Troubleshooting by day, troubleshooting by night

Sometimes I don’t notice how much I enjoy configuring, fixing, and generally working with technology and gadgets until I find myself spending my free time buried in settings menus and help forums.This past evening, I worked on setting up my brand spanking new Logitech Harmony One remote.  This thing is a beast, by far the best remote I’ve ever used.  It’s definitely a luxury item, don’t get me wrong, but I consider it a pre-birthday present for myself (with my PS3 Harmony adapter coming for the actual birthday).

The biggest problem during setup came when configuring my TV settings, so here’s a note to anyone that cares: If your TV doesn’t have separate source buttons, be sure to change the TV device settings in your Harmony Remote software to have the correct set of source inputs by going to Devices -> Settings (under your TV) -> Adjust Inputs, then clicking Next.  Here you can customize the remote based on how your TV handles video sources, which will be essential to getting the most of your Harmony activities.

If they’re setup correctly and in order, the Harmony One will remember where it last left you, and should change appropriately when a new activity is selected.  Lastly, you might need to raise the Input Delay (also in the TV settings menu), since the signals to change video sources are sent one after another when switching activities, and if the delay isn’t great enough, it could miss a few while still changing sources.

My night of troubleshooting continued with some Time Machine backup issues that I can’t seem to get resolved — It keeps reporting that there is no space, but refuses to delete old backups, which I did manually, though it doesn’t seem to  like that.  I may have to reformat and start a new backup, which isn’t the end of the world.  I’m thinking that it could have to do with the connection being wireless (WD hard drive plugged into an Airport Extreme), while my old Time Machine backup was over USB.  To be continued on that battle.