While I was on sabbatical in Gießen I was thrilled to have super (über?) fast internet and a nice television.

Unfortunately for me, the good folks at Apple / Netflix / HBO / etc, don’t want people in other countries to be able to easily access American™ feeds (and vice-versa of course, and I dig the whole ‘licensing’ thing, etc. Still, I paid for it and it would be nice to be able to access things I pay for when I am in places other than my usual places.)

So, what to do? Basically, set up a server back in America™, VPN into that thing, then try my best to convince the AppleTV in my apartment to access that feed. Turns out, this was more complicated than you’d think, since the AppleTV does bits of voodoo so that, even though it was connected to a VPN back in Saratoga, it still ‘knew’ it was in Germany. So basically my approaches involved various iOS devices, screen sharing, and voodoo strategies.

My first iteration looked like this:

(Note that I had improperly drawn the flag of Germany but unfortunately made it the flag of Belgium. I’m pretty sure they get that all the time… I erased it here.)

I wanted to watch Arsenal and, sure enough, whatever sport network my apartment building had was not really that ‘diverse’ in the sporting sense, so that’s how I did it. It was ridiculous.

So, to make it even more ridiculous, I went with version 2 here-

This required internet sharing on the laptop, hard wiring the AppleTV and using screen sharing only.

I’m sure neither of these work anymore, but found these Paper drawings I made to remind myself, and thought I should re-visit my insanity.