decaturpc.com blog

I’m a huge Slingbox fan, I’ve never been shy about that… The Slingbox product is simple, efficient, and well supported. I use mine every day. That said, there is a powerful alternative to Slingbox if you have Windows Media Center and a TV tuner. For those that don’t know, many multimedia focused desktops come with TV tuners pre-installed, allowing you to plug your TV cable into the desktop and watch live television. Most cards are supported by Media Center allowing for scheduled recording of TV shows. Some shots of Vista Home Premium Media Center are shown below.

An add-on called Webguide allows remote access and control of media center from a web browser. Download and install the add-on on the machine with Media Center, configure, open up ports 50538 and 50539 on your router, point your browser to your home IP address, and watch/record TV from anywhere.

Like many, my wife and I are longtime users of Outlook (recently Outlook 2003). Once my beautiful wife learns to make a software produce for her, she would only stray from it if it ceased to function at all. I’m a bit harder to please… Outlook does most of what I need it to do, but for every one thing I need it to do, it does 50 things that I don’t need it to do. The things I don’t need it to do must be expensive, because Outlook (depending on how you license it) runs $150-$250. Alternatively, in linux, I have always used Evolution. Evolution is great software, and free. It’s available for windows, but not maintained. So what option does that leave a guy like me who needs everything?

Why it leaves me Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is part of the Mozilla suite, is open source, and free. The mail client alone is simple, convenient, and attractive. There’s really so many nice things I can say about the base program, it makes more sense for you to just have a look yourself here.

Worth noting are the calendar extension ‘Lightning’, and gnupg extension ‘Enigmail’. Also worth noting, is that I’m able to place my Thunderbird profile on a fat32 partition shared between the 2 operating systems and use it from both linux and windows.