Extreme Home Engineering: How To Build Your Own TiVo

This week: How to build your own TiVo (or, How to never miss an important football game ever again.) Building your own TiVo—or FreeVo, as some call it—is more than a dream. It's more than a trend. It's the new cool way to stick it to The (TiVo) Man while impressing your friends. Make and Wired have published detailed how-tos. For the technology dunces of the world—myself included—I had several friends break down the jargon into simple steps we can all understand. Your mission: To build your own digital video recorder from mail-order parts. The payoff: An integrated entertainment system that records TV programs with no monthly fees. Keep reading for your marching orders... Ingredients 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. "You have to consider WAF (wife acceptance factor -- or HAF if it's the wife doing the installation). Steps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Chris Weber is an occasional contributor to mentalfloss.com.

The Nerd Handbook A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head. It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. Your nerd has control issues. The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. These control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Your nerd has built himself a cave. Your nerd loves toys and puzzles.

Grace Hopper Explains Nanoseconds to Letterman Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is famous both as a computer pioneer and for, at the time of her retirement (at age 79), being the nation's oldest active military officer. Hopper worked on early computers, and is widely credited with popularizing the term "computer bug" after she found a moth stuck inside a relay in Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947. (Thus "debugging" became the term for fixing computer problems....) You can see the first computer bug (they kept the moth!) In this 1986 interview with David Letterman, Grace Hopper displays her grace and wit, and explains the concept of a nanosecond, using Bell System telephone wire cut into 30cm lengths -- 30cm is the maximum distance light can travel in a billionth of a second. "When an admiral asks you why it takes so damn long to send a message via satellite, you point out to him that between here and the satellite there are a very large number of nanoseconds. She also gets into picoseconds! You can read more about Hopper from Wikipedia.