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I received a flyer in the mail yesterday from DirecTV. It was touting their newest MPEG-4 HD receivers or the 100 new HD channels they will be launching in the next couple of weeks. No, it was promoting features that will be available in a TiVo software update in early 2008! This is pretty surprising, first of all that they are releasing new features, and secondly that they once again care about TiVo customers, since they dropped TiVo as their DVR supplier many months ago. My best guess is that they know there are a lot of loyal TiVo users who are more loyal toRead More →

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In: Reviews
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I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and I’ve had a couple of days to play around with it. In summary, it is one awesome piece of hardware; this is the best laptop I’ve used. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. Windows Vista looks beautiful, but it’s pretty slow and unreliable as compared to XP. Also, battery life is shorter than I expected (due to the power hungry nVidia graphics card and maybe due to Vista power management.) Here are the pros and cons: Pros: Keyboard: This keyboard is incredible; it has a great feel to it and the large, white letters on the black keys makeRead More →

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In: Tech

If you’re like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  I decided to give it a try to see if I could at least get these domain names to pay for their own registration fees. Looking at the example GoDoddy shows, it appeared that a domain would easily be able to pay for itself. With any luck, my domains shouldRead More →

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Last night over at TiVoCommunity.com forum, TiVoPony announced that TiVoToGo will become available for the TiVo HD / TiVo Series 3 starting November 2007. (This was also announced at CEDIA, as was a new $200 Series 3 rebate.) This is the one feature I’ve been lusting after, in addition to all of the other Series 2 Stand Alone features that I currently have. Since I have a HR10-250 HD TiVo satellite receiver, many features such as these as well as networking, photo sharing, Home Media Engine, etc. are not available. So now I have to decide, do I stick with the DirecTV TiVo I haveRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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I just ran across an article on DigtalHome.ca [via Engadget HD] singing the praises of Plasma over LCD. Although I agree with most of the points, there are a couple with which I completely disagree. In fact, both of the posts seem to be overly-biased toward plasma, to the point that it is almost misinformation. Here are the points with which I disagree, which are probably major enough to push most people to pick LCD over Plasma. Screen Glare and Dealing with Ambient Light Taken from the article: LCD superior in brighter rooms – simply speaking plasma is glass with white phosphors behind it. TheRead More →

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In: Web
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As you know, my wife and I just welcomed a little girl into our family. Our families ares hounding us for photos on a daily basis so I set out on a quest to find the best way to share with them our digital photos. Here is what I found. RAW Image Support I have a Nikon D40 D-SLR and shoot all of my pictures in RAW (*.NEF) format. I do this because the RAW / NEF format offers much, much more flexibility; you can almost re-shoot the picture if you edit it with the Nikon NX software. Anyway, I was hoping to find aRead More →

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In: Reviews
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Today Sonos announced the release of version 2.3 of their software, which adds support for Sirius Internet Radio. I was fortunate enough to participate in an early evaluation and NDA ends today; here are my thoughts on the latest software update. This is a win-win situation for both companies; the Sonos system becomes more attractive to Sirius customers and vice versa. + Review of the new Sirius Feature First of all, I’d like to state that I’m not nor have I even been a subscriber to either XM or Sirius satellite radio. This is really my first long-term experience. I was never interested before becauseRead More →

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In: Web
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Despite being around for years, RSS and Atom web feeds have managed to stay below the mainstream radar; a quick poll of my tech-savvy friends proved this to be the case. This article explains what web feeds are, why you care, and how best to take advantage of them. What are web feeds? According to Wikipedia: A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation. What’s the Benefit? The benefit to the userRead More →

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In: Home Theater

I’m passing along my good fortune. The good folks at Rocketfish sent me review sample and I’m giving it away to one lucky commenter. Don’t know what a Rocketfish Wireless Surround System is? Well, it’s a 2-part system that eliminates the need to run wires from your A/V receiver to your rear surround speakers. The system consists of the following: the Rocketfish transmitter – connects to the rear channel speaker outputs of your audio/video receiver the Rocketfish receiver / amplifier – powers your existing rear surround sound speakers For any contest to be interesting, there have to be some rules. Here’s the deal: You mustRead More →