OK, so I’m a long time TiVO fanatic. I got one when they first came out with the DirecTV TiVO and got a lifetime subscription for a house full of TiVOs. For a long time I was the only one on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a dish poking out my window. All my old Series 1 and 2 TiVOs were upgraded to add additional disk storage (thank you WeaKnees!). When the Series 3 High-Def TiVOs came out for cable only, I finally bid farewell to my satellite feed. I rewired for digital cable and transferred my membership to a pair of new Series 3s.

The Series 3s were expensive, and buying WeaKnees modded 3s with extra disk was prohibitively so. So I got the standard units with 250GB of disk, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that 32 hours of HD content will fill that disk. A couple movies and a season of “Lost” and boom - you are out of space and no more fun “TiVO Suggestions” to look through, and you have to trim your subscriptions down to saving just 1 or 2 episodes. To add insult to injury, there is a tempting eSATA jack for “Expansion Disk” that isn’t enabled yet.

Life is now good - Kickstart 62 is here! (Actually it was always there, built in my the wonderful TiVO engineers who love back doors. Thank you!) Last night I upgraded my living room TiVO to a whopping 1 Terabyte of storage using a very-cool-in-its-own-right Newer Tech miniStack 750gb eSATA drive from OWC.

Engadget recently posted how to finally use that jack here. However I actually found this post from MFS Live better because you absolutely have to do your “6″ “2″ kickstart when the orange LED is the only one on.

Enjoy!!!

OK, I love the Skitch image tool and I’ve only been playing with it for half an hour. Run, do not walk to the Plasq website and request a beta copy of Skitch. This is a great app for several reasons: it is perfect for the day-to-day tasks of someone like me who isn’t (usually) a graphic designer, but do need to share images via mail and IM and do screen grabs and the occasional bit of cropping and annotating, it is totally simple and easy to use and has lots of useful pop-up tips and help, it has built in image sharing via mySkitch image hosting site, and last but not least, the user interface is AWESOME!.

This app defines broad swaths of new UI paradigms for Mac desktop apps. I love that it miniaturizes to a menubar icon - where it has a number of useful features including an excellent image grab feature. It works great with your iSight camera. All four corners of the window can be grabbed and used to resize (thank you, thank you, thank you!) It has built in image upload to a website (mySkitch by default, but set up all the upload accounts you want - FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Flickr and .MAC). And just to show they rock and roll with Cocoa, Dashboard-style Preferences on the back of the window.

Cool as this app is to use, the main point is to improve your workflow when collaborating with others on tasks involving images. Grabbing a screenshot of a bit of mis-aligned HTML, adding an arrow with a comment and sending it off has never been easier. And for everyone building a Mac desktop app out there - check this puppy out for some excellent design ideas!

Flock has released their first public beta of their browser, now available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It can be downloaded here. Flock is a Firefox-based browser that offers a “social browsing” experience that involves heavy interaction with the web rather than just passive browsing.

Flock has a slew of features but the ones that do it for me are easy photo sharing (Flickr and other services) including drag and drop upload, searchable bookmarks (good del.icio.us integration) and blogging. I’m composing this with the Flock WYSIWYG blogger tool now. It seems to be solid, useful and fun. I think it is about to become my default browser!

Blogged with Flock