Been playing a lot with Diable III – well, been trying to, actually.

I don’t know if it’s related to Macs and how the game runs on them (I’m going to try to install it later on Windows 7 running on Parallels, maybe that’d be a better deal), but I’ve been getting lots of errors on the thing. Lots of lag on Fullscreen and Windowed mode. I thought it was because I was running it at not quite the right installation mode, so I reinstalled it – twice now. The purported hang at 69% I took care of by letting the install run through the night. In the morning, it comes out to 100%. Hah. Wear me down? Not a chance.

For a while after the fresh install it ran well, then it began to have those stupid response time lags again, and now it’s showing up not only on my iMac, but now on my MacBook Air. It can’t be the connection, I’ve been running it while logged onto my iPad’s faster 3G connection on both machines (last night though, there was a Server Maintenance interruption for a couple of hours, from 8 to 10).

Occasionally, like this morning, it ran pretty well (after having been reinstalled for the second time over the night), and I managed to sneak in a couple of hours of gameplay early today. Now, I’m on the verge of killing the Skeleton King, and my Monk character Rama is now on Level 9. Later, time will tell whether or not I licked the problem, at least on the iMac. But now, I tried to run it on the Air, and the same lag showed up, when yesterday afternoon it ran just fine. Shucks, and I reserved the whole afternoon to play it.

It’s a wonderful game, nonetheless, harking back to the old days of I and II. Mindless clicking and dogged persistence rules. I picked up an NPC as a partner of sorts, although he gets in my way more than actually helping me out. I find that in the hairier situations when the undead and the demons attack in hordes, it’s best to stay in place and just click-click-click away, and the room’ll clear right up of those things. Of course, you gotta monitor your health, but mostly only in boss battles when you gotta replenish when it dips low. Most of the time in those horde skirmishes, health packs appear regularly and there’s no need to top up, you do it automatically.

I find I prefer to explore every nook and cranny of the dungeon first before clambering down some portal to proceed to the next level, just like in the previous games. I get loads of gold, and often my inventory quickly fills up with junk that I need to dispose of by just leaving them in some dark corner. I just stop and see if my character is outfitted in the best gear I can find before I junk the cheap stuff.

Going to try and restart the game on my Air again; maybe this time the lag would go away.

Diablo, the original game, first came out in 1996. I remember having it and playing it incessantly until my eyes bugged out of my head. Then Diablo II came out in 2000, once again introducing me to countless sleepless nights, with my hand on my computer mouse, twitching and  clicking with frenzied abandon, dispatching hordes of demons, monsters and the undead.

Then, nothing for more than a decade, until rumors began to fly that they were making another sequel. Then the rumors slowly became fact, and fans began to salivate at the prospect of more dungeon crawling, this time in the 21st century, with all its technological developments. Betas went online and people fought to get on them.  A few weeks ago, a server stressing test open to the public went online for a weekend. I couldn’t get it to work for some reason, but I downloaded the beta and spent that weekend staring at the logon screen.

Then at long last, after a hiatus of 12 years, Diablo III finally got released yesterday, worldwide, and is probably the most pre-ordered game of all time.

I went to the local game store yesterday morning along with many others, only to be told that the game was to be released sometime later that afternoon (a local forum had said they’d release it at 3PM, but that was pure speculation). So I killed time and went to a coffee shop, and came back after lunch to check. There was a line at the cashier already and I discovered that they apparently had released it already, earlier than 3PM, and there were lines all over the city eagerly waiting for the game.

When it was my turn at the cashier, they asked me if I wanted Global or Southeast Asian. I went, huh?

Apparently the Global version enabled you to log on to any server in the world, while the Southeast Asian version only allowed you to access the Asian servers. Plus, there were some discounts, and a voucher to get another (different) game at P200 off, and of course I said gimme the Global. The game cost went down from P3150 to P2750, and I hurried home with my purchase.

