Stéphane Lee

The IT Crowd has just started its second season in the UK this week (on Channel 4). NBC will have its first US version this fall. We’ll see how the US and UK version compares. The IT Crowd is about three IT support people in a company. I highly recommend that you check from the first season if you don’t know them. Very funny!

After making a rocket car and visiting the south of USA, they are the first to go to the North Pole by car. Amazing!!!

BestBuy is having a sales on SlingBox this week and I bought the SlingBox AV version. Three BestBuy stores did not have it in stock despite it being featured in the weekly flyer and today is the first day of the sales. It comes with a RCA and S-Video Input, infra-red remote controller but no wireless connection nor RCA output for the TV. The SlingBox Pro has 4 audio/video inputs with HDMI. The wifi connection is really missing and I think it is the most requested feature. Since I did not want to have wires through the living room, I also bought a Linksys Wireless Bridge (WET54G). The Linksys documentation is a bit misleading. I thought the setup was done through some ARP/MAC address technique. The documentation fails to mention that you will have to be in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet and that the default IP address of the device is 192.168.1.226. You can change this afterwards.

So, the Slingbox is connected through the wireless ethernet bridge at 54Mbps (802.11g). The WET54G supports WPA in addition to WEP. On a wireless LAN (802.11g), the Slingbox streams over 3000kbps and the image is very fluid. You can view the Slingbox remotely via another PC or even a mobile phone. The Slingbox Player software is available in Windows, Mac OS X (beta) and Windows Pocket PC. The Slingbox can be watch by only one person once at a time. It is unfortunate that it is limited to only one viewer. I would be glad if they could increase the limit to 5 viewers for example.

Below are two screenshots from the Mac OS X Slingbox Player:

My next test is with the remote PC connection. More screenshots to come.

It is very weird that NBC put two new TV series whose subject are TV shows. 30 Rock is produced by the people of Saturday Night Live. It features Tina Fey (ex-SNL) as the head writer and Alec Baldwin as the network executive. I must that that Alec Baldwin’s character is quite funny (Jack Donaghy) as well as Tracy Morgan’s. On the other hand, Studio 60 is more “serious.” You know that it has a West Wing aura since it shares the same creator, Aaron Sorkin. Studio 60 has a different style which we can appreciate. You will certainly recognize the actors like Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Bradley Whitford. Both shows are quite entertaining. However, I must say that 30 Rock is worth just to see Alec Baldwin play. He’s great!