Plastic guitars? Drums taking up the living room? Is a band video game a good family game night activity? Read on for a his-and-hers review by my wife and me of Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band.
Anyone who has a computer these days browses the Internet. The web browser has become as important as the operating system in meeting a user’s personal or business computing needs. When the World Wide Web began its life 15 years ago, the dominant web browser was Mosaic, which later became Netscape. In 1995, Internet Explorer entered the marketplace with Windows 95, coming free with every new computer. As Netscape and Microsoft competed in the “Browser Wars”, Netscape became a bloated piece of software and died a slow death. However, before Netscape’s dominance ended, they created an open source group to develop a new web browser called Mozilla, which ended up providing the engine for the popular FireFox browser. Microsoft’s dominance in the web browser has been deteriorating in recent years because of the introduction of several new, powerful, and fast web browsers.
Since the battle between Netscape and Internet Explorer ended, different web browsers have come and gone, with varying levels of success. The Browser debate also garners a lot of passion as people get very attached to their personal choice of web browser. While there are countless minor web browsers out there (which we will examine at some point in the future), we focus on the five major web browsers currently in use: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.
Blogs have exploded on the Internet in the last 10 years, covering a wide variety of topics. They have ranged in scope from personal diaries to blogs such as this one that cater to a wider audience. More recently, people have started using blogs as a means of updating family and friends of an important life event. These “event blogs” are being created to write about everything from the preparation for their wedding day to the difficult journey of a family member undergoing a serious illness.
These blogs differ from the wider-audience blogs in that they are catering to a select group of family and friends, and differ from personal diary blogs in that they are created to chronicle one specific event with long durations. For example, we have a family friend who’s daughter spent a semester abroad in Europe, and she started a blog to post photos and details of her travels. She was able to keep in touch with a wider circle of people than she would have been able to by individual emails and phone calls, and was able to circulate her photos and chronicle her travels across Europe in detail.
Last month, Brian wrote about his Home Theater PC which he created for streaming web content such as Hulu and YouTube to his television. I have actively been planning to build my own Home Theater PC for some time, but I had hoped to build in DVR functionality so that I could use my PC as a TiVO-like box, which I could then use to store and burn recordings of shows and movies that I enjoyed.
It turns out that Microsoft Windows Vista included just such functionality through the Windows Media Center, a free Windows extender that allows you to run your media (whether audio, video, or pictures) by use of a remote control, and includes an Electronic Program Guide and ability to DVR, as long as you have a tuner card to which you can connect your incoming TV signal. However, because of restrictions imposed by the Cable industry, digital cable signals are often scrambled, and require a cable box to be able to change channels. Most digital cable cards have no ability to descramble these channels, making them useless for any digital cable setup.
Ars Technica is one of my favorite sites on the web. They can be very technical sometimes, but when they post something relevant to our topic here at HTH, we’ll let you know.
Today’s link is a write-up they did in response to a recent FCC report on parental controls across all sorts of media. The report is very comprehensive, but the article boils it down nicely. It’s definitely a good read for the parents in the audience tonight.
Professor Masahiko Inami of Keio University has created a new advancement in the field of robotics – a robot to do the most mundane of chores, the folding of laundry. The robot receives instructions on how to fold the laundry via a Windows program, and then works on its own to fold what you give it. As it is a prototype, this RV-style robot is somewhat impractical for the average household, but has huge commercial implications. Now, if they could only get a robot to mow the lawn…
One of the biggest rackets in home tech is audio/video cabling. I recently got a shiny new LCD HDTV, and I wanted to upgrade the connection on our Nintendo Wii from an RCA composite cable (three plugs: yellow for video, red and white for stereo audio) to component (five plugs, three for video, two for audio) for progressive-scan video. I walked in to Fry’s and saw the Monster-brand item for about $50. Digging through the store, I found the MadCatz cable for $16. Sold.
So, sounds like I got a good deal, right? Monoprice.com has the same type of cable (as of this writing) for $3.36. Even with shipping, that’s a pretty huge savings. So how do some vendors charge $50 or even $16 for the same thing? The only things I can figure are laziness or ignorance.
An audio/video cable is basically just a length of insulated copper, so any claims of high-fidelity super-quality-iousness are generally bogus, except perhaps in the case of very long cables (as in, way more than the six feet needed in most home setups).
My Wii cable anecdote may have limited applicability, but as bad or worse is happening in the sales of HDMI cables. In general, you’re better off ordering audio/video cables online rather than being gouged at a brick-and-mortar retailer.
Internet Radio has come a long way in the past few years. What started as something that a few people did as a hobby has now become a full-fledged entertainment option. When Internet Radio started, people were restricted to listening on their home PCs or laptops. While this may be a good option when working, it is hardly practical for those who like to listen on the go.
Podcasting helped to expand the possibilities of online radio to go by allowing users to download mp3 copies of an internet radio broadcast onto their iPods or other portable music player. While this added some portability, in the last year, there has been an explosion of options for listening to Internet radio.
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