TIVO

We did our laundry this morning, and also visited fellow Excel owners Kenny and Janice from Dodge City. Their Excel is also nominally 30 ft., but a much different floor plan from ours, and Janice has done a lot to personalize the decor. After lunch we visited with Gary and Mary Ann. They are having their rig washed and waxed today by Nick's RV Wash. We've been talking about it, and we decided to go ahead and schedule having ours done next week. It will be good to have the whole rig done, including the parts we can't reach.

We are back in business with our beloved TIVO. When we got our replacement DirecTV receiver last month, the IR controller that we had been using for the TIVO to control channel changing would not work. We tried every code we could find or think of to no avail. We couldn't use the serial controller because the DirecTV receiver does not have a serial port--it has a USB port. The solution was to order a USB TV Translator from Paterson Technology. It came today and works like a charm! Now when TIVO needs to change the channel to record a program, it will actually be able to do so.



While we were at it we switched to using an S-video cable to connect the TIVO to the TV. That left the coax available for the connection from the video distribution box, so now we can watch the park's cable channels or the DVD player without having to swap cables--yay!