Looks like BT are dumping their Videophone 1000 model.  Currently showing with over 70% Off in their on-line store - Was £149.99 Now £39.98 .  Should be worth a punt even if you don't use the video capabilities...

Keene Electronics have added a new  affordable (£46) 4 port HDMI switcher with IR Remote Control - "from ATEN, the VS481 is a high quality yet amazingly low cost 4 port HDMI Switchbox that allows you to quickly and easily share your HDMI display device with 4 HDMI input sources. Ideal for DVD players, Satellite receivers, DV camcorders etc. Input selection is via a remote control unit or front panel pushbuttons...

Why automate your lights? Well, to be honest, most of my house is automated, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. There are lots of benefits in automating parts of your house, lighting in particular just makes life easier, lights coming on when you walk into a room is better than switching them on yourself! ....and because they turn themselves on, they turn themselves off too, so you can't forget...

Do you NEED to be able to connect to the net always?  Do you feel funny when you aren’t near a wi-fi hotspot?  Are you outside the range of traditional ADSL and cable but have 3G cellular cover? Does your home or office need a backup broadband service for those frustrating outages?  If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions then the new Vodafone USB Stick 3G Modem may be for you.  Read on for our video, photos and full review of this mini marvel…

As we've said many times before, our favourite Media Player by far is XBMC (XBox Media Center). The problem is now thought that the software has outgrown the hardware.  Although the xbox can do an analog HD 720 componant output, people really want 1080 and "proper" DVI/HDMI HiDef output. So, what's going to replace XBMC at Automated Home Towers?  Well, it may just be XBMC, OS X...

The Bargain Police have been in touch and given us a tip-off about this awesome PC Server deal. The £139.99 + VAT HP ProLiant ML110 G4 is a Tower with Dual-Core Xeon 3040 @ 1.86 GHz and comes complete with 512 MB RAM (expandable to 8GB ), a 160 GB hard drive, CD-RW / DVD-ROM combo and Gigabit Ethernet...

One of our readers spotted this Belgian Home Automation system and dropped us an email.  The system seems to be based on CAN Bus and prices look very reasonable... 

Home automators love personal video recorders. A lot of us employ several of them around the home and use IP to stream recordings for different users to different rooms.  Already office apps (like Google Docs) are moving on-line so I suppose it shouldn't come as any great surprise that now the PVR is moving up to the cloud as well.  TVCatchUp is a free service recording from the UKs FreeView channels and storing them online so you can stream them to any PC with web access...

This morning I was primed to settle down to a normal day's work when Chaos on the UK Home Automation IRC Channel mentioned something about "B&Qs HomeEasy automation stuff", and that pretty much put paid to the rest of the morning. We turfed up the website but there was precious little information on there besides the usual marketing guff. So, time for an in-depth review for Automated Home.  Is this the successor to X10 I've been looking for?  Read on to find out and check out the rest of the photos and the video...

The new CM15Pro from Marmitek is like a CM12 on acid!  As well as the usual X10 powerline functionality the CM15 also includes a built in RF transceiver.  The unit has other significant advantages over the CM12 including a logic engine and 8 times more memory meaning it can cope with over 1,400 timers/macros compared to around 100 in the older unit...