Items Tagged With reviews

The SmartHome Show 2006 took place in the NEC in Birmigham over the 2nd to the 5th of March. AV was once again a large component of the exhibition and the ubiquitous flat screen LCD's and Plasmas seemed to be on every stand. However there was also plenty of lighting control, home networking, whole house audio and cctv/security too...

It's not often there's a new style X10 device around to review, but as it's Christmas.

The new X10 Mini Controller (MC10) is an all white affair. The colour and shape are a tad more 20th Century than the previous mini-controller, but maybe not quite 21st Century yet....

Submission by Rob Mouser - Disclaimer - Before I start I must point out that my programming knowledge is pretty darn limited, well more like non-existent! Many of us C-bus owners will know that the ability to add true logic based programming has always been somewhat lacking with C-bus unless using third party software/hardware solutions. I've had the Comfort to C-bus UCM since I installed and that works well but as with all things Comfort you need a good deal of patience to programme using Comfigurator....

Submission by Keith Finnett -  Let's get straight to the point - does Microsoft Windows work as an entertainment centre? If you read the computing press you'll know the answer is yes, no, and maybe. If you want one, you'll have to be an early adopter with deep pockets - most pre-built systems retail at around the £1,000 mark. There are some great looking systems out there (Elonex's range look very tempting), but few of them would look good in my living room - and certainly not at that price...

One of the most popular projects that readers of Automated Home embark upon, is moving all of their media files (music, video, photos etc) onto a central server. Many of us have ripped our entire CD collections to MP3s on our hard drives over the last few years and, if you're like me, also taken the time to ensure they are tagged correctly and complete with album art.

Of course there have been a myriad of portable MP3 players that have enabled us to carry a selection of our tunes around with us. However, a similar product to allow us to access to an entire collection in the home environment has been a much rarer beast. Even though its five years since we reviewed our first domestic, networked mp3 player (the Dell Digital Audio Receiver) new devices of note have been relatively thin on the ground. The DDAR was a good first generation player and there have been a few other devices of note like the SliMP3 range, but nothing to really come close to the usability or design pinnacle of the ubiquitous Apple portable products. Until this year...