I don't want to be wired for sound

A bloke from Sky knocked on my door the other day asking me if I'd like to part with eleventy billion pounds a month for the privilege of watching more rubbish on television.

Needless to say I turned him down. There are a couple of reasons for this: Firstly I had Sky a few years ago and it was rubbish. Out of the 66 million channels available only 3 or 4 are ever worth watching and you usually have to pay extra for those anyway. I already have 33 million useless channels courtesy of freeview and, as far as I can tell, Sky is just like Freeview. Without the free bit.

The other reason I don’t want Sky is because I don’t particularly want to add any more to the spaghetti junction behind my TV. The last time I ventured into that jungle was 2 years ago at Christmas when I hooked up the Wii. I went missing for a month.

So far I have wires for the TV itself, wires for the aerial, wires for the DVD player, wires for a separate NTSC Region 1 DVD player, wires that connect the DVD players to the TV, wires for the Wii and wires for the Wii remote chargers. There are about a thousand of the damn things that connect the surround sound system to various holes in the TV and 5 different speakers around the room. Then there are the dozens of leads lying around the plug socket for my iPhone charger and my girlfriend’s phone charger and the lead to the digital camera so that we can view our holiday snaps on the television.

It is the same problem with computers as well. There is the wire for the unit, the wire that connects the unit to the monitor, one for the printer, one for the scanner, one for the mouse, one for the keyboard… you get the picture.

Of course there is wireless technology but even a wireless mouse needs a wire connecting the remote to the PC. It’s not really wireless is it? And have you tried using a wireless mouse and keyboard? They are great until the batteries die. They don’t give you any warning either. The cursor will suddenly freeze on the page somewhere, meaning that you can’t do anything apart from leg it down the shops and buy some spare batteries.

I use a laptop at home now. Not just because they take up less space and are generally more convenient but because there are fewer wires involved. With things like iPhones, iPADs, Kindles and all manner of wireless gadgets being released now my hope is that wires will become a thing of the past sooner rather than later. The technology is already there to do away with wires altogether but for some reason it’s not catching on fast enough.

Of course now we have these eco mentalists telling everybody that all this wireless technology is giving us brain cancer and killing all the bees. I think this is going to be an even bigger problem than solving the dilemma of batteries running out in wireless keyboards. Speaking of which, I better finish writing now before my keyboard runs out of ba