I arrived home last night to find the wireless USB adapter waiting for me. I quickly ripped open the box and jammed the adapter into one of the USB ports on the TiVo and the link light instant lit up.

Giddy with anticipation, I turned on the television and found a new message for me from the TiVo. It recognized the device but cautioned that I first needed to upgrade its firmware and warned that the upgrade might make the adapter unusable with a PC. Another strike against seemless plug-and-play, I guess.

Updating the firmware was a simple procedure. Then it was on to selecting my wireless network and entering the network’s password. It took a while to find out how to get my Mac to give up the hex equivalent of the password but I finally got it.

With network configured, I unplugged the phone line and made a test connection to the TiVo service over broadband. Everything worked as expected.

The final test was to go to the Photos and Images menu. I tried to add my Mac as a server, but it couldn’t find it. I verified that the TiVo desktop was installed and running. This may be just a matter of punching the right holes through the firewall.

I was surprised to find that two remote servers were available. One had a bunch of wildlife images, not too interested in that one. The other, however, provided 50 or so MP3 songs to stream to the TiVo, including the new U2 album. I also found, much to my credit card’s dismay, a few tracks from obscure artists that actually sounded pretty good….