Geeking Out at Home

Diann and I spent last night doing something we didn’t think we’d be doing yet: looking at houses online.

To this date, I’ve avoided the insane Seattle real-estate market, but we figure it’s time to bite the bullet and jump in.  It just doesn’t show any indication of slowing down in the next 3 years or so more than it has in the last two months.

This is where the geeking out comes into play.  You see, our realtor had sent us a list of listings (list of listings? that doesn’t sound right) that we were supposed to look over and pick out a few that we were interested in.  Having only laptops in the house doesn’t exactly lend itself towards sharing screens to look at things.

(Warning: lots of product identifiers coming up)

Luckily, my Samsung TV (HL-S5687) has a VGA input.  I connected up the laptop to the TV, and we suddenly had a 1920×1080 (1080p for you theater buffs) screen about 10 feet away from us.  This was brilliant, except for the lack of ability to control the computer.  Several years back, though, I had bought a Bluetooth mouse, and I paired it up successfully to my Lenovo T60p.

There we are, sitting on our couch, looking at home listings on our TV.  Diann had our older laptop looking at addresses and tracking which MLS numbers we liked. So, you’d think we’d be content there.  Then Diann started playing music, and the tinny speakers on the laptop drove me nuts.

I cranked up the Xbox 360, and enabled Windows Media Connect on the laptop.  Shuffled all the music in the 360’s media player, and then we had our background music.

To sum up: Laptop connected wirelessly to the ‘net and VGA to a TV, controlled by a wireless Bluetooth mouse.  Another laptop connected wirelessly to the ‘net, streaming music to the Xbox 360.

I wish I had taken pictures.