Items Tagged With reviews

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...