phone charging challenges be gone

Do you struggle with the mass of cords and chargers cluttering up your kitchen counter or a favorite desktop? Do the cries of, "where's the charger," ring throughout your home? It seems, we all universally grapple with the daily charging of the one to two devices per household family member. Over the years I have tried a number of solutions. Including, you guessed it, a Pottery Barn cell phone charging station.

Pottery Barn charging station (seriously?)

unsightly cables - how dare you?

After Albert's miraculous installation of the bedroom TV that allows us to see the living room cable DVR in the remodeled bedroom (See Part 1 and Part 2), we were left with a nasty cable problem.

Boxee and Cables

Boo. Come to think of it, cable messes are pretty common place in our house. We have the usual 2-5 cell phones, 3-4 laptops, 2-3 ipads, a tower, a few servers, and who knows how many wireless connections. That is pretty normal, right?

viewing your cable dvr on a second tv (part 2)

PART 2: Continues Albert's adventures trying to view the cable DVR on a second TV.

As detailed in Part 1, we purchased a Samsung Smart TV and found out it wasn't all that smart. Yeah, sure it's wireless, and, okay, you can stream Netflix on it, but that really is about it. And, entering usernames, passwords and movie names on the Samsung's pitiful TV controller made me want to tear my hair out (come on, no Albert jokes--so hurtful).

We installed Slingbox which claims to make "it easy to watch and control your home TV from virtually anywhere, anytime on your laptop, tablet, smartphone or connected device," but it still didn't work with the TV. Then, Albert downloaded the Slingplayer to his iPad, which worked just fine. We were able to watch the TIVO DVR box in the bedroom which was the goal, but on an iPad, not on the new 55" TV. I suggested we should consider returning the TV.

Samsung Smart TV mocking us every night. We hadn't
even pealed the sticky clear cover off the screen, label still
in the corner and the box still in the garage.

viewing your cable dvr on a second tv (part 1)

PART 1: The following series of two posts are a public service announcement.

A secret benefit to the remodel was we were going to install a big, beautiful flat-screen TV smack dab in the middle of the master bedroom wall. I have never had a TV in the bedroom and never really wanted a second TV. But, having an older son, who stays up later, was cutting into my available "True Blood" viewing time. So, since we would have all the walls in the master bedroom open and chopped up for the new bathroom, we decided it would be super easy to install cable TV in the back of the house.

Albert researched a bit, and decided that, no, we didn't need another cable and DVR in the back of the house, with the new Smart TVs we could view the cable TV from the front of the house TIVO on the TV in the back of the house. Did that make sense? That was the bottom line goal, watch TV in the bedroom using the TIVO box in the living room.

Tivo