Slashdot Mirror
TiVo and DirecTV in a Cellular-Only Household?
Balthisar
asks: "Like so many others, my wife and I have recently made the move to pure mobile telephone use, and have disconnected the landline permanently. Today, I turned on the TiVo and received a stern warning that only three days of the program guide remained! I screwed up. Anyone have a good emergency way of refreshing the program guide while I wait for my TiVo networking card to come in? An additional concern is DirecTV: I never use Pay Per View, but it's not connected, either. Any horror stories about not having your DirecTV connected to a phone line? If you don't have any advice, at least take this as a cautionary tale to make a good checklist before taking the leap of eliminating your terrestrial line!" This topic was handled in a previous article over 2 years ago. What suggestions do you have for others, that find themselves in this position?
Take your Tivo to somebody else's house and hook it up to their phone line, then force it to make a call. It will download like 2 weeks worth of data.
Responding to your post, in no particular order...
/. readers.
Ask Slashdot is a section for people to pose their questions to the Slashdot community. Slashdot is made up of, in large part, a tech-savy and geek-indentifying community. I'd be willing to bet that a higher percentage of Slashdot readers have TiVo and/or ReplayTV than the general population. So this seemingly narrow question that, on the surface, would not be helpful to anyone is probably of interest to a large number of
Likewise, those lucky enough to play with tech-related toys are likely to have more money to throw around. Again, compare Slashdot's readers to the general population, and I'll be you'll find a higher income among the Slashdot population. So while saying that the poster owns a TiVo and ReplayTV may cause envy in some Slashdotters eyes (mine included), it probably isn't enough to cause any fits of jealousy over this damnable soul who is clearly of a higher social and econimic standing than the rest of us slobs.
Finally, I very much doubt that the manual has instructions for not using a phone line. My guess is it simply says that TiVo requires a phone line. But that would seem to not be the case. And Ask Slashdot could be considered "checking a website..." The poster is asking for Slashdot's collective knowledge on the subject. Consulting Google is the only valid point you bring up. Plugging in tivo and "no phone line" brings up MOSTLY ads, but a couple of valid-looking links.
But Ask Slashdot isn't meant to only to give the origonal poster an answer (hopefully) to their question, but to provoke discussion and inform others. So someone with a unique experience might post here, and only here. Their knowledge may be absent from every single webpage out there, and a Google search could be useless. Or maybe I was thinking about getting a TiVo, but know I don't have a phoneline for it to work with. After reading this thread, I might learn that I definitely can or cannot buy a TiVo and expect it to work.
Or, as someone who doesn't have and doesn't plan on getting a TiVo, I may just be curious about the problems of living without a land-line. A friend of mine recently killed her phone line, and I'm curious how others have dealt with possibel problems. Dealing with TiVo and ReplayTV is only a small subset of the larger problem of living without a land-line. So I'm interested in what people have to say, not only about TiVo and ReplayTV specifically, but about living without a land-line in general.
The "Your problems aren't important enough so we'll ignore them" argument has always seemed shallow to me. The fact of the matter is the editors (for whatever reason) decided to post this question to Ask Slashdot. Maybe they were currious themselves. Maybe it was just a slow news day. Maybe the specific goal was to piss someone like you off to the point of posting a knee-jerk, thoughtless response to prove some point about the nature of Slashdot. We'll probably never know.
But clearly a sarcastic comlaint is the right sollution...
-Trillian
He seems to be doing quite well at researching this. He is asking on a forum with lots of people who are knowledgable about all techy toys.
I am too dumb to know how my audio-visual equipment works and feel it is easier to write this to slashdot than to research anything. Please tell me what to do 'cause I can't be bothered to read the manual, check a website, or consult google. Oh, and I am also so damn rich (bling bling), I have both a TiVo and a ReplayTV. Please help me out, I am in such a bind.
One of the benfits of asking technical questions on Slashdot is that almost always there's someone there who can point you to an even better source of information such as Tivo Community.