Amazon is offering Tivo’s 80-hour Series 2 recorder for $170 - with a $170 rebate, it’s free, with free shipping. You still have to sign up for Tivo’s service, of course, with a year-long commitment (but without Tivo service turned on, it’s a free door-stop).

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Here are some shortcuts into Amazon to help you set up your Tivo to work with Unbox video downloads, find videos, and find some useful Tivo accessories.

• Register your Tivo(s) with Amazon Unbox
• Find rentals
• Find science fiction & fantasy movies
• Find horror movies
• Find TV shows
• Tivo Series 2 - 80 hour and 180 hour
• Tivo Series 3 - the HDTV Tivo with CableCard support and HDMI and component video out
• Tivo ethernet adapter - not needed for Tivo Series 3 and dual-tuner Series 2 units, which have built-in ethernet ports - requires Tivo 7.3 software or later
• Tivo Wireless adapter - Plugs into the USB port of your Tivo and lets it connect to your wireless network

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Tivo’s been looking for a movie download partner for some time now. There was a day when Tivo and Netflix were in bed together, but their dalliance bore no fruit. A couple of months back, Amazon replaced Netflix as Tivo’s bed-mate, announcing that Amazon’s “Unbox” video service would allow you to view movies on your Series 2 or Series 3 Tivo.

This is the kind of thing that gets announced and months later people are scratching their heads saying “Hey… do you remember something about Amazon downloading movies to Tivo? Did that ever happen?”… imagine my shock when Amazon and Tivo announced last week that you the service was now working.

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Apple is now shipping their new, long-awaited Apple TV. Like many Apple products, they’re shipping individually via Fedex from China. Ours is supposed to arrive on Friday. With any luck I’ll write it up by early next week.

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Part of my childhood I grew up in rural Maine, desperate for stimulation. There were a few kids my age nearby and fortunately we became friends pretty quickly, but my mind was hungry. I was all over the map, from learning from Radio Shack electronics kits my father would get me to taking apart calculators and reading Scientific American. I liked electronics, chemistry, math, computers, physics, astronomy and cosmology.

That was long enough ago that my sense of time is skewed. I have to work out when things happened by relating them to other things and deriving the dates and my age. Two of the most important things that I remember learning from are James Burke’s “Connections” and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and without looking them up online and seeing when they aired (Connections was filmed in 1978 but I’m not 100% certain when I saw it, and Cosmos in 1980), I was unsure how old I was when I saw them. It turns out I was older than I thought; I was 16 in 1980. I thought I’d seen them when I was younger… but many of my memories of TV from then are confused; were we living in the country or the city? When did we get cable? When did I see music videos? Were both my parents still there, or one, or none?
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The iTunes Store has made Sufjan Stevens’ “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever” available as a free download. Free songs are usually available for a couple of weeks at the iTunes Store. It’s a pretty good song, and a welcome relief from most holiday music. Click on the icon to download it:

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Mac users with Tivos have long been left in the cold when it comes to downloading video from their Tivo to their Mac. Series 2 Tivo devices let you hook them up to your local network with a USB ethernet or wireless adapter. Once hooked up, they can make their daily calls to Tivo HQ over the Internet instead of using a phone line. You can use Tivo Desktop to share music, photos or even videos from your computer to your Tivo. But only Windows users have been enabled to download video in the other, much-treasured direction, from their Tivo to their computer, so that they can hoard video files like digital packrats.

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Do you have a food lover (and by this I don’t mean McDonald’s addict) in your life who you’d like to get a holiday gift for but haven’t got a clue what to get? Here are ten suggestions for you.
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Do you have a comics lover in your life who you’d like to get a holiday gift for, but haven’t got a clue what to get them? Read on, true believer.
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The iTunes Store has free episodes of 30 Rock and 3 Lbs. 30 Rock is NBC’s Saturday Night Live-ish sitcom; 3 Lbs is the new brain surgery drama with Stanley Tucci. I was curious about both shows and took advantage of the free episodes to check them out. Beware that free episodes don’t stay free forever; if you’re looking at this weeks after it was posted, odds are that iTunes will want you to pay for these episodes.

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