As is customary with Blizzard, the game developer, it’s made to install on both Macs and PCs from the same box. Installing it on my iMac turned out to be a pain. After an hour it was just at 69%, and it got stuck at that point for a half hour until I decided to restart it. But it turned out that it was still installing underneath that stuck progress bar, and it actually finished. (Maybe it was an isolated incident; when I installed it on myMacBook Air, it went along swimmingly.) When I tried to start it, it went on, and thus began my new episode of bleary, sleepless nights of dungeon crawling.

Here’s what fundamentally different with this version. You have to be online the whole time you’re playing, which was a departure from the solitary games of the past. Maybe the social aspect of it is one of the new developments of the game, and the new Auction House (something I have yet to try) has something to do with it, that and the Public Games feature where you can join and play with other people online. Getting online took some doing (I can imagine the stress the servers must have been under, being the first open day of public gaming) but I finally got on.

I’ve only played it for several hours at this point. I vaguely remember those early days of feverishly playingDiablo I and Diablo II (and maybe the stroke I had a couple of years ago dimmed the memory somewhat, I don’t really know), but now there are several new classes you can play as. What used to be just Warrior,Sorcerer and Rogue (and later, Monk) have now morphed into Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Monk, Witch Doctor or Wizard, all of which you can make male or female.

The dozen years that have elapsed since Diablo II hasn’t changed the gameplay much. It’s still the same isometric gameplay as before, albeit with a lot of graphical pizazz now. Wisps of fog envelop your character as you walk along the dungeons, and the hordes of demons and monsters have graduated to nastier, more complicated forms. You just click on where you want to go, and click on the monsters you want to do battle with. And that’s it. Click click click click. You converse and interact with NPCs (Non Player Characters) to bring the story forward as you descend deeper and deeper into the dungeons to do battle. Familiar and comforting.

I’m pausing from playing the game to write this short review, and I’m getting to know it a bit better now, but this is just a first look at one of the biggest video game releases for the PC and the Mac. More later.

AVAILABILITY: DataBlitz

PRICE: P3150

*Reprinted from Technoodling

Yesterday I got Diablo III. On launch day, along with everybody else.

I wasn’t totally sold on getting it at first. I was hemming and hawing again as usual. I already had spent for my domain and the hosting fee for the next couple of years, and paid up my outstanding balance for the first two years that morning, depositing P2700 in Jayvee’s BDO account. I wasn’t about to spend around the basic same amount for a computer game, no matter if it was something I was waiting 12 years for. And yesterday was also my Tita’s birthday, and my brother and I were splitting her blowout between us, so that was another added expense. So I had gone first to their ATM to get some cash, as I was quickly running out.

I went to Data Blitz (yeah, yeah, I’m back to going there, despite that snafu with the Vita game from before; I can’t stay away, they’re the only game in town, to make a bad pun) after going to the BDO ATM, only to find out that they were only releasing the game later that afternoon. So I grabbed an early lunch at Jollibee and gone to Starbucks to kill time surfing and watching The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on Slingplayer.

Before I broke off to buy the goodies for Tita’s birthday blowout (which my brother still hasn’t paid me back his half), I passed by Data Blitz again, and came across a queue. Damn it. I couldn’t resist. I lined up and bought it. There was sort of like an assembly line thing there: you line up to pay (P3150, but with discounts it came to P2750), then on to another line where you go through the game material inspection routine they make you go through to wash their hands of any responsibility for defects, finally get the game and the voucher for P200 off Mass Effect 3 (an additional “promo”), and out the door you go.

Later at home, I install the game on the iMac, and it takes forever. After an hour, it was only at 69%, and the progress bar got stuck there. After another half-hour had passed I finally give up and went to install again, but lo and behold, the game had actually kept on installing under the stuck progress bar, and it booted up and started fine. After several fitful starts at getting on the server, the game finally logs on, and I play for an hour or so. I also loaded it on my MacBook Air, and the install fares better there, zipping along and finishing in about 30 minutes. I wrote a quick review for Technoodling last night, and Vic posted it this morning. I’ll reprint it here tomorrow.

Nice. Brings back memories of I and II. I expect many late hours playing the game.

What more is there to say about The Avengers that hasn’t been said yet?

