Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 5 An Onscreen Clock

Turn your TiVo into a glorified and expensive clock .

Watching TV is an amazingly effective way of losing track of time. One minute it's 8 p.m. and you're watching Friends ; the next thing you know, it's midnight and David Letterman is hurling a pencil at the camera (if you are still watching live television, that is).

Perhaps you even have a clock in the same room as your television set, but it's off in the corner and you never think to avert your gaze from the tube. This hack embeds a clock right there into your line of sight, at the bottom-right of your screen.

Enter the following sequence on your TiVo remote:

Select Select 9 Select

You will hear TiVo bling with a thumbs-up sound, and a floating white-on-black clock will appear at the bottom-right of your screen, as shown in Figure 1-2. On some versions of TiVo, you not only get the local time, but also how far you are into the show, in minutes and seconds assuming , of course, you're watching a recorded show.

To remove the clock at any time, simply reenter the sequence and visit any TiVo menu. If you do not go to a menu, the clock will just sit there happily until you do so.