Five Wishes for Better Webapps

"As we look ahead to 2010, we're hoping it's the year the web becomes a truly great platform for working and connecting online. Here are five things we'd like to see fixed for that to happen."

Replacing a Tivo drive with one of the same size

My TiVo starting acting hinky recently, and I could hear the hard drive making unusual noises. I'd upgraded it a couple of years ago, because the drive that came in it was really loud and not very big. The drive that I had put in there was a quiet Seagate 80 GB, and I had another one in my spare parts, so I figured it would be easiest to just clone it. Unfortunately, the partition/format flavor that TiVo uses is not recognizable by the bit-copy tools I tried to use, so I had to go a slightly more complicated route and use the instructions for upgrading a drive. There's a great set of such instructions here, but just in case you are someone who is trying to replace a TiVo drive with another one of the same size (or a bigger size, and you don't care about regaining the extra space), here's what I did: Removed the drive from the TiVo, jumpered it for cable select, and also jumpered the new drive the same way. Plugged them both into a computer that handles IDE drives (old drive as primary, new drive as slave, both in the secondary IDE controller, switching the CD drive to primary, as the software didn't seem to want to work if I put the HDs in the primary). Then:

• from Step 4: download Tiger’s Mfs Tools Boot CD and burn the .iso to a CD
• from Step 7, option 3, follow the isntructions for "Boot CD users"; I didn't ahve to do any of the non-Quantum A stuff... but I did have to change the dd command a bit because of how I plugged in my drives: dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd bs=1024k
• after a couple of hours of that running, I got the message about blocks in and blocks out, the numbers matched, and that was it!
• I swapped the new drive into the drive TiVo drive holder, jumpered it for master, and put it back in the TiVo, works like a champ.

The Complete Guide to Avoiding Online Scams (for Your Less Savvy Friends and Relatives)

"... here's a few tips that you should share with your less-than-savvy friends and family to help them avoid falling victim to an online scam."

What Everyone Should Know About Cameras

"Talking to a camera nerd—or even reading about new cameras—can feel like translating from a different language. But it doesn't need to! Here, in this here post, is everything you need to know about cameras, without the noise."

Fix Internet Explorer Not Prompting to Choose Save Location in XP

"If you’re still using Internet Explorer and Windows XP, you might have encountered a problem where you unchecked the box for “Always ask before opening this type of file”, and now you can’t get it back anymore."

Are terms-of-service enforceable?

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Ed Bayley has written an excellent introductory white-paper on whether click-wrap, browse-wrap, and other online terms of service are enforceable."