I’d seen it twice already, once on opening day at a regular 2D theater, and then a week later at an IMAX 3D movie house. The first time for the sheer spectacle and the visceral oomph, and the second time to really watch it, warts and all. The second time I came off a little less than impressed, or at least not as enthusiastic as some reviewers out there.

I don’t deny that it’s a cinematic triumph, putting together seemingly disparate heroes and their individual movie personas and bringing them all together in one film and managing not to screw it up. Seeing the goody-two-shoes personality of Captain America pitted against the morally ambiguous gray world of Iron Man, or the black and white, royal might persona of Thor against the primal rage of the Hulk takes some doing, and Joss Whedon is to be commended for that.

It’s just that the progression of the story seems a bit crowded and busy, that there are too many elements and sub-plots and secondary themes and elements that it would take hours of exposition and story-telling to get to all of them. The fact that the movie is only two-and-a-half hours long is a credit to Whedon and the screenwriters. In fact, the sheer volume of story and plot is enough for two movies, yet they managed to squeeze it all into just one. And therein lies the problem, at least for me.

The second time I watched it, it seemed to drag in several places, speed up in others. It was slow going in the first hour, as characters were introduced and exposition ruled, and towards the end in the final battles, it sped up really fast, almost as if the story was being told in shorthand. Sure, as screenplays go, these things are necessary – the many character introductions, setting up the interplay between them, the setting up of the conflict on which everything hinges, the development of the many story lines, the final resolution, but the story feels unnecessarily complicated. I feel Whedon should’ve cut the story short in many places, and lengthened other parts, like the main battle at the end. But that’s just me.

I feel the whole Loki thing was drawn out too much, to the extent that he even had the gumption to play a VIP part in that German sequence where Hawkeye got that power doohickey from the vault. There Loki so played the part of god to the hilt that he got captured by the Avengers, and Thor and Iron Man got into a fight as to who captured him first. All the while Loki’s minions were secretly working behind the scenes to set up the Tesseract portal and planning an attack on SHIELD‘s flying aircraft carrier, on which the Avengers were arguing among themselves what Fury was really up to. Like I said, unnecessarily complicated.

I also have some trouble with the story’s logic in some places, particularly Bruce Banner (as the Hulk) and his rationale for doing what he did. (I realize this is a comic book movie, after all, but there has to be some sort of logic to a character’s actions nonetheless.) In his first enraged outing, he was berserk, and didn’t listen to anyone; it was just SMASH SMASH SMASH, no matter who got in the way. (Mostly Thor, whom he really couldn’t really hurt.) But in our last encounter with him, he was playing nice with the others, posing with the other heroes in that rotating all-together-in-one-money-shot, listening to instructions from Captain America, and even saving Iron Man in that last-gasp plucked-from-the-jaws-of-death rescue in the end.

But on the whole, flaws notwithstanding, it was an exhilarating, enthralling experience, and I wouldn’t put myself past watching it one last time before it goes from the big screen.

Some folk contend that it isn’t really necessary, that the iPad’s glass screen is built to take punishment, built to withstand the slings and arrows of everyday life and is tough enough to weather everyday wear and tear. Just wipe the screen down with a damp cloth every now and then and you’re good to go. Besides, that beauteous retina display has to be enjoyed in its pristine state and it would be a pity for it to be covered up and ruined by some film.

Some take the safe route and purchase a screen protector just to be sure. There’s something reassuring about a screen protector giving an extra layer of resistance. All manner of screen protectors abound: matte, glossy, anti-fingerprint, anti-scratch, anti-glare, crystal film, cheap, expensive — take your pick. Just make sure that it’s a good quality screen protector so you don’t ruin your iPad screen experience by much.

In my iPad life, I’ve given in to temptation once, and bought an expensive oleophobic, anti-glare, anti-scratch film for my iPad 2, and was immediately… unsure of my purchase. True, the iPad 2 screen was protected from scratches and largely free from glare, but it was no more resistant to fingerprint marks and smudges than the original screen, and frankly, I couldn’t really tell the difference. There was this weird rainbow effect when light fell on the screen in a certain way, but on the whole the experience was underwhelming. Still, there it was, and there it stayed, with me wiping it down of fingerprints and smudges every now and then as I would have had I left the screen as it was.

