Squat in the middle with you

A surprise squatter turned into an unintended houseguest for a woman who returned to her Detroit home last week after a year away. But while the homeowner wants to boot the tenacious tenant, she legally can’t, and now they’re sleeping under the same roof. So now, Heidi Peterson is embroiled in a battle for control of her own home. After living away for a year, she returned to find a previous tenant (who says the home was abandoned) had moved back in, changed the locks, and installed new appliances. Peterson is taking her fight to evict the woman to court, but for now, it’s a problem she’ll just have to live with. Unless, of course, she pulls a gun on the squatter. But if that happens, the squatter won't be alive to enjoy this: DirecTV has announced their latest HD DVR. The new product is called the DirecTV Genie, and this new DVR brings to the table a whole roster of features you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, including the ability to record up to 5 high-definition videos at once. According to DirecTV, this flagship DVR is the by-product of integrating as many of the most requested features as possible. Other features include an opt-in recommendation system, which will recommend shows based on the subscriber’s preferences. A single recorded show can be watched on up to four televisions at the same time. Shows can be recorded and deleted from every room with service. With the Genie, the single receiver will operate for the entire home, so that an individual DVR is not needed for every room in which service is wanted. Recordings can be scheduled up to two weeks in advance, while up to 5 weeks of past shows can be viewed at any time. Genie utilises DirecTV’s TV Apps to provide access to Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, and ScoreGuide, in addition to the usual array of weathers/news/sports. Genie has 1TB of storage space, which can store about 200 hours of high-definition content, or 800 hours of standard-definition content. It looks awesome and they should definitely bring a version of this to New Zealand.