slingbox

geek blogging from abroad...

OK – this has to be one of the coolest toys ever. Seriously. It is so cool that I have to write about it from my hotel room in China instead of going out and actually seeing some sights. But then again that is what nerds do isn’t it….

The Slingbox officially gets my vote for my favourite thing in 2006. OK it isn’t even 2006 yet – but this is a preview of how many cool things will be coming in 2006 and the future looks bright.

What is a Slingbox?
A Slingbox is a little gadget that you hook up to your television set and then when you are away you can get online and stream your tv to your laptop. HOW SWEET IS THAT?!?

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in action

So, Bob went out and bought a Slingbox. I received an email last night telling me how to hook it up. I downloaded the software, put in the ID and password and was viewing Mom and Bob’s television set (complete with 600 channels of shit) and Tivo from China in a matter of minutes. You can change the channels, record stuff on the Tivo, watch the DVD that is in the player – basically every function that they have – but from across the world. AWESOME!

This morning I went on and noticed a movie playing that I didn’t want to watch. So I hit the Tivo button on the remote. Then I noticed that the remote started moving and someone put it back on the DVD player and hit play. Turns out that Mom and Bob were sitting there watching a movie and I went in and stopped it. They didn’t realise that I was the one controlling the remote and figured that there were ghosts in their computer. So I decided to ring them up on Skype (also the coolest thing ever when you are in China). They put the movie on pause (which I could see them doing before they answered the phone) and picked up… Ha! I can totally fuck with their minds all the time now by changing channels.

Anyways…this little gadget is going to come in handy for watching all of those Lost episodes before anyone else…now I just need to figure out how to capture the video stream so I can record stuff.

Slingbox Media