Chiriquí Chatter

If you move to Panama you have to know what you are going to do for entertainment. Many come here and the uniqueness wears off quickly and they decide that Panama was a mistake. It all depends on what your interests are and what makes you happy.

Luckily for me most of my interests are relate to technology, the Internet, taking photos, and blogging allows me to record what I have been doing. If I post something, then I must be alive and the older we get we sometimes need some barometer to tell us if we are living or not.

My blog’s posts most likely reflect if I am having a good time or not, if I am bored or not, if I am angry or not, or just not. It seems that I get new projects when I am getting bored or when I want to get my mind off of something that is bothering me.

For whatever reason, the last couple of weeks have centered around a new project that my son got me started on. My son developed Crohn’s disease at an early age and his life has had many challenges. For the last few years he has not been able to work consistently because of the disease and it finally got to the point that he had to give up work all together and become the stay at home dad.

He and I communicate via the Internet. Because of his problem, his entertainment comes mostly from movies on TV. He was telling me the other day that he was using Net Flix via the Internet. He has an Xbox 360 hooked up to his TV and streams movies from Net Flix. He said it was cheaper and easier than going to Blockbuster

So that is where my project started. Movies in Panama can be be by DVD rentals, movie theaters or TV. Except for DVD all movies are going to have Spanish subtitles, which I am so used to that I rarely notice anymore. I prefer watching movies in my own house rather than going to the theater. So that leaves me with DVDs or Cable.

The problem with renting a DVD is that many users don’t know how to handle DVDs and they get scratched. The problem with cable is that you are held hostage to what they are playing that month and then they play them over and over again.

Being able to stream a movie over the Internet might be another option. I started off by considering his setup, an Xbox or PS3 hooked to the TV. In Panama, the PS3 that would cost me $349 in the US would cost me $449 in Panama. Likewise there is a big markup of Xbox as with all technology products.

With PCs, I have been able to buy the PC or parts in the US and that has been my practice. However, I can’t have an Xbox or PS3 brought in. One of the reasons for getting one of these boxes would be to use it as a DVD player on some occasions and as you may know, the region code for Panama is different than the US, so that DVDs bought in Panama will not play on a US player. So if I went with one of these boxes, I would just have to bite the bullet and get it in Panama.

Assuming I had one of those players could I sign-up for Net Flix. The answer to that is tied th the fact that Net Flix only streams movies to US residents. So if I wanted to use Net Flix, I would need a US ip address for my PC. Now you may understand how I got started with the VPN project that I wrote up a while back. VPN would allow me to appear as if I were in the US. So far so good.

After starting the VPN analysis, I returned to the game-box setup. None of the game boxes run a sophisticated enough OS to allow it to configure an internal VPN connection. Therefore, I need something between the game-box and the Internet. Currently I use a router which allows me to connect wireless as well as multiple PC. Now if that router were a VPN router, then it would work. Unfortunately the VPN routers are a quite a bit more expensive and then whether they would work with all VPN services, is another unknown.

I do have another option. I have a Mac Mini which I assumed that I might one day connect to a flat-screen TV. Most of the VPN services, that I have seen, have configurations for the MAC. So far so good. To connect the Mac to the TV will require me to buy a DVI to HDMI cable. Yesterday, I went to two of the Chinese electronic stores in David as well as Acer Computer and all had a cable for $20.

While that is much more cost effective than a game-box solution, I wondered if I could save much by getting a cable from the US. Before I looked at the US option, I went to the YOYTEC Panama website and found the cable for $4.90. Granted, it may not be as high quality as the ones offered locally, but since this is still an experiment, I might as well save $15 and go with the cheaper cable.

I can order it from YOYTEC and the cost to ship it to David should be no more than $2. It looks like the plan is coming together.

The only remaining question will be if the streaming of the movie from Net Flix will be fast enough. I have watched a couple movies over HULU with mixed success to this point. I watched one and it was perfect. The next was far from perfect. It would have to buffer up an amount and then it would play for a few minutes before needing to buffer again. If Net Flix was not any better than that, then it would not work.

I haven’t decided where the problem is. I think the problem can be my Cable Onda connection to the Internet or it can be how loaded my VPN server is in the US. My current VPN is plenty good enough for email, general websites, and Pandora, but it may not cut it for movies. If I could stream the entire movie before I watched any of it, that would work, but I don’t know how it works yet.

So that is the current state of this project. I have proven that I can get VPN working and receive US only streamed data such as Pandora. When I get the DVI to HDMI cable I will be able to try the Mac Mini hooked up to the TV. At minimum I may be able to surf the Internet from my bed. How cool would that be.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, if you are coming to Panama, you have to know how you are going to occupy your time. This is one of the ways I occupy mine

Tags: Technology