Archive for the 'Home Entertainment' Category
At peace with One.
August 11th, 2008It’s guys night out. Football, beer and some beirut (aka beer pong). And then the phone rings…
Wife: “Honey, I can’t make the TV work. Your sister and I want to watch a movie, but we can’t figure out how to make it come up.”
Me: “Use the receiver remote to switch the TV to HDMI2. Then […]
E3 News for Home Theater
July 14th, 2008The first day of E3 has produced one major home theater announcement - Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360! Basically the Roku box functionality will be recreated in the new Xbox dashboard update coming this fall. This will allow Xbox 360 Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers to instantly stream over 10,000 movie and […]
Batteries that pay for themselves
July 2nd, 2008I have been using the ProMaster rechargeable AA batteries for about 6 months now and I know that they have at least paid for themselves in money saved from having to buy alkaline. Prior to purchasing the XtraPower PRO charger with 4 Ni-MH AA batteries, I was going through 4 AAs a week in my […]
Samsung Blu-ray Resource Center
June 24th, 2008Samsung has started a new website dedicated to making sense of the often confusing world of Blu-ray. The Samsung Blu-ray Resource Center is broken into two sections - one for people who already own Blu-ray and the other for people just looking to get started. Taking on questions such as “Isn’t upconverted DVD just as […]
What does God have to do with it?
June 13th, 2008When buying consumer electronics, some unfortunate happenings can occur. You can drop your camera, your child can throw something at your new 50-inch LCD. Some of these things can be avoided with straps and child-proofing the house. The one thing we can never predict is an act of God like a lightning strike.
This is one […]
Panamax saved my gear
June 13th, 2008So I was sitting at home watching TV and playing video games. No surprise to anyone who knows me. I heard a “pop” and then all my equipment shut down and at that exact minute I heard a very loud crack of thunder. Lightning had struck very near my house.
I had lost a Pioneer receiver […]
No more commercials!
June 10th, 2008It seems like everything is about convenience these days. One convenience that I don’t believe I could live without is the TiVo DVR I’ve had for about a year now. You really don’t realize how many commercials there are until you watch a program without them. A typical 60 minute program takes about 45 […]
Bioshock - Creepy showcase for your home theater
May 27th, 2008I finally finished Bioshock for the xbox 360 this weekend. Now that I’m a dad I have much less time for video games and this one took me quite a bit longer than my kid-free friends to get through.
The game itself is a multi award-winning masterpiece, and played on an 80-inch HD screen with 5.1 […]
The Netflix Player by Roku
May 22nd, 2008We were all in a twitter the other day when the first set-top Netflix box was announced. Having extensively used Netflix over the years (and the Watch Now feature more recently) this product created a lot of buzz around our end of the office. Being an early adopter and Netflix fanatic Scot ordered one immediately. […]
The Cheapest Home Theater Upgrade
May 14th, 2008Over the past several years I’ve been collecting gear for my “dream” home theater. A front projector here, a surround receiver there, ceiling mounts, speaker wire, it all adds up after a while. Once we moved into our latest house last year (the one we’re going to stay in for a while) I set out […]