Tag: tv

Good Luck EnglandThe Rugby World Cup starts today! And for the first time in years I can confidently say that I can watch whichever matches I want, wife permitting of course.

In previous years I have had to miss a lot of the matches due to work commitments. Now I have the ability to control when I work I can rearrange my day if I want. This allows me to keep working, and hence earning some money, but gives me the freedom to choose when to do it. I haven’t really had any real tangible use for this new found freedom until now…

Obviously I want to watch all of the England matches and the timing of all the groups games are quite nice this time round anyway, all being on weekend mornings and nothing ridiculously early. But to get really into the tournament there are lots of other matches that deserve to be watched, some of which are on during the week when I would normally be working.

Apple TV (2nd Generation)I recently bought myself a 2nd generation Apple TV for the front room. Now I have had it up and running for over a week I thought I should post a quick review of the device.

I have had a computer connected to my main TV for about 5 years now but it was slowly getting used less and less as the time it takes to power up was not very practical. I decided to look at what main uses I required and then set about finding a replacement with a quicker bootup process. As you can probably guess by now I ended up going with the Apple TV. I am not exactly an Apple fanboy but I do have an iPhone and love the simplicity of the interface so that helped make that choice.

So let’s get into what my requirements were and how the Apple TV stacks up…

Old broken TVI have a Sky+ HD box at home and there are a lot of series that my wife and I have recorded, ready to watch, at any one time. We tend to watch a block of 24 or Lost, for example, in one go.

Unfortunately the box seems to have died. I can’t even get it to power on even after many a phone call to Sky customer services.

This causes two problems for us, trying to remember what was waiting to be watched or recorded and the fact that until an engineer comes out to replace the box we cannot watch any TV at all…

At first this was a bit scary. Life without TV, even for a few days, is pretty much unheard of unless you are off on holiday or something.

Now don’t get me wrong it is not like we both spend all evening in front of the box but we usually put our feet up for at least an hour and watch something before we go to bed.

So how have we survived…