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This is a follow up post to my earlier post about watching internet video (Hulu and YouTube) on a TV. Since I still haven’t found a set top box that I can recommend, I thought it would be helpful to describe how to hook your PC or laptop up to your television.

• If you have an older PC or laptop, and an older TV, most likely what you need is an S-video cable.
• If you have a newer PC or laptop and an older TV, DVI to S-video is more likely what you need.
  
• Lastly, if you have a new PC or laptop, and a new TV (like a flat screen LCD TV) - you probably need a DVI to HDMI cable.

Hooking up your PC to your TV can be a pain. Here is another article I found about internet set top boxes. One that looks promising that I didn’t mention before is the “vunow“. The vunow claims to offer NBC content, but I couldn’t figure out where to actually buy it - so it may not be released yet.

It seems like someone just needs to get this hardware done so we can make cable and broadcast TV obsolete.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, my co-worker Matt told me about some Gmail tricks I hadn’t heard of. Well, one is a trick, and one is just “nice to know”.

Gmail will ignore (some, all?) punctuation in email addresses. So bob.smith@gmail.com is the same as bobsmith@gmail.com. (That’s the nice to know part).

Furthermore, text after a plus sign is ingored. So, when you sign up for a new service, you can use a unique email address. You could sign up for amazon.com using bobsmith+amazon.com. All your mail will be routed to the same place, but you can block certain services and track who gives your email to spammers.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I got this question from a friend the other day:

do you know if you can transmit the internet signal in a wireless network to your tv?  now we attach our laptop directly to the tv with a VGA adapter.  I want to avoid doing this and maybe buy and attach  some type of transciever to the television to access  the internet while sitting on the couch in our living room.

I am looking for a good answer to this also  I used to use my Xbox to stream recorded TV from a PC upstairs, but the video was always choppy over the wireless connection, and now it just plain doesn’t work because of some setup issue.

I found a few questionable products. I really doubt the video quality - in home wifi doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit HD video in realtime, it has to be cached on the set top box.

The only established products that I know of are AppleTV and Roku Netflix. But both of those lock you in to either Netflix or iTunes. ZeeVee looks promising (but wired and expensive).

Anyone out there know of other alternatives?

Just wrote this in an email to a friend, so I thought I would repost it here… Apple intentionally doesn’t let you copy music from your iPod back to a computer - the best way is to go from straight from one computer to another (via a network, or perhaps you could burn some data-format DVDs, or perhaps you could get an external hard drive - which is good for backups too). That having been said, I did a google search for “transfer music from ipod to computer” and found some $19.99 “iPod Transfer” software (http://www.easyipodtransfer.com/showproduct.aspx). There is a free trial download that may be worth a shot.