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In: Home Theater
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I recently wrote a short review of the Harmony 1000 touch panel remote. Yesterday afternoon, that post received a suspicious comment entitled “Screw Harmony, the iconRemote Rocks!” from someone using the name illuminati and the e-mail address [email protected]. The problem is that the comment was posted by an employee of X10 Wireless Technology Inc and they did not divulge their affiliation. I’m not making baseless claims — I have proof and can share it if necessary. In my opinion, this is deceptive marketing and is in violation of the marketing code of ethics. The comment told the story of how the person purchased a LogitechRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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I found an interesting article related to my 1080P Does Matter post (as well as my Home Theater Calculator.)  It gives some additional perspective on the resolving power of the human eye.  One key difference I noticed is that it states the resolving capability of our eyes to be 0.01 degrees, where as I’ve used a figure of 0.0167 degrees (0.6 arc-minute vs 1.0 arc minute.) This is not a huge difference; both are estimates based on the average eye.  I’m just glad that the values are so close. The figure I found most interesting was the total resolution capability when taking everything (eye, eyeRead More →

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In: Wordpress
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I think Ultimate Tag Warrior is one of the most useful WordPress plugins available for Serach Engine Optimization. For those who are familiar, it allows authors to add descriptive tags (keywords), helping search engines categorize the content and ultimately increasing site traffic. This feature is so useful that there are a bunch of people who believe it should be incorporated into the core of WordPress. Unfortunately, to be so popular, I find it surprising that the two latest versions are causing serious problems with the WordPress search feature. Versions 3.1415926 and 3.14159265 have incorrect table joins in the search function. So, if a post (orRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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I haven’t found a better solution than Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition for playing movies / videos in my home theater. I’m getting ready to upgrade my Home Theater PC from MCE 2005 to Windows Vista. While this is still my plan, it looks like there may finally be a viable non-Microsoft alternative: Linux MCE. I’m running Ubuntu on my desktop PC / file server, I’ll give this a try and see how close it is to Windows on features, ease-of-use, and reliability. Because of the Digg effect, it appears the linuxmce.com site is temporarily down; if so, the home page can be accessed throughRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 10 Comments

Let’s face it, the thermostat that is installed by default in most dwellings is pretty basic. If you have a digital display that’s the “upgraded” version; and all it does is replicate the functionality of the old rudimentary mercury switch / rotary knob designs. An advanced thermostat with scheduling features can save quite a bit on your energy bill, but can also be an interesting gadget to occupy your time. Since my energy company is offering a rebate for anyone who upgrades to a scheduling thermostat, I decided to pull the trigger. The features I identified as necessary for a new thermostat are: Scheduling ofRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 5 Comments

Easier than Building Yourself: Buy a Replacement battery from ProntoWizard.com You can order replacement higher capacity (900 mAh) battery packs from ProntoWizard.com. These battery packs have almost twice the life of the standard battery packs. They are fully assembled and ready to use. My NiMH Battery Pack Replacement Procedure I attempted to replace the NiMH AAA batteries within my ProntoPro battery pack. The procedure is the same for both the standard Proto with AA batteries and the ProntoPro with AAA batteries. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the battery pack to work with the ProntoPro, perhaps due to it producing lower voltage than the PhilipsRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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I use Windows Media Center 2005 to play back video over my network. Mostly I play the original VOB (mpeg) files from DVDs. But occasionally I have an Xvid file AVI file. It will play if FFDshow is installed, but there is no way to fast forward or rewind and there is no support for “post processing” – which can greatly improve image quality. I found out about a plug-in for Windows Vista Media Center that apparently solves these problems and add even more features, such as support for MKV files (the replacement for AVI), subtitles, and bookmarks. I’d be even happier if it supportedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 6 Comments

I’m a long-time Philips Pronto user and I’ve been somewhat frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the Pronto development team. I noticed that Logitech just released the Harmony 1000 remote. Since they are are much easier to program than the Philips Pronto remotes, I decided I may want to purchase one, and I started researching. Unfortunately, the Harmony 1000 remote has two substantial shortcomings that are causing me not to buy it: 1) You can’t configure “soft” buttons to be on a specific screen. So you may have to scroll between screens much more frequently because the two buttons you use the most are not displayedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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Last week, I received an e-mail from a friend asking about a home theater quote. I looked over the component list and was impressed with the quality components and the reasonable prices — until I saw the following line item: HDMI Cable – 5 meters – $129 I pointed to him to an equivalent $8 HDMI cable from MonoPrice.com – and that was for the “premium” version. Since HDMI is a digital specification and the specifications for the electronics that produce the signal are quite high, the cable resistance and shielding have very little impact. However, I’ve never been able to quantify this. I justRead More →