Right, so this is a weird one: we’re getting tons of reports—tons—about failing Zune 30s. Apparently, the players began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless.

The crisis has been dubbed by Zune users ‘Z2K9′, due to the apparently synchronized faceplantings across the country. According to tipster Michael, the Zune users experienced something like this:

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them

What hasn’t emerged yet, largely due to the fact that MS’s support lines aren’t yet open for the day, is why these devices are failing. The evidence seems to point to a software glitch, but simple resets aren’t providing any relief. Some reports indicate that only Zunes with the latest firmware are affected, but this hasn’t yet been confirmed.

The proximity of the events to the New Year, which inspired the Y2K9 moniker, provides little more than a colorful backdrop; it’s unlikely that the switching of years in the Zune’s internal calendar has anything to do with the failures (besides, it hasn’t even happened yet).

Read the full article at Gizmodo

I loved my Series 2 Tivo. It was rock solid. It was so faithful that I even bought it a twin brother to play with while out of the house.

My Series 3 Tivo is like the gremlin that eats after midnight. It’s slow at times, it doesn’t like to multi-task and it’s temperamental. And it crashes — a lot. I’ve learned that if the Tivo is recording two shows at the same time then don’t, no matter how badly you want to, don’t ask it to do anything else. Stop recording one of the shows if you don’t want the screen you see here. What is this screen? Well, it’s the startup screen you see after the Tivo very quietly crashes. No error messages, no clues as to what happened, not even an acknowledgement that something has gone seriously wrong. Just 7 or 8 minutes of time that the Tivo refuses to stay awake for.

I just wanted to watch a rerun of Family Guy. Now I’m writing a blog post. Oh well…