Sailboats in the sunset

The boob tube addiction

One problem we considered when planning our sojourn in Italy was, how to feed the TV habit? Not that either of us is a hardcore addict, but we do like to watch an hour or so of television in the evening – almost always something recorded on the PVR.

Our Italian isn't good enough to watch local TV and there was no reason to think we'd get any English-language TV from the cable service at the apartment we rented. (We were right about that.) So what was the solution?

I've already talked about a possible Internet-based solution, Slingbox, which streams TV from your home service over the Internet to your computer. While the quality of video is okay for watching the news, say, it's probably not good enough to watch an entire episode of House or a movie.

Another possibility is watching programs streamed from Web sites of TV networks or aggregators such as hulu.com. There is actually quite a bit available, but that solution is fraught with other, copyright-related problems that I'll discuss in a future post.

So what did we do? Before we left, we borrowed DVDs from our local public library - movies and recorded TV seres - and ripped them to an impossibly tiny but capacious hard drive using a program called AnyDVD from Slysoft. The hard drive is the FreeAgent Go from Seagate, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It is currently holding 50 or 60 hours of high-quality video.

Here's a shot of the modified home theatre set-up in our apartment, showing the laptop, FreeAgent Go and components that were already here. In future posts, I'll talk about the ripping process and our experience watching recorded material over here, but before closing, I want to say a word about legality and ethics.

In the U.S., rightly or wrongly, it is illegal to rip DVDs. Which means that the software for doing it is illegal too. (This is why software providers like Slysoft, which is based in Barbados, tend to be offshore.)

In Canada, according to legal experts I consulted a few years ago when researching the question for a story I was writing, it is perfectly legal to copy copyrighted material for personal use. You just can't distribute it. That's under current law. New iron-fisted, American-style legislaton is probably coming that will make DVD ripping just as illegal in Canada.

What about ethics? It's not as if we're doing anything more with the programs we ripped than we would if we had just borrowed them from the library and viewed them at home. We're not distributing them. In most cases, we'll watch them once and delete them from the hard drive. Having them recorded simply means we can watch at our leisure, whereas the library has a one-week loan period. But that loan period isn't imposed for any reason of copyright, only because DVDs are in such high demand.

Some days it's tough to work

Created using Flip Video Ultra from Pure Digital Technologies Inc., one of the splendid tech toys I'll be testing while in Sicily.

Settling In

Setting up an office away from the office is not just about the technology. There are all kinds of other considerations, some anticipated, some not.

For example, at home I have a big 20-inch monitor on my desk, adjusted to the right height, a proper ergonomic task chair, a full-size keyboard and mouse. Here I have my laptop with its 13-inch screen and a little travel mouse (albeit a very good one: Microsoft's Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 - a wireless mouse with a dongle that doubles as a 1GB flash drive). My office furniture: the Ikea utility table our landlord kindly lent us and a chair from the apartment's diningroom. Would it be a problem?

On Monday, I was a little sore at the end of the work day, but that may have just been a hangover from humping bags while in transit. I also commandeered a small cushion from the livingroom which turned out to be perfect for providing lumbar support. That helped. Yesterday, I felt fine.

And then there is the business of re-establishing routines or creating new ones. At home, I get up at 7 - plus or minus 45 minutes. After breakfast and exercise, I work through until 5:30 or 6 with a half hour break for lunch. Here it doesn't make sense to quit that early because the people I do business with don't even start work until 3 p.m. my time - and the left-coasters not until 6 p.m.

So I'm taking it bit easier in the morning, going out shopping with the V.P. Finance - we went to the great open air market today - blogging, etc. And then working through until more like 7 or 7:30. So far so good.

When I first arrived, I was concerned about exercise, which is vital to my routine - my caffeine in the morning, and my prozac too. Could I do my lying-down stretches and strength exercises on a hard tile Italian floor? Could I run on the uneven and slippery-when-wet cobbled streets?

Non è un problema. I improvised a yoga mat with a folded blanket on the hemp carpet in the livingroom. And this morning - beautifully sunny and about 60 degrees - I went for a glorious run all along the sea wall around the island of Ortigia, with waves crashing and salt spray cooling me.

Yeah, I think I can adapt to this.

The wind from Africa

The Sirocco came in during the night. The sky was a weird orange colour most of the day - sand from the Sahara, according to our landlord Giorgio. It stormed and blew and pelted rain while I worked.

My VP Finance went out for a walk in some of the worst of it, down to the sea wall (mad dogs and - Canadians?) She was almost swept out to sea by her account, waves crashing across the roadway. Then in the late afternoon, the rain stopped, the sun tried to come out for awhile and we went for a walk. This is one of the pictures. For more, check here.

First day of telework

Today I set up my office away from the office, in the spare bedroom of our apartment in Siracusa - although it's pretty much a moveable feast, consisting only of phone, computer and desk.

The communications, after a few false starts, came together yesterday. I brought from home an RTX Dualphone - a cordless phone system that lets me make and take both Skype and landline calls on the same phone set. The "landline" in this case is another IP phone service, Hosted PBX from Primus, a Canadian company.

The RTX base station plugs into the network router. The cordless handset sits in a charging dock that can be up to 50 meters away. The Primus adapter also plugs into the router and then into the RTX base station.

This morning, I temporarily lost the Skype service after taking out the power in the apartment by plugging in a plug the wrong way around and shorting a circuit. (No problem, we found the fuse panel right away and flipped the breaker to turn it back on.) But when the RTX unit came back up, it couldn't immediately get an IP address from the router. I had to reboot the router. Now it works again.

We tried out the Primus service last night in two calls. Fantastic. It was like talking to someone on the other side of town - no noticeable latency, very good audio quality. Our daughter, who is looking after the house, has the use of a Primus IP phone set up in my office. She can, and did, dial four digits - in other words, as if from one extension on a PBX to another - to reach us here in Siracusa.

Last night, Giorgio, our landlord, brought over a small Ikea table, which I set up initially in the main bedroom in a little alcove. But that bedroom is at the front of the house and it turned out to be a little noisy - people talking, motorbikes gunning their engines, impatient motorists honking - even though it's a tiny, narrow street.

On the whole, a good first day. Everything is working as it should, including, miraculously, me.

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.