A Quick Tips & Cool Stuff Found Bonanza! — Mac Geek Gab 893

You folks filled the mailbag this week with some of the best Quick Tips and Cool Stuff Found your two favorite geeks have seen in a while. Listen as John and Dave share your tips (and theirs) about iOS 15 Focus, Safari 15 Tab Groups, Refunds on AppleCare+, Follow-up Siri Commands, document scanning, iPhone cases, portable speakers, and running your own DVR the easy way. And they even have some time left to answer your questions, too! You’ll have no trouble learning five new things this week. Press play and enjoy.

TiVo GameSkip Will Let You Watch Pure Commercials for Super Bowl LIV

TiVo’s GameSkip feature lets people record Super Bowl LIV and jump right to the commercial breaks, which are nearly as big as the game itself.

Here’s how GameSkip works: Set your TiVo to record during the game, an hour after it’s over, look for the onscreen SKIP icon. Once the icon appears, you can jump right to the commercial breaks.

How TiVo Changed the World: An Oral History

OneZero writes: “… in 1999, two former employees of Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics (SGI), Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay, introduced a revolutionary new product: a digital video recorder, or DVR. The product, named TiVo, seamlessly recorded shows, paused live television, and allowed users to fast-forward through the commercials.”

The TiVo set the stage for all our modern TV viewing habits.  It changed television forever. This is a fascinating story.

CES – TiVo Demos Alexa, Google, and IFTTT Integrations, Coming in February

LAS VEGAS – TiVo has been making a lot of changes to its user interface lately, and it’s not all just on the surface. Under-the-hood they’ve added some hooks and been hard at work putting all the pieces together for some pretty impressive third-party integrations. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integrations are pretty far along, and TiVo is close to getting certifications for both of those, likely being available before the end of February. More than just turning TiVo on and off, these voice assistant integrations allow for fairly granular controls, including channel changing, play/pause, rewind, and even commercial skip. IFTTT integrations take this one step further, allowing bidirectional communications. This means TiVo could tell IFTTT that the “press D to Skip” icon is on the screen, and that could trigger an IFTTT skill to send the “skip” message back to TiVo. Yep, auto-skip is available and I’ve seen it in action! Even better news: IFTTT integration will work all the way back to Series 4 (Premier) units and doesn’t require the new Hydra UI (except auto-skip actually will require Hydra, at least at launch). Look for more from TiVo soon.