This really goes in the “Swatting mosquitos with a shotgun” thread, but that vanished a while back, so…
After a dismal couple of weeks, the weather has turned pleasant, so I’m taking advantage of high technology to work outside in my gazebo (safe from the skeeters). My work laptop doesn’t have a wireless card in it, so in order to put the “tele” into telecommuting, I’ve got my Airport-equipped Powerbook out here as well. I’ve got iTunes tuned to a local radio station.
This amuses me. In years past, I’d be using a $20.00 radio. Instead, I’ve got cable internet that feeds into a transceiver that re-broadcasts the digital signal to my laptop where it’s converted back to analog for my listening pleasure. This solution uses approximately 1,000,000 times the number of transistors that my first radio possessed. (I seem to recall that it proudly claimed, sometime in the late 60’s, to possess a whopping seven transistors.)
Despite the complexity, the reception is much better than I get using the radio and I don’t get interference from the annoyingly powerful Christian radio station located 300 miles away on an island somewhere in Maine. The reception would be even better if the gazebo wasn’t screened which I hypothesize acts as a sort of Faraday cage and louses up wireless reception.
I think this is pretty cool, even if mundane and pointless.