When I traded in my iPad 2 for the new iPad, I wondered if I should get a screen protector this time. I had bought a Targus back cover (largely because it was the only 3rd generation case available at the time), and I had my trusty old gray polyurethane Apple SmartCover. I said, nahhh, forget it.

That was until I saw the Spigen GLAS.t Premium Tempered Glass Screen Protector. They had been around before, making glass screen protectors for the iPhone, and now they’ve come up with a version for the iPad 2 and the new iPad (sorry, iPad 1 users are out of luck).

It protects glass with glass. It wasn’t made from some protective film from Japan or someplace like that — it’s actually a layer of thin, transparent, chemically treated and processed tempered glass that is just 0.4mm thick, and adheres to the iPad’s glass screen by advanced silicone adhesives.The glass’s surface hardness is 8-9H, and is coated with an oleophobic anti-fingerprint layer. If by the remote chance it broke, it wouldn’t shatter into sharp shards of glass, it would break into many harmless little pieces you can easily get rid of.

It comes in attractive packaging (as well it should, for the price), and with the glass screen protector there comes a squeegee, a microfiber cloth and an alcohol swab. You use the alcohol swab to wipe your iPad clean and buff it with the microfiber cloth to make sure no scuffs, fingerprints or dust remain before you apply the screen protector. Unfortunately the advanced silicone adhesive is a one-time only application, and you have to get it right the first try; unlike other protectors, there is no do-overs with this one. This baby’s for keeps, and you better get it right.

Once you get it into position, you tap gently on the center, and static cling and the adhesives work their magic, sticking the protector to your iPad from the center outwards by itself until it fills up the screen. You can use the squeegee to ease out any bubbles that remain; in any case if any small bubbles do remain, they disappear over the next day or two. There were hardly any bubbles when we applied mine, thankfully.

You can’t tell there’s a protector there after you put it on. It practically disappears into the iPad. Here’s a look at mine with the GLAS.t on:

Absolutely no difference from the original screen, save for the slightly deeper depression the home button is now at, a result of the (negligible) thickness of the screen protector. People who shy away from screen protectors can get this, as it doesn’t affect anything in the iPad’s functions. It’s a case of put it on and forget about it.

There’s no reduction in response time, things still swipe and shift and click and enlarge, and in appearance, it’s as if there’s literally nothing there. Using other protective cases like the SmartCover and folios and back covers are unaffected; you can go on using them as before.

Marketing videos on Spigen’s website show the GLAS.t being attacked with scissors and knives and screwdrivers and keys and nails and all manner of damaging objects – I think I’ll just take their word for it. It’s enough to know that my iPad is well protected in case it came to be attacked by these things.

Here’s the catch: the price.

The original GLAS.t for the iPhone came a a price far beyond any of the screen protectors available, and this one isn’t any different. It retails for just under P4,000. By far it’s the most expensive accessory I’ve ever gotten for the iPad. But hey, it’s tempered glass, not some simple crystal film. It’s expensive, but let me tell you, it’s worth every centavo.

It’s the best, most durable, yet also the most unobtrusive screen protector available for the iPad 2 or the new iPad available anywhere. Fence sitters are well-advised to get their asses off the damn fence and get this thing, no matter how much it costs.

You won’t regret it.

Availability: All Applewerks branches

Price: P3,890

Likes:

• Made of tempered glass!
• No effect on any of the iPad’s functions
• Lasts forever (or at least the iPad’s life)

Dislikes:

• Expensive!

*Reprinted from Technoodling

I’d been hemming and hawing the past week whether or not to get the Spigen GLAS.t Tempered Glass Screen Protector for my iPad from Applewerkz, that Apple accessory store near the house. It was just so expensive – a little under P4k. I’d come close to buying it, but chickened out at the last minute, justifying to myself that I didn’t really need it, and that I’d better save my money, which was dwindling fast.

