Little boxes will make you free. At the beginning of this year, in fact at a new year’s party, everybody was talking about their Rokubox. Eventually I figured out what they were talking about and got one, it cost around forty bucks and has no recurring cost other than the internet connection, so I can watch Netflix streaming and Amazon and plenty of free stuff on my TV, now all I have is basic cable with a handful of channels, and my TV fare is much better and a tiny fraction of what it used to cost. Then I got another box, who thinks of these names: an Obibox. It also hooks to the router and then my cordless phone plugs in and what it basically does is make Google Voice into something physically manifest in the real world. Plus I have my $19.95 Trac phone from the spin rack at the supermarket. So I have two phone numbers, a home phone and a cell phone, and I pay a total of $20 a month instead of the former $130 for my dumb smartphone plus a landline. A little silver box connects my laptop to my TV, so I can see more TV and movies, or just see my prose 37 inches big in high def glory. The Obiwan was really hard to set up and I still don’t have it all perfect - but these various boxes represent using gizmos to escape the shackles of big companies like Verizon and Time Warner that – manifest greediness aside – are so frustrating and demeaning to deal with. It was well worth the hours of struggle with Google Voice and Obi to cast aside those heavy shackles.
