Tech Eye: Is there no escape?
Unlike the A-Team we're not innocent, nor have we turned to a life of fighting crime to mitigate the wrongs we have committed.
However, we do have a number of excuses for our sociopathic mindset and tendency for revealing behavior in public places. Firstly, father's use of a muddy pit and an electric cattle prod as a discipline device has left emotional scars that no amount of sympathetic ears will heal. Mother's insistence that we were too poor to waste money on buying clothes and hence spending our formative years in Sister TechEye's well-worn dresses may also have had an affect (though we still insist we had the hips to get away with it). And Grandfather TechEye's insistence that we know all the details of what he got up to during various wars from Bombay to Bangalore is a memory that no amount of whiskey can erase (nor his assertion that the only true kind of love is prison love).
But foremost in the mitigating circumstances file currently occupying a large portion of the International Criminal Court's shelf space is our unadulterated addiction to television. Yes, like an old person bitter about the onset of death, we are willing to blame everything on the youth of today and that infernal picture box. Watching its accursed pictures, whether it be Tom Selleck's short-shorts in Magnum PI, Stringfellow Hawke's squinty face in Airwolf or Jaime Sommer's Bionic assets, there is no doubt in TechEye's mind that TV is to blame for all the world's evils, from the fall of the Roman Empire to cats.
And now thanks to the lovely people at Miglia, we can watch the bloody stuff on our computer. This is the TVMini, and although it looks like a simple plastic stick, it does a whole pile more. Plugging straight into your Mac's USB port, it lets you watch, pause, rewind and even edit free-to-air digital terrestrial TV. Plus you can record your favorite Fantasy Island episodes direct to your hard-drive. For EUR 150 (zł.586) you get the gizmo, a remote control, a portable antenna and other goodies. Of course, you need DTT broadcasting in your area, but that's only a matter of time for most of us. Isn't it?
