Gadgets

This page has been ignored for far too long; all the information that was here prior to this update (November 2002) was out-of-date. The only gadget that was listed here that I am still using now is my laptop computer -- and that's only because I've been putting off buying a new one.

At the moment, I'm in something of a gadget trough. Nothing that really tickles my fancy has come on the market for a while. Instead of focusing on gadgets specifically then, I'll document the whole-house A/V system in the Front Royal house.

TV service in the house comes from a DirecTV system; this requires a clear view of the south-western sky to work properly. This photo shows the view our satellite antenna has; it's hardly what you'd call clear, and this is the very best location on the property, barring construction of some sort of tower.

We lived with rain and tree fade for about a year. In the winter, the TV worked fine. On the fringes of summer, when it was dry, it worked acceptably well. When the trees were in full leaf, or when the trees has some leaves and it was wet, we effectively had no TV.

Eventually, I got fed up and bought a larger antenna. At 36 inches, we only get rain fade during the worst storms -- storms so bad that you're cowering in the basement instead of watching TV anyway. So I'd say it's a success. I need to eventually build a better mount for the thing; currently it's supported by two pieces of exhaust pipe, welded together and painted black. I eventually plan to pull a whole bunch of wire up to the roof, and build a little platform for antennas. I eventually want a remote-turnable VSAT antenna up there, for watching free-to-air programming, and an FM antenna, a shortwave antenna, etc. I need to get something housed in a radome, too, just to look menacing.

The heart of the system lives in a rack in a junkroom in the basement. It's hard to see in the photo (click on it for a larger version, if you dare), but roughly from top to bottom, here's whats in there:

• A cheap mechanical speaker switch that controls sound distribution to several sets of speakers. I'd like a nicer, remote-controlled switch, but these are very expensive -- upwards of $600 for the cheapest reasonable version.
• A Sony DVD player. This was just being integrated into the system when this photo was taken; it's now been put in with the other AV electronics on the bottom. I tend to favor Sony equipment for no reason other than that it makes handling the remote controls easier. I am pretty disgusted with the remote for this DVD, though, as I have to look at it to do anything other than play, stop, pause, or navigate menus. Since I tend to watch movies in the dark, this is a problem.
• A Cisco 765 ISDN router. ISDN is the best we can do, unfortunately. The entire house is wired with Cat-5, but we've never actually connected it all together; we use a wireless network instead.
• Radio Shack distribution amplifiers (strapped to side of rack). One handles the distribution within the rack and to the projector, the other amplifies RF signals for use on TVs throughout the house.
• Power strip and RF modulator. The power strip is one of three in the rack. The rack is powered by two dedicated 20-amp circuits; it's hard to overload that feed, and blown circuits elsewhere in the house never mean that I have to re-program anything in the rack. The RF modulator, in conjunction with the RF modulators built into the video equipment itself, allows me to run multiple programs at once. TV can be watched on channel 3 while something else is running on channel 63, anywhere in the house.
• Sony VCR. Some things are only available on tape, and these things must be accomodated. I am planning to buy a multi-standard VCR, as I have a number of things I'd like to watch that are only available as PAL tapes.
• Sony tuner/amp/switch. Cheap but functional. I have a number of presets programmed for FM tuning, and a page on the Pronto that allows selection of various stations by name; this eliminates the only real problem that comes as a result of having this guy in the basement where it's hard to get at in person. The FM antenna is so bad, though -- it's also in the basement -- that it doesn't really matter.
• Sony DirecTV receiver. Very old. I tried to replace it recently, and found that while these have become very cheap, they've also got much worse. I paid $600 for this one, and you can commonly get them now for under $100. The current models are so bad, though, that I'll put up with this one's quirks.
• TiVo. I tried living without it for a while after we bought this house, and found that I could not bear to watch TV any more without its mediation.

All of this feeds just two TVs and a projector. The TVs are in the kitchen and living room, and the projector is in the Boom-Boom Room. The TVs, as I said, just tune to the appropriate channel for whatever source they want to watch. The projector gets a composite video feed through a wall plate in the B.B.R.; yes, there's noise. I haven't been able to get S-Video to work worth a damn at all over the distance (about 40 feet), and I've tried all kinds of things to get the noise out of the line. In the B.B.R. there's another set of inputs for hooking ad-hoc devices like video cameras to the main system.

The Boom Boom Room (seen here in enhanced nite-vision, showing the approximately 10-foot screen), does not have a properly-masked screen because the ceiling is too low; the light-spill from the edges of the projector is noticeable and annoying. I am planning to re-arrange the whole room to allow for a better experience.

All of this is controlled with the regular IR remotes, using a system of in-wall IR sensors throughout the house. There's also a Philips Pronto that simplifies some of the more complicated tasks, but because the Pronto has no tactile feedback (it's a touch-screen device), it's often simpler to just use the regular remote controls.

There's an IR-to-X10 interface wired into the system, so the Pronto (and certain other of the remote controls) can turn lights on and off, start fires (in the fireplace, silly), open and close drapes, etc. I do not have these all programmed into some grand scheme where you press 'play' on the DVD and have the lights dim, the curtains close, etc., because I have found all that to cause more problems than it solves. Simply being able to control everything without getting up is convenient enough.

There's also a rack-mount computer, installed since these photos were taken, and running Windows 2000. Its output is just another source for the A/V system, and it's equipped with an IR wireless keyboard and mouse, so it can be controlled and viewed from anywhere in the house. It allows us to listen to MP3s and Internet radio stations, and watch downloaded movies and Internet TV just as easily (well, almost as easily) as more traditional media. We have every episode of Family Guy ever made, most episodes of The Simpsons, and the best of Warner Brothers' classic cartoon output on the machine, all of them just a few clicks away. It's much more convenient than screwing around with tapes and DVDs.

I tried to integrate IR remotes into this, but it proved more of a challenge than I was equal to; the system just wasn't designed for this to work. I got things to the point where you could play, pause, skip, etc. things using a regular remote control, but choosing songs, movies, etc. still all required a keyboard. Microsoft has a product called Windows XP Media Center Edition that looks like it would fit the bill, but the only way you can get it is to buy a very expensive ready-made computer -- and it still doesn't really support some of the things I'd insist on, like Internet radio and TV.

The next project, I think, will be to install a phone system along the lines of an AT&T Merlin or something. Not so much for the phone aspect -- we use cell phones almost exclusively -- but for the intercom and paging capabilities. Shouting from one end of the house to the other is difficult, and impossible if there are any noisy things going on. I'd like to be able to control various household functions through the phones as well, allowing another means of control for when you can't find any of the remotes.