remotes, registration, etc.
Mood: thankful
Posted on 2007-10-11 14:54:00
Tags: links
Words: 547
Today, as djedi mentioned, was all things DPS-ish. Last night before bed I made a list of stuff we needed - thank goodness we didn't need proof of address unlike our fun experience in MD. Got going late as usual - first up was the Travis County Tax Office (hi Nelda Wells Spears!) to transfer the title and register our cars. Got there, signed in and were seen within a minute(!), and the people were friendly and helpful and knew what they were doing. I even registered to vote (although I'm not sure it'll be ready before the TX constitutional amendments election in November) at the same time!
Since that went so quickly, we stopped by Wendy's and had lunch - I had a delicious yogurt with granola as a side item. If that's an option to replace fries it'll make it easy to avoid fries in the future. Then on to the driver's license office on Lamar. There was a little line for check-in, but the guy at the desk was pretty amazing. He was kinda brusque but very fast and knew exactly what you needed for stuff. When we got to the front we showed him all our stuff and he gave us the form to fill out, then gave us a number when we returned them. Waited ten minutes for our number to be called and everything went fine.
Total time: 90 minutes including travel time and stopping for lunch. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me! Also, my car has Texas license plates again which is nice :-) (the Texas license plate is a lot more decorative and nice-looking than the Maryland one in my opinion)
We just bought djedi's sister's old TV off of her, and it's pretty nice - HD and all that jazz. We hooked the TiVo to the HDMI port so we can finally see our HD recordings in HD, which is pretty sweet. The problem is that you can switch between all the TV inputs with an A/V button (they don't have the original remote anymore but they have a generic-ish one that works) except the HDMI input. For that, you have to bring up the menu, scroll to the bottom, hit right, scroll to the bottom, and hit right again. And it doesn't stay in this mode when you turn it off and back on.
This is problematic, to say the least. That would bring us up to three remotes needed to watch TV! (TV remote, TiVo remote, and receiver remote to turn on the sound) Not to mention lots of annoying button pressing.
So after doing a little research I ordered a Logitech Harmony 670 universal remote. This thing is pretty darn cool. You set it up by running some software on the computer, telling it what equipment you have and what "activities" (watch TV, watch a DVD, play Wii, etc.) you want to set up and what the correct settings are and such. For the input problem I just had it add the extra five presses necessary whenever it goes into the "watch TV" activity. It is awesome. It's even a replacement for the TiVo remote, technically, although the buttons aren't quite as well laid out.
The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks - thank you thank you thank you
This backup was done by LJBackup.