OTHER TECH

Sling Thing

The next project was to get the Slingbox video streamer working. (That's a great name, isn't it? I kept thinking of Billy Bob Thornton going HU-HUM in Sling Blade). This proved much easier than the camera. In one night I had the box hooked up to my Sat receiver, the Ethernet HomePlug units connected to my electrical outlets, and the signal from my DirectTV dish running on my TV. The problem with this equipment is that the real test would have been running it off of a laptop from another location. It's really meant for business travelers who want to use an Internet signal to watch their own home TV or DVR signal from anywhere in the world. Seeing as I never travel on company business and my daily commute consists of making two left turns and three right turns, I'm not exactly the target market for this. Anyway, I was just happy it wasn't a headache to set up.

Drop-in Speakers

On Thursday, Rob arranged to have someone drop off some speakers to test. Unfortunately, the units that he wanted to give me were still finishing their final development, so the only units available were some older Radio Shack speakers. I did get to meet the marketing director from the computer-chip manufacturer; he got stuck dropping off the speakers.

He was able to explain how the new speakers are supposed to work. Apparently the biggest difference is that the new equipment will be primarily for whole-house audio. He told me that the new technology will allow all the speakers on the system to compensate for time differences in the signals, so the speakers will all play the same music at the exact same time - something the old technology could not do. The idea is that, during a party, you can go from room to room and not hear any difference in the sound. It sounds cool; I only wished that the new speakers were available to play with.

Because it was the end of the week and I was getting worn down from all the testing, I decided to just use the audio output from my satellite system to play through the speakers. I turned on one of the XM music channels in my DirecTV lineup that I never listen to and plugged the speakers in. I could not pick up any sound unless the speakers were in the same room as the receiver. And the sound I did get was not good; there was a lot of popping and the quality just wasn't good.

Sine of the Times

The next day, as I was going through everything with Rob, I realized I had committed the cardinal sin of HomePlug technology: When I connected the audio receiver, I'd plugged it into my home theater surge suppressor. As my brother the electrical engineer had explained to me, HomePlug works by sending a data signal on top of the regular sine wave that is present in 60-Hz electrical circuits (at least that's what I got out of it). Anyway, when I plugged the unit directly into the power outlet, the popping stopped and I was able to go to different rooms without a problem.