i spent a few hours today cleaning up the garage which looks like it is just overflowing with all sorts of boxes and baby stuff. all of this clutter is starting to bother me so, i finally started to clean up the mess. our recycling and garbage bins are full, it’s a good thing that garbage day is coming up soon.

i would say that we’ve got another 3 or 4 week’s worth of recycling stuff that needs to go. i’ve been pretty bad about efficiently breaking down cardboard boxes. instead, i’ve been smashing them to flatten them. not the most effective way to do it, but far easier.

while cleaning today, i found a little treasure that i haven’t seen in a long time. i’m not sure why it never got much use, but i found the slingbox that i had purchased years ago. not sure if it still worked, i decided to plug it in and see.

the slingbox worked great out of the box. there is now a mac client of SlingPlayer which installed and setup my slingbox, now known as the slingbox classic. it upgraded the firmware of the slingbox and after some router port forwarding, i was all set to start slinging.

the slingbox actually works pretty well and i was impressed by just how easy it is to use. i already had a solution to stream all of my content on my media server to the iphone, but now i can stream live tv as well. the slingbox has a client for the iphone and though it says that it doesn’t support the slingbox classic, it appears to still be working just fine for people. the iphone app is expensive at a whopping $30, though, and you have to be on wifi to use it. are these crippling restrictions worth the $30 that allows you to stream live tv onto your iphone?

i don’t know if it really is worth it for me, that’s a lot of money to pay just to get my live tv on my phone. i guess if i was stuck somewhere where there wasn’t a tv, but there was wifi, it might be useful…but those times are far and few.

besides, if i had wifi, i could always just bust out my laptop and use the free mac slingplayer, right?