looked cool on the bottom of this where they sort of overhang the curve of the molding. Underneath them is just a regular stick on plastic non-slip foot thing to raise it up enough for the cord to get out.

The control system required some extra parts to make the knife switch safe, obviously you can’t put the 120v for the light through the knife switch. That black box there is a little 6v power supply that I just soldered to the power plug directly. That is that runs to the knife switch and powers the candle flicker LED. When the switch is in the other position it turns on a Solid State Relay that isolates the knife switch from the mains power needed for the LED bulb. I considered building a custom LED array to light it all from low voltage, but this offers more options for lighting and was actually much simpler.  The 6v power supply there is just slightly too tall to fit glued in there with a cover over the entire assembly so I made a cutout for it. I could have dremeled or notched the bottom of the plate to cover it completely but I had made enough sawdust at this point and needed to finish the product ;) There are no exposed high voltage wires inside there even if little fingers should turn the lamp over and poke around.

See how well the brass shelf supports fit between the angle bracket screws. Measuring for where to drill the holes was tricky as the offset of the shelf supports was 3/8” and my table saw has come out of alignment a bit so that piece wasn’t quite square and the routed profile meant getting a measurement to the actual edge was a pain. But it’s close enough to centered that it looks fine unless you attack it with a ruler.

The cord completes the steampunk/vintage feel of the thing. Ordered a spool of absolutely beautiful fabric woven wire from Sundial Wire.

In the dark my camera made it look more like a steampunk nuclear reactor ;)

how NOT to update the paths to files in your iTunes library

learn from my mistakes...

I have many kids movies and tv shows in my iTunes library for playing on the apple tv and the iPads for the kids to watch on car trips and such. Years ago I moved it to a portable external drive. I recently outgrew that drive and purchased a new, shiny 1.5TB firewire 2 drive. I copied all the original ones over and then was faced with the problem of how to get iTunes to realize that all the moves had moved. I only ever stored movies on the external drive, all my music and other things I keep internal to the macbook.

You can do this easily enough by just turning on and off the checkbox in the preferences for when to copy items into the itunes folder. Turn it off when dragging in a movie and back on for everything else. For purchased movies you have to move them in the finder and then delete and re-add them from iTunes, which is more steps but I dont purchase movies that often so it’s hardly a handicap.

But then you can’t just copy they whole iTunes library from one device to another, you need to be able to move parts of it around and there doesn’t seem to be a way to batch change the paths.

When I undertook the exercise I thought that I would just delete them all from the database and then drag them back in from the external drive and re-organize them. This is what I SHOULD have done. Instead I went searching around the internet and found other people in similar situations that had edited the iTunes.xml file that stores the information. I opened this up in BBEdit and was able to see all the old paths and easily do a replace to put in the path to the new drive.

However, iTunes doesn’t normally read that XML file, it normally uses a binary database file in the same folder that ends with “.its” and so you have to delete that to force it to rebuild it with the new path information. I did this and restarted iTunes (after making backups of course, which come to think of it I should have just immediately put back)

iTunes chewed on that for quite some time and then it all came up and the movies played from the new drive fine. I didn’t immediately notice all the other things that had gotten broken.

iTunes no longer knew about any of my iOS apps, it wanted to downloaded purchased items from my phone and proceded to do so for ALL the apps I had ever purchased. It has also lost all my podcast subscriptions which I will be rebuilding next.

So when searching for info on how to move portions of your iTunes folder, think twice before deleting the its file and making it rebuild it from the XML as it appears that not all the information is actually stored in the xml file.

Not a disaster as things go, nothing was actually lost, just making more work for myself by trying to reduce the work for myself ;) Which is pretty par for the course on a normal day!

MORE INFO as of 4/16: Got tired of trying to get everything back and restored backups of my iTunes library. Spent quite a bit of time investigating applescript methods of updating some of the location paths before I discovered that iTunes actually has built in ability to fix this itself. After locating one of the moved files it asks you if you’d like to use that new location to try to find others. Never noticed that before ;) And it did find all the other moved files on the new disk. So we’re all back to normal now and while I’ll never get those hours wasted back I have a much deeper understanding of iTunes applescript dictionary now which I’m sure will come in handy someday.

How NOT to run the 5.1 update on your iPhone...

Last night I started downloading the iOS 5.1 update. After seeing that the download alone would take an hour and a half I decided to go to bed. I disconnected the iPhone and left the download running in the background. All innocent I honestly believed that it would just save the file and let me run the update in the morning. An hour and a half later my iPhone waking up on my bedside table woke me up as it shone into the darkness, it had switched to recovery mode even without a USB connection to the computer. I wasn’t aware there was a remote command to put it into recovery mode over the air. Since it was not able to apply the update over the air it seems rather useless, and rather frustrating as I didn’t have a phone.

Once you’re in recovery mode there is no option that isn’t a hack but to restore the phone. Great, more hours wasted watching it reload and restore and put everything back. So digging into the internet I refreshed my memory on the double secret sequence of holding buttons in to get into and out of recovery mode but to no avail. The phone refused to go back to normal. I resorted to the jailbreak tool “tinyumbrella” which has buttons for “enter recovery” and “exit recovery” and it worked. Selected my phone from the list and clicked exit recovery and it came right back to life. I returned to iTunes with the intention of running the update. But the update failed...

“The iPhone could not be updated. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build.” Well.. that’s frustrating, lets start iTunes again and see...

So iTunes says both, yes, it is, and no it isn’t. So back to teh intertubes to read. I WAS behind a version of iTunes, so I ran that update. But even more importantly it turns out that upon quit, TinyUmbrella redirects a specific apple host on your machine. This is necessary if you are jailbreaking as it keeps iTunes from overwriting your new settings on the jailbroken iPhone. This was by default on, which makes sense I suppose if the tool is mostly used for jailbreaking, but my iPhone is not jailbroken. It’s in the advanced tab and is called “redirect hosts to Cydia upon quit” or something similar. After re-running tinyumbrella and turning that off and updating iTunes my phone is now happily running the update.

None of this would have been necessary if it had just not remotely put the iPhone into recovery mode in the middle of the night. At this moment it seems to be stuck at "waiting for iPhone” and seems to have now jumped to “verifying updated iPhone software” without ever actually loading anything. That doesn’t bode well. Oo, now we’ve gone back to “updating iPhone software” and it’s actually running now! The little progress bar on the phone is creeping across ever so slowly. Now iTunes is back to the Verifying message but the phone is still only about half way done with it’s little progress bar, but this is more how I remember things running. I am now more confident that it will complete and that things will go back to normal.

This blog post serves no purpose but for my own documentation of the issue so that a year from now when it does it again I’ll remember what I did to get it sorted out. Mostly I’m just venting my frustration. If you use tinyumbrella to get out of recovery mode though remember to turn off that redirect or iTunes will refuse to do anything with your phone after that.

OK, now wasn’t there something else I was supposed to accomplish today?