TiVo, I miss you.

You may have read the headline and think that for some reason I no longer have TiVo, and that's not true. I still have it, it's just that I don't use it as often anymore. Why not? Cause over this past month or so I've realized that work takes up a large sum of your time. In fact, I would be willing to bet that I spend five times as much time at work than I do home (disregard the time spent sleeping at home, that doesn't count, I'm not awake!)!

Because of this, when I am home, I decide to do the things that I really want to do. Until recently, that was go home, grab something to eat, watch a TiVo'ed Mythbusters or something similar, and unless I run off to hang out with people, watch other things on TiVo. Now it's go home, watch a Mythbuster while eating, then play PS3 if I don't run off to hang out with people. TiVo must feel neglected. Aww. I guess I should watch it some more and play less PS3. But over all this week, I've only played it twelve hours. ...I guess that is a lot? I don't know. Cause I used to not have to go to work and I would have just stayed home and played it. I guarantee you that if I didn't have to go to work I would have played it over 30 hours by now. Crazy.

So one solution to this problem? Well, I usually watch TiVo'ed stuff while eating, cause I don't want to eat and play at the same time, cause that would get grease on my PS3 controller. So therefore, I must eat more! Then I will watch more TiVo'ed stuff. That's a good plan, right?

Nooo.. definitely not. I guess I'll just have to pick up all the things I've recorded once the PS3 high wears off. I don't know when that'll be. My TiVo will run out room soon. How much space is in those things anyway? It needs like a TerraByte (TB). That would be awesome. I guess it has something like a 250GB in it.. that's how much the S3 ones have. Series 3 for you non-technical folks. Huh. I don't think mine has 250 in it. I mean, I know I've recorded a lot of one hour segments, but still, I think I'd be able to hold a little more. A TB would blow the space I have out of the water. Most people understand how large a GigaByte (GB) is, but just in case, I'll explain. So if you know all that jazz, skip the next paragraph:

/* WARNING! This next part is nerd-tastic. Skip it unless you want to fall asleep. */

Space on a computer is dealt with like this. The smallest piece of data that most people learn about is called a Bit. Most of the time, it's either 1 or 0. Eight of these bits make a Byte. Eight bits, or one byte, make up different pieces of data. A combination of 0's and 1's is actually what the computer receives when I type this sentence. Each of these characters are made up of eight bits, or one byte, each. That's how the computer understands data. 1,024 Bytes, or 8,192 bits, makes one KiloByte (KB). Most smaller images and text files are a number of KB. Some GIFs are about 10 - 40 KB, while some large text files and JPG files are around 100 - 300 KB, usually. Then you get up to 1,024 KB, and you get one MB. To give you a scale, the size of most MP3s is around 3 - 5 MB. One episode of your favorite hour-long show is around 320 - 400 MB. 1,024 MB makes one GB.

That's basically 3 episodes of an hour long show. Let's do some math. If my TiVo is a S3 (which I doubt), then 250/3 will give me how many eps I can hold until my TiVo maxes out on space. The math shows that that's 83 with repeating decimal of 3 shows. So that means 83 one-hour shows and one ep of Robot Chicken. Yeah, I don't think I have an S3. I think at the most I've gotten around thirty to fourty at max. That's less than half the space. About 115 GBs or so. Maybe a little more.

Now, if my TiVo had a TerraByte of hard drive space, I could hold... 341 one-hour shows and a Robot Chicken episode. Why? Cause, (just like the others), 1,024 GBs is one TB. That's a lot of space.

/* All the talk of HDD (Hard Drive Disk) space is over now. You may return to your regular reading. */

So I am sad that I don't use it as much any more. I guess I'll just have to find more time to watch the shows I really like, or wait until I'm over this PS3 craze. Oh, and if I got something wrong about the way HDD Space works, and it bothers you to death cause I misquoted something, then Byte me. <-- NEEEEERD!