Family IT

Last year was our first flat-screen, Apple TV, AirPort Extreme, networked printing and NAS.

Adoption was slow.  I was the only one who used the 160GB drive hooked up to the network as well as the printer.  Same w/ the Apple TV, pretty much.

These days, Katie brings downloaded episodes of various shows home from her computer down @ Rutgers (I had gotten her and Betsy a Slingbox years ago w/o realizing that they couldn’t use it).  I either take thumb drives or get DropSend files from Katie and convert them, dump into my library so Apple TV syncs up.  The process is pretty simple.  Just tedious and, depending on file size, a bit slower than we’d like.

Enter a year of living with this tech and, now, Boxee.  Yesterday, I hacked our Apple TV to get Boxee running on it and sent invites to the entire family.  Now anyone can dump any format of media onto the NAS and automatically play it in the living room from their own computers.  We can stream the best web content and each have our own personalized settings.

About 14 years ago, Mom got rid of cable television in our house.  Today, I’m pretty confident it’ll stay that way.  The future has arrived.