Then I spent the next several days debating with myself whether to get it or not, being convinced I needed it in the evening, and then being convinced I did not the next morning when I woke up, and switching back around later on, over and over. I guess I just became tired out changing my mind and decided to go for it. I came home early one day, and decided what the hell, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. So I got ready to go back out (in more homey clothes, natch), and walked over to Applewerkz.

Lester, the guy there, got to helping me right away, and he said he’d install it for me, but he’d have to do it in the back where things were less hectic and more dust-free. I asked to go back there with him to sit in on the process and they said ok.

He was very careful to do it, and washed his hands first. He was very cautious in attaching it properly and in just the right place, taking his time. While he was attaching it, the owner of the shop, a guy named Lemirand came by and I got to meet him finally. He’d been very visible in the PhilMUG forum, I guess to better sell his stuff. Nice guy. He was much younger than I thought, and he seemed normal. Thought he’d be a huckster-type, but he seemed grounded and sane. He gave me a big discount for the screen protector, so I got it relatively cheaply – at least at US cost.

I was surprised at the final result. The screen protector practically disappeared into the iPad, and it looks the same, save for the deeper depression the home button was in, because of the relative thickness of the protector. (A quick aside: while writing this, I’m currently watching The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in Dallas-Fort Worth real time through Slingplayer, and his guest right now, Christiane Amanpour, looks so much like Antonio Banderas in drag I can’t get over it.) Anyhows, the protector has been absorbed into my iPad, and works like it did before. Damn, it’s good.

I took time out last night to write a review for Technoodling, and they put it up this morning. I’ll repost it here tomorrow.

I went to see The Avengers again yesterday with my brother.( I had also wanted to see it with my daughter, but she hasn’t replied to my texts. No load, I guess.)

We went to see it in IMAX 3D this time, which was a whole different experience entirely. There’s something about seeing it in an expansive screen like that, almost truly immersive, like they say in the ads. The characters are so big and so bright and clear they could almost jump from the screen. And they almost did – the 3D effect was really that good. Those IMAX guys weren’t kidding. It’s really so different from seeing it on a conventionally-sized screen in 2D, and I wish I’d seen it in the IMAX theater in the first place.

I had gone to get our tickets on Friday at SM North EDSA, thinking that was sufficient time to get good seats. Turns out a lot of people had the same idea, and the theater reservations for Sunday were almost full. I was lucky to get the seats we got, which turns out weren’t really all that bad. It was in our general preferred area, Row L, Seats 11 and 12 , just off to the side a bit and not dead center as I was hoping for. Our preferred seating was M18 to 20, and it wasn’t really that far off.

It was the first screening of the day, which was at 11:10. We got there at 10:30, and there were tons of people waiting in the lounge area ahead of us, and a long queue at the concessionaire. We had hoped to get big tubs of popcorn and drinks, and we lined up for them, but the line took forever that we just gave up and just lined up to get in the the theater, which by then had snaked halfway through the lounge area. At least the good part was that they were actually lining up. There may be hope for this country yet.

We got out a little before 2, and we had lunch, fried chicken at Four Fingers. Or is it Five Fingers? I forget.

Then we went to look for our iPad covers at the SM Annex, a faux SmartCover for my brother, and a nice back cover for me. He didn’t find any, and I found a Targus back cover specifically for the iPad 3, but I held off buying it, hoping that I’d come across a better one. (I didn’t, but by that time we had wandered far away from the store where I saw it, and it took a lot of effort to get back that I decided I can get it at another branch, maybe in Cubao or something.) Before we went home, we stopped for a cinnamon roll and coffee at Cinnabon.

That was my Sunday.

Been getting into the habit of watching television on my iMac via my new Slingbox Tuner, and I must say, it’s really easy. Global Destiny‘s channels are all right, and I can watch easily on my home network, less so on the net outside the house where it’s largely choppy, mainly because of my slow upload speeds. What I hadn’t counted on (a big bonus of sorts) is watching on Slingboxes that aren’t my own, with their own individual feeds, both on my iMac and MacBook Air.

The guy I bought my Slingbox from emailed me the URL to get Slingplayer for the iPhone (which turns out to be obsolete for an iOS 5.1 user, which I am), and threw in as a bonus three Slingbox IDs and passwords that I could access. Wowsa! I didn’t know I could do that!

