Rasmus' Toys Page

Sophie asked me about getting a Tivo. Basically if you don't do DirecTV, a series 1 Tivo is all you really need. I have had an original Phillips 14-hour series 1 Tivo for years. Stuck a 120G drive in it and a network card and it is a happy little box. Should be in some sort of hall of fame for the best geek gadgets of all time. ComputerGeeks has the original Tivo already upgraded with an 80G drive for $219 which isn't a bad price. And if you add the promotional code "GEEKTIVO" during checkout, you get $20 off. $199 for a series 1 80G Tivo is not bad. The original 14-hour Phillips Tivo can sometimes be had for $89 from ServiceDVR. But right now they don't seem to have any of the 14-hour ones. The cheapest is a 30-hour for $129. So, for the geeks out there, find yourself a 14-hour series 1 Tivo in good working order and upgrade it. Plenty of people are upgrading to series 2 or DirecTivo boxes so you can also check Ebay and look for an HDR-112 (original 14-hour Tivo) or better. For the non-geeks, that $199 Tivo from ComputerGeeks is probably your best option right now. Also have a look at Seth's TiVo Evangelism Page for more Tivomania.

Posted by Rasmus

Buffalo WLI-PCI-G54 uses the Broadcom chipset and has a cool-looking external antenna. At this point I think the only hope of getting this to work with Linux would be through Linuxant's driverloader.
D-Link DWL-G520 uses the Atheros 5002 chipset. Should work with the madwifi driver, or with the Linuxant driverloader. It also claims to support 108 Mbps Extreme-G.
Netgear WG311 uses the Intersil Prism GT chipset which has no native Linux driver that I know of. But the Linuxant driverloader says it supports it.
Linksys WMP54G uses the Broadcom chipset and should work with the Linuxant driverloader.
The Linksys WMP55AG is an a/b/g card whereas all the previous were just b/g. This one uses the Atheros 5212a chipset and should work with both the madwifi driver and the Linuxant driverloader. This one is actually just a PCI card with a mini-PCI adapter on it with a mini-PCI card plugged into it.
D-Link DWL-AG520 uses an Atheros chipset and should be supported by both the madwifi and the Linuxant driverloader. Like the Buffalo, it has a nice beefy external antenna.
Netgear WAG311 like the other a/b/g cards is Atheros-based so it should work with both the madwifi and the Linuxant driverloader.
It probably would be a good idea to get an Atheros Super A-G based board so I can go 108Mbps when the drivers support it and when I get a gateway that can go that fast. I don't think my Broadcom-based WRT54G is going to be able to support Super-G. I think the Linksys, D-Link and Netgear a/b/g cards are all based on the same Atheros chipset, so the only deciding factor is likely to be price between these. If anybody has one of these and can inject a bit more data it would be appreciated. I will update and bump this up as I learn more.

Posted by Rasmus

Another Linksys gadget. A motion-sensitive wireless video camera that can alert you via email when it sees motion and it streams out 320x240 video. Could use it to bring CarlCam back, although my outbound bandwidth on this Comcast cable connection isn't really sufficient for it. I have been eyeing the networked cameras like the Axis 2100 (on the right) for quite a while, but they always seemed too pricy. This Linksys is $100 cheaper than the Axis and it is wireless.

Posted by Rasmus