The O'Reilly series of "Hacks" books, in their own words 'reclaims the term 'hacking" for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own.', sounds like a pretty good description of a UK Home Automater to me, so I was a little excited to see O'Reilly had published 2 books in the series for home automators..

Submission by Tim Fletcher - The Maplin telephone controlled mains socket adapter is a device using a telephone landline to switch a 13A socket. What's in the Box  - Switcher Unit, 3M telephone extension cable, Instructions...

 

Yesterday I received my Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Remote. This device allows you to control your MCE PC in a more convenient way, and one more akin to normal domestic brown goods. At around £30 it's relatively inexpensive, which is just as well as it's not worth building a Media Center PC without one...

FirM Jr + KAT5 - A marriage made in Croydon :) (Submission by Tony Butler).

Having made the decision many moons ago to move all my AV kit to node 0 (coincidentally, around the time my twin boys were born!), I have long sought the twin holy grails of quality distributed A/V and reliable distributed IR control...

Jon Whiten recounts his recent project building a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC...

"I recently built a MCE2005 machine and have been using it for a few weeks now. The system is basically a P4-3.2Ghz, 1Gig Ram, 80Gig HDD, ATI 9200 Graphics with DVI and Svid Out, 2 x BlackGold DVB-T TV Cards, Dual Layer DVD Writer, Soundblaster Audigy and MCE Remote control...

Rather than wait another few weeks to publish my Home CCTV Server review I've decided to make t a two part affiar. Part one is now on-line...

"I have had CCTV at home for 8 years now in one form or another. Over that time camera performance has increased, whilst prices have fallen. Par for the course where most technology is concerned I suppose. A year or so ago I bought a Samsung CCTV switcher from eBay to view our cameras by modulating its output round all the TVs in the house. Using its simple timer it switched between each camera at a set interval, while this worked it was frustrating as the camera you wanted to view was rarely the one that was on the screen at that particular moment in time. The eBay acquired switcher died a month or so ago and so the search for the "upgrade" was on"...

Submitted by Simon McCaughey - The idea of the Showcenter is to make media files stored on your PC available for use on your TV in the living room. I don't have (and can't get) broadband, so my selection of media is limited to a few ripped DVDs, loads of MP3's, and about 1000 photos. My main objective was to remove the DVD player and VCR from the living room, so I only have a TV, HiFi, TiVo and Showcenter...