So, a while ago (94 days ago, to be exact) I unplugged my DirecTivo from the phone line, since I decided that there was really no compelling reason to submit to tracking (anonymized though they claim it to be.) Since it's a DSS model, it gets its program listings from the satellite, so the only thing the phone line is used for is to deliver the keypress logs back to the mothership. (And, presumably, auto-downloading new software updates someday, which I'm not terribly interested in.)

After about a week, it started getting anxious, and once a night it would tell me "unable to make a call for N days! phone home! phone home!" I ignored it, and everything was fine for months. Until a few days ago, when all of the sudden, Tivo lost its little mind: navigating around in the "now playing" menu would take up to a minute for each click, and even the background animations were getting jerky. Recording and playback of video, and ffwd/rw within the video were working fine, but the menus were damned near unusable. I guess it filled up its log files and was swapping or something. I tried rebooting it, in the hopes that that would make it rotate its logs out, but no.

So finally I plugged the phone line in and let it phone home; that didn't fix it. But a second call followed by another reboot seems to have brought it back to life.

I find this terribly irritating: I had to let it phone home because there was no easy way for me to just go in there and delete the damned log file. It almost (almost) makes me want to crack the thing open and put an ethernet card in there, but I'm just not ready for that kind of pain. Also, if I broke it, I would be so very, very sad.

Update: Not fixed! Eek!