… for about 10 minutes anyway. Last night I tested my new APC J15 home theater power conditioner and UPS. A neat feature of the unit is the front VFD that shows various informational screens, one of which is the total watts being drawn. With everything connected turned on (receiver, DVD player, TiVo, Wii, and …
I’m a long-time Palm user: I’ve owned four different Palm OS devices over the past 12 years from the original Pilot 1000 to my Treo 680. Palm is finally starting to do some advertising, and the latest round of Santa’s Gone Centro videos are pretty funny. I’m looking forward to CES next week as Palm …
It seems like just yesterday (ok, last decade!) when I got my first digital video camera and then purchased a Firewire card for my PC so I could download and edit my home movies. Since then I’ve owned a multitude of laptops and PCs with IEE 1394 built in. It was aimed primarily for high-speed …
I’ve complained about my Vista woes here before since I upgraded from XP back in April. Well, apparently the solution to my Vista problems was just to buy a new PC. Thanks to a 20% off coupon found through my slickdeals.net RSS feed, I purchased a “built-for-new” (i.e., not refurbished) Dell Inspiron 530 desktop from …
The day before Hurricane Charley hit back in 2004, I cut plywood sheets to protect all of our windows using my tiny jigsaw (which is all I had at the time), and it took forever: But now that our new impact-resistant hurricane windows are in (partially paid for by the state of Florida thanks to …
So last night my RMA replacement for my failed WD Expander arrived. I opened the box and found … an internal 500gb SATA drive, just the bare drive. So I called up Western Digital and spoke with a support rep. I explained that I had opened an RMA for my external MyDVR Expander and received …
Last night I found my TiVo HD just showing a black screen and it was unresponsive to the remote. No big deal, I rebooted it and it came back up fine. Then I tried to play an HD recording and it spontaneously rebooted. This time it got stuck in a reboot loop. So I let …
The way my home theater is set up, all of the components (receiver, TiVo, DVD recorder, Wii, etc.) are hidden in a cabinet. When we first moved in, I would leave the cabinet doors open so that the IR signals from the remote control could reach the components. This was unsightly though, so eventually I …
Continue reading ‘Controlling HT components through walls’ »
150 hours of HD-recording goodness … today TiVo unveiled its new TiVo HD XL. From the outside it looks just like the TiVo HD, but this baby sports a 1TB (that’s 1 terrabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes) “green” hard drive, THX certification (like my now-discontinued Series3 box), and comes with the backlit Glo remote … all …
Today I realized that in the past 12 years I’ve owned 4 Palm and 3 Windows Mobile devices: Pilot 1000 (1996) Palm III (1998) Compaq iPAQ 3135 (2001) Compaq iPAQ 3760 (2003) hp iPAQ h1945 (2004) Palm Treo 650 (2005) Palm Treo 680 (2008) That’s a lot of PDAs … boy was I glad once …