I have been aware of the Slingbox for some time. It is a small box that converts a television feed and sends it over the Internet. Cindy’s boss purchased one and was able to access local television from his house in Grand Forks will traveling in Norway.
Buy.Com had one on sale for $159 so I made the purchase. It was easy to set up for use within my home. Split the cable leading to a television and run one connection into the device. Connect the device to the home lan. Plug it in. Download the software and run through the setup and it works.
Getting the system to work outside of the home (over the Internet) was a little more of a challenge. I had to figure out to reconfigure my router for port forwarding. I keep telling myself that struggling with issues like this is the way I learn things. I now know a little about port forwarding.
The image below was captured from the laptop operating in wireless mode. Yes, it is CNN and the flying fish video. The quality is much better than I expected.
What is this good for? I know why I wanted this. Strange as it may seem, I want to be able to watch Twins baseball from my home or office office. CNN is also a habit. I can work on certain things (e.g., programming) with this video feed running in my periphery. Come to think of it, this type of multitasking is what is supposed to set we old folks apart from the students who are now in our classes. I am guessing most of my students won’t be running CNN in a window on their laptops while doing their work, but whatever is running in that unused attentional space is really not the issue.
