Insteon Home Control, Not

I was all excited when I found Insteon products made by Smarthome. It is basically X-10 improved. It is a powerline system that has two way communication (and other technical improvement). What that means is that when a controller sends a command to a device, it will make sure that the device got it, and you can also find out about the state of each device (lamps, etc). It also has a very nicely priced keypad that you can mount in standard switch boxes. So, what's wrong with it? In short, it will not work with 3 phase electric systems. Most commercial grade building uses 3 phase systems. Our loft building is one. So it just won't work well.

If you have a house, I think this system is great. But for me, we have to go back to either Z-Wave which is radio based, new, and have a very poor and ugly selection of controllers and devices, or Lutron RadioRA. Stay tune.

HDTV - Sony Grand Wega KDF-E50A10 + Comcast Motorola 3412 DVR Box Review

Taking advantage of my moving lofts, I have finally decided to upgrade video equipments. Under the general direction of upgrading to HDTV, I bought the Sony Grand Wega 50 inch LCD rear projection TV KDF-E50A10, and got hooked up to HD and DVR service from Comcast with a Motorola 3412 set top DVR cable box. From a user point of view, I am getting three new things:

1. I get a new 50 inch TV to replace my 10 years old 60 inch rear projection unit. This new TV is much lighter and slimer.
2. I get to watch high def broadcast from my cable service. Each time I see HD broadcast in the stores, they look stunning.
3. I can also hook up my PC to the TV and use it as a very large monitor for casual work and presentation and demostration at home.

The TV

The TV is beautiful, of course. It measures 47 inch x 33 inch x 17 inch (rounded up) in size, and 73 pounds in weight. It managed to fit into my Sienna with the back row folded down and the middle seat pushed all the way forward.

I was choosing between this LCD rear projection and the Samsung DLP projection sets. At the end, I decided to try the newer technology of LCD rear projection. Most review raves about this Sony set. The price is similar, the look is slightly better on the Sony (a personal opinion). However, the Sony does have less features -- notably only one HDMI interface, and no picture in picture support.

It has many inputs, but only one HDMI and only one VGA input. The "PC" input strangely only support a 3.5mm jack as audio input. It will not accept digital sound input. However, the supported video resolution is great. More about using this as a monitor later.

One thing that surpised me is that the TV is not very stable. I have it sitting on top of a nice IKEA TV stand that is on wheels. Because the TV is so thin, it actually wobbles a little if you rock the TV stand back and forth. The custom Sony stands have indentations that mate with the bottom of the TV, and also a safety strap that locks into the back of the TV. The safety strap is not available as an option, unfortunately.

HDTV from Comcast

I used to use Sage TV on my Window 2000 PC as my digital video recorder. It works really well. Since I do not have a capture card in that PC that will capture in High Def, I switched to use the DVR feature on the Comcast cable/DVR box.

The box has a 120 Gig hard drive (hence the model number 3412). HD recording unfortunately takes up a lot of room, and I managed to fill the drive in no time. The software and user interface definitely is not as polished as the Sage TV software. Here are some of the issues:

• It cannot distingish first run vs re-run shows well -- at least on all of the shows on the "Fine Living" channel, which reruns a lot. So I ended up recording lots of duplicate show, which brings me to issue number two:
• The program information display on recorded show is useless. It shows almost no data that is episode specific. This makes looking for duplicated shows impossible.
• If the box loses power, it tends to crash and have problem. You want to "reboot" it by doing a hard power cycle -- unplug, wait 30 secs, plug back in.

There is a lot of information at the wikipedia on the Motorola DVR box.

Using the TV as a monitor for my PC

I hooked up my home theatre PC, which is an old small form factor Shuttle box, to the TV. I used the VGA to VGA connection, although my PC actually has DVI output. I want to save the TV's only HDMI input for other things. I change the PC screen resolution to 1280 x 768. (I have a ATI Radeon 9600 card.) The display is prefectly readable across the room. I can sit 12 feet away from the screen and read the text.

IKEA Shoe Storage

Shoe storage is very important to keeping the house tidy. Us Asian especially like to take our shoes off at the door. Any normal shoe storage solution is likely to be too small. What to do? We bought two IKEA MAGIKER short shelves with doors for our entry hall. Out of all the series at IKEA, I always like the MAGIKER series. It's clean look, especially in the lighter colors, matches a modern interior nicely without being too cold. Since we have very light bamboo floors, the color further matches.

The original idea was to use those cabinets as secondary storage, while giving us a display space for the entry hall. Once we put them up we realized that they are perfect for shoes. The only trouble is that we could use double the shelves. Today I found a new shoes rack that is not in their catalog call FRAN. They fit perfectly in the cabinet, but you need to take one of the doors off temporarily to put them inside. See pictures below:

Loft vs High Rise city living

I often hear these from friends -- "you live in the city, right?", "loft? How about those nice luxury condo buildings?", "No? Why not? I thought that's real city living....". Don't get me wrong. I grew up in Hong Kong, and lived in many high rise buildings. I was/am used to them. But given the choice, I very much prefer the real or fake (new) loft buildings that is at most 5 or 6 stories tall. Why? It is because, part of the reason for living in the city is that I feel more connected to the neighborhood and people. From my windows, I can see the streets, and the city activities on the street, day and night. I can see the people in the next building. I can see the courtyard and parks. I feel like I am almost there. If I move to a high rise building, that visual connection is lost. You are now looking out a window far away from the ground. You cannot make out the details of the activities. You are not connected. It's more like voyeurism rather than connected