Hockey Morning in Sicily

Best laid plans (and blogs, I suspect) are often derailed by the Christmas holidays. I fully intended to post a series detailing technological preparations for our three-month sojourn in Sicilia. Somehow the time got away.

And now here we are in Siracusa! (Oh well.)

This morning, our first in the apartment - we arrived yesterday evening - I was up early with only a few hours sleep, still fretting about the sudden unexplained loss of Internet access the night before. Without the Internet, I'm sunk. A prolonged outage so early in our stay did not augur well.

The DSL service, from Telecom Italia, which our landlady assured us was very reliable, looked great for the first ten minutes when we connected on returning from a late dinner out. Then it was gone, right in the middle of a Skype conversation with our daughter. I went to bed worried.

This morning, a half hour after a first unsuccessful attempt at connecting, the Internet just as suddenly came back.

It is very fast. Pinella, our landlady, had said it was 8 megabits per second (Mbps) service. I don't know about that, but it is nimble.

How nimble? One of the things I wanted to test here was remotely accessing a SlingBox, a little gizmo from Sling Media that you plug into a TV set top box and a home network. It lets you stream video from your home TV service over the Internet - which you can then receive anywhere you have Internet access.

The SlingPlayer software on my laptop connected almost immediately to the SlingBox Solo back in London. (I had set it all up before leaving.) The software shows an image of your TV's remote control beside the video window - you click buttons with a mouse rather than physically pushing them.

When I used this virtual remote to bring up the electronic program guide, the first thing my eyes lit on was Hockey Night in Canada Replay on a CBC station. It was 1:30 on Sunday morning back home. Who knew CBC rebroadcast hockey games late at night?

I changed the channel to the CBC station and, dad nab it, there were my benighted Maple Leafs skating against the hated Philly Flyers. I had connected the laptop to the 32-inch flat panel in the apartment (with an HDMI cable I'd brought from home), so I was watching on TV, full screen mode.

My expectation of SlingBox was uwatchably bad video - jerky, blurry, constantly stopping and restarting. But this was actually half decent: not great, but watchable. Just. Motion was smooth. There was no stopping for "rebuffeing" then starting again.

It was a little blurry and from time to time, the image would get "blocky" - blocks of colour where there should be smooth contours. But I could see the puck, most of the time. And the audio was good.

The SlingPlayer software reported streaming bit rates in the 400-to-500-kilobits-per-second range, which for you non-geeks is pretty remarkable.

The downside? I was determined to wean myself of the Hockey Night in Canada habit while in Italy.