There’s nothing better for curing a bit of homesickness than watching your home TV station broadcasting the news or a sporting event. Wherever you are it can transport you back to your home if only for a few hours. Which is why the internet is so wonderful for curing the blues when you just miss the your home town.
Of course we have a solution for this, and the internet has enabled it although there are still a few obstacles in the way. This is a quick post for all those Irish people who are a long way from home and just want to hear a familiar accent and home related stories. One of the best ways to stay in contact with the Irish news and stories is by simply watching the news on RTE or TV3. These are arguably the biggest broadcasters in the Republic of Ireland and both of the have fantastic websites which stream most of their programmes live and ‘on demand’.
So in theory you can sit in an internet cafe in Cairo and watch the Irish news on your laptop. Unfortunately in reality this isn’t so simple and what will actually happen is that you’ll get blocked when you try and access either RTE or TV3. Although for RTE you’ll actually get redirected to an international version of their site which contains very little of their programmes. What happens is that when you connect to any of these sites, they check your IP address and perform a lookup to see where that IP is registered from, if you’re not on an Irish IP address then you’ll be blocked due to copyright restrictions.
However all you need to do is hide your real IP address and present an Irish one instead. Here’s how it’s done by using an Irish proxy server like this.
Although you’re not actually changing your IP address if you relay your connection through an intermediate server you can hide your real location. If that server is in Ireland that is an Irish proxy , the web sites will see an Irish IP address, if it’s in France then they’ll see a French IP address and so on. The beauty of this program is that it has servers in all sorts of countries, you can even use it from back in Ireland – to watch the BBC iPlayer like this post.