Time Warner: We gotcher tuning adapters right here. Do not panic.

UPDATE: You can order your Tuning Adapters at this link. (Not in the KC system? Try changing the URL in your browser, substituting your market for "kansascity".) Thanks to reader Craig Brown for that.

Whether to avoid any further FCC fines or simply out of the goodness of their hearts, Time Warner Cable is planning to make available, at no cost, devices that will help its customers who were left out in the cold by the Switched Digital Video mess.

Last week I blew a fuse after I tuned into channel 1497 on Time Warner Cable expecting to find ESPN HD and instead found ... 1497 had disappeared. I immediately assumed it had been moved off the regular HD grid and onto one fenced off, like so many other channels, from the poor saps (like me) who were using CableCARDs in a laughably futile attempt to stray from the Time Warner nest.

I wrote this, then someone at Time Warner talked me down. Turns out the high-def ESPNs weren't gone, and I could still watch them. But ... I still had something to cling to. At its new location, that channel was surrounded by HD channels I couldn't get because of my crippled CableCARD. And since at least one Time Warner CSR had told at least one TV Barn reader that Time Warner would never, ever support my CableCARD.... well, the lion roared again.

Only that turned out to be premature, and now I have been talked down again.

Word began leaking out this weekend (well, it might have been raining earlier but that's when I noticed a puddle under my door) that Time Warner Cable across the country were, in fact, providing the tuning adapters that would make the CableCARDs two way as God intended them, and thus would be able to access all those channels currently off-limits to the 1,200 of us who swing that way.

That means there shouldn't be any need for the FCC to get involved -- always a circumstance I would prefer to avoid, even when it's on my side it gives me the heebie-jeebies -- and maybe by Christmas there will be enough of the magic gizmos that Time Warner Cable can slip one under my TiVo. (Actually, I'll take two.)