Mickey Papillon

I thought this was a pretty fun photo. Some light cell phone humor. Enjoy!

So I got playing around tonight with the Grand Central concept.  Basically, you go to Grand Central.com and sign up to get your phone number assigned.  Then, you can use this number as a single point of contact for yourself.  When someone calls the number, all the numbers you have added to your account (Home, Cell, Work, any others) ring and you can answer from any one of them.  My initial thought on this right now is that this is a good idea, but I’m not sure yet how useful this is going to be for me.

Just thought I would give it a mention as it seems to be a very good concept for those that have multiple numbers and wish they were consolodated.

This is going to be short, but to the point.  I have had a Slingbox Pro that Santa brought me this past holiday season and love it.  I use it every day with multiple devices, and I highly recommend one to anyone looking.

My comment involves a comparison between the Slingbox and the Sony Location free units.  A family friend is living over in metro Tokyo for a few years and is longing for american TV.  He decided that since he happened to know someone working over there for Sony, that he would get thier version of the TV place shifting software.  Here are my observations.

Slingbox:  10 minutes to setup, easy to install software, great solid UI, smooth video when streaming.  I am able to plug in a coax cable, RCA cables or other options.  No wi-fi.

Sony Location Free LF-B20: 3 nights (6 or so hours) setting it up.  No coax connection, RCA connection needed from some sort of AV source.  Has Wi-Fi, but only supports WEP, not WPA.  This is a huge issue for me since I have a WPA encripted network and am not willing to go back to the WEP protocol.  In order to get around this, I ended up installing a second wi-fi network that was only used for the Location Free box and is MAC restricted to it.  Also, the software has been flakey and have had issues connecting to it consistently.  The video streaming is smooth and I liked how it came out.

Between the 2, I highly recommend the Slingbox over the Sony unit.  I can’t say that my 3 days of setup has been good on my stress level.  I am disappointed by the complication of the unit, and hope Sony takes a hint from Sling and makes it an easy process.   Oh yeah, and for goodness sakes, put a Coax connection on the thing for us with regular cable!!!

As you can see from the photo below, I am talking about the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Lexus LX470.  Take a close look at the styling of each.  You can see that they are basically the same vehicle!  The difference is in the sale price.  The Lexus LX470 is over $68K on Kelly Blue Book, whereas the Toyota is close to $57K.  I ask you, is $10K worth it to you for a name???