DirecTV, Verizon FiOS, and a host of other cable feeds are available to me, and while they are technically not mine to access, the owners can override me by plugging in their administrative passwords and kicking me out, which is just fine. Most of the users don’t access their feeds much so they’re basically mine to use most of the time.

I checked the net for some Slingbox IDs and passwords and came across several more. These feeds are much clearer than my own Global Destiny feed, which is a good thing. If only I had known about Slingplayer and the IDs and passwords, I don’t think I would’ve bought the Slingbox Tuner and gotten the Global Destiny cable in the first place! (Nah, I guess I would’ve anyway. I’m not a deliberate internet TV feed pirate.)

The time difference is big, since they operate in real time, which means I have to watch foreign TV in their home time, which means the good shows are around lunch and in the afternoon, especially when I access the American feeds. Right now, I have about three American feeds, a UK feed, and a Taipei and a Taiwanese one. The US feeds originate from San Francisco and Dallas/Fort Worth; the third one I haven’t identified yet since that one is being used by the owner most of the time. The UK feed is also good, but I’m mainly an American-oriented viewer. The Taiwan and Taipei feeds are basically inscrutable Chinese channels so I don’t access them much.

This afternoon I finally came across a show I diligently watch on torrent – the CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I saw it on my SF DirecTV feed. It was my first time to watch the show in the actual time it broadcasts in the States, and let me tell you, the show has damned long commercial breaks! (For a show that airs at half-past midnight in the US, it’s doing pretty well for itself.) I guess I just got used to the torrent downloads where the encoders take out the commercials and come up with an ad-free forty-minute video file. It was the first time for me to watch The Late Late Show in real time, and eliminates the need to torrent-download that particular episode. Cool!

I can tell I’m going to spend a lot of time in front of my iMac from now on.

I reserved yesterday for the installation of Global Destiny cable.

It seems like a silly proposition to have another cable TV service connected, since we already had a great Skycable account at home, with its three digiboxes hooking up the TVs in the house. But my Slingbox Tuner needed an analog connection, and Global Destiny still had that. Besides, it was only P500 a month. There were no installation fees, all I had to do was pay for three months in advance.

It would make my Slingbox installation complete, and I could use my iMac as my television, with the added bonus of having the TV available through the net. And if things worked out the way I figured, I could also connect a fourth TV, the one in the dining room, to the cable service with a splitter so we can have cable TV there too to watch while we eat dinner.

I had already contacted Global Destiny the day after I installed the Slingbox, and they told me they’d try to rush things so it could be connected that same day, Saturday, but they were only half-day then, and if they didn’t make it by 2PM, it would be installed Monday at the latest. Of course they didn’t make it. So I reserved the whole of Monday for the installation.

Should have gone on my usual sked; they maddeningly arrived at 5PM, at the close of the day.

They installed the service quickly, climbing up ladders and stuff, and had me sign the contract and made out the receipt, and pretty soon I got it running. It’s great. I spent most of the evening watching TV and setting up the channels on Slingplayer so I didn’t have to second-guess the unhelpful virtual remote control. I tried to connect via the Portable Hotspot connection of my iPad to see how it would fare online from outside the home network, and unfortunately it came out choppy. While the feed is great on the home network, the upload speed is too slow for the online uptake. Oh well. (I also split the signal and connected the downstairs dining room TV to the service last night, and it worked great.)

Meanwhile, my brother and Dad went to get Dad’s consolation winnings from the lotto place at the PICC that afternoon (he almost won the grand prize – he just missed one number!), and they came home with a take-home feast from one of the restos, complete with ice cream. Great dinner that was. My brother is also arranging for Globe DSL (in lieu of the aborted WiMax), and he said they’ll set it up on Saturday. He’s getting a 2Mbps account (double the speed!) for the same price, with a modem and a free wifi router. That’s great, because faster download speeds usually means faster upload speeds as well, and that would be great for my Slingbox feed. I can finally get decent signals from the online Slingbox feed from anywhere I am. Cool.

