NBC's Olympics app

When you can’t plant yourself in front of your LCD or plasma TV, here are some ways to follow the action from the Vancouver Winter Olympics, which opens tonight, on your favorite mobile device.

iPhone (and iPod Touch) apps

The following apps are available from the iTunes app store:

• The free NBC Olympics app (see photo) provides schedules, real-time updates on all events, news, alerts, and video clips. You can also post articles, photos, and messages on Facebook and Twitter.

• The free Official Guide app from the Vancouver Organizing Committee is geared toward those attending the Olympics in person. It features schedules, non-sporting events (including dance, film, theater, comedy, and musical events) in both Vancouver and Whistler (the latter is where bobsled and luge events are held), news, and the ability to follow at least 11 Olympic-related Twitter accounts.

• The free CTV Olympics Guide app, from Canada’s largest TV network, offers headlines, photos galleries, schedules, and maps of event venues. There’s a neat feature where you can view profiles of individual athletes by country for any of roughly 30 nations (the default is, of course, Canada).

• Another free app, the NBC Olympics Cheer, lets you listen to Olympic-themed cheering sounds from cowbells to whistles, winter sports sounds, and submit your own “Team USA” cheers. This app won’t run on an iPod Touch, because it requires a microphone.

I found at least two Olympics-related apps for sale at prices ranging from 99 cents to $2.99, though it’s not immediately obvious why they’re worth paying for, when you can get so much from the above free apps.

Android apps

The Android Market listed a small group of apps, but nothing from NBC, the Olympic Committee, or CTV. Most just offer updated medal counts.

The free Vancouver Olympics app offers news from the official Olympic Committee, NBC, and other sources. What it did when I tried it was display a list of headlines, then browse the Web pages for whichever headline I chose. The 99-cent app, Olympics News, did nearly the same thing. I don’t see much point in paying for apps like these, when you can easily bookmark and browse the Olympics-related sites for free on your own.

Olympic Web sites

Here are some useful Web sites to browse to get Olympics news:

• The NBC Olympic site
• CBS Sports
• The official Olympic Committee site
• EPSN
• Facebook
• Twitter (Also search on hash codes #olympics and #vancouver2010)

To find Olympic athletes to follow on Twitter, surf to Twitter-Athletes.

If you have any favorite Olympic sites or apps, tell us about them below.

–Jeff Fox

Among the many annual rites of winter—hot chocolate on a cold day, shoveling snow from the driveway—my family has added another quaint tradition: throwing snowballs at our DirecTV’s satellite dish.

Well, watching me throw snowballs at the dish, really.

That’s because at least once or twice every winter, we get a wet enough snow that it sticks to our dish, apparently covering enough of its face that it knocks out reception from one of the HD satellites. So instead of getting “American Idol,” one of my 5-year-old son Tyler’s favorite shows, we get a blank screen and a message that the receiver is searching for satellite 771. Occasionally we can get the non-HD versions of the channels we normally watch if they’re being beamed from a different satellite, but not always.

Unfortunately, the dish is on the highest point of our house, a good 30 feet from the ground. That’s far enough away that I don’t want to risk climbing out on a snow-covered roof, and too far to reach with the longest pole we own. The best solution I’ve been able to come up with is snowballs.

That means our neighbors now have the added winter bonus of watching me stand in our driveway, tossing snowball after snowball at the dish, hoping to dislodge the snow that’s collected on its surface–or at least enough so that satellite 771 can get through. Occasionally, though, one of the snowballs will actually stick to the dish, potentially knocking out one of the few channels we are able to receive. I can say that this is met with a good amount of displeasure from my wife and son. But when I do manage to free enough snow with a—can I say, DirecT hit—I’m a momentary hero in the house, and my wife’s threat to switch at least one of our TVs to a cable provider is held at bay, at least until the next snowfall.

Are there other DirecTV users out there with similar stories? We’d like to hear them, so take a few moments to share your experiences in our comments section at the bottom of this blog. It’s likely they’re amusing, and at the very least I won’t feel like I’m going at this alone—a small but comforting consolation the next time I’m armed and dangerous in my driveway, aiming at a small parabolic target 30 feet away on my roof.

—James K. Willcox

Combing through hundreds of blog posts and news articles daily, Dirk Klingner, our technology-trend watcher, sifts through the noise to bring you the tech news most important to consumers. If you have a tip on a story you want to share, leave a comment below.

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