Lo and behold, I came across a Slingbox Tuner on one of the online selling sites. A Slingbox …Tuner?

A quick search on the web gave me the info that Slingbox had discontinued the Slingbox Tuner some time ago, and was now only selling the Slingbox Solo and the Slingbox Pro-HD, a wondrous device which also doubled as DVR with multiple inputs and HD output online and all that. They had all these inputs in the back that allowed for a a cable box, satellite receiver, a DVR and all that home theater stuff.

The Slingbox Tuner version was a simpler affair, and all it had was a power input, a network cable output and in and out coax ports. That was it.

Although the Slingbox Tuner was obsolete, the guy was selling it brand new, and cheap (under $100)! Might be worth a look.

So I bought it. Turns out to be a mixed bag.

The Slingbox Tuner came in a big box with a couple of coaxial cables, a cable box splitter, a short network cable, a power adaptor and the requisite CD-ROM (which was also obsolete, and only for Windows, which made it doubly useless for me, being a Mac user) and instruction manual. It was a small device, and you can easily hide it in your A/V cabinet. If you’re looking for composite video connections or HDMI, you can forget the Tuner; it only connects via coaxial, and is thus confined to an analog connection.

I hooked it up to the main TV cable setup in the house: I connected it to the power supply and the network router, and tried to figure out how to connect it to the cable digibox. Which was a big honking clue that it wouldn’t pan out, since it was an analog device. I connected it to the TV RF coaxial output since that looked promising. And that was the only output of the digibox other than the RCA audio/video jacks which were already in use.

Then I set about registering an account with the Slingbox site and tried to get it to recognize the Tuner. Nada. It refused, saying that Slingbox was obsolete, and did I want to upgrade to a newer model of Slingbox, like the Slingbox Pro-HD? The site was going to give me $50 off if I did. Yeah, right.

It took me the better part of the afternoon, but I finally figured out what to do with it… from a buried and hard-to-find portion of the site, under the heading Legacy Desktop Software.

I proceeded to download the old version of Slingplayer (1.0.10 for the Mac) and then registered the Slingbox under it. When I tried to configure the TV settings for the cable box, nada again. It simply gave me static when I tried to auto-configure the channels. Ah. Here was the expected digital conundrum. I was at a loss as to how to connect the damn thing to our cable service, until I remembered that the thing had a tuner inside! Of course it did, its name was Slingbox Tuner!

I immediately grabbed an antenna from one of the old TVs in the house, a pair of jackrabbit ears with a coax adapter, and hooked them up directly to the back of the Tuner. And whaddayaknow? The Slingplayer software auto-configured the broadcast channels, and pretty soon I was watching TV on my Mac through the network router.

To be sure, these are only the publicly available broadcast TV channels, available in a window on my computer, and I could change channels through an onscreen virtual remote control. You can adjust the aspect ratio of the screen from normal, letterbox, pillarbox, windowbox to anamorphic, and shift the virtual remote to the left or right side of the Slingplayer screen, among other things. (And boy, that Slingbox got really hot; I almost toasted my fingers handling it trying to read the serial number on the bottom. That looks like something to worry about.)

So, in effect, I got me an old-fashioned TV tuner for my iMac, and I’m happy. It’s not our cable TV, and neither is it in HD. But I can remotely connect my MacBook Air wherever I am and watch, although I’m confined to those broadcast channels. (It stutters and balks when I’m on the net; I guess that’s because my upload speeds on my network are kinda slow; gotta get a better signal.)

I still haven’t figured out how to do it for my iPhone, although the seller I bought it from is emailing me a link tonight on how to get the obsolete software that lets it run on an iPhone. I’m getting a cable service that’s still analog, so I can watch better TV than this broadcast crap I’m currently confined to; they’re installing this week. I’m still trying to decide whether or not to spring for the $29.95 Slingplayer for iPad, because it may or may not work, since my Slingbox Tuner is technically “obsolete”. That’s a big gamble, and I don’t know if I’m willing to bet that much on an iffy proposition. (EDIT: I just found out. It doesn’t. So I won’t.)

But I’m okay for now at least.

*Reprinted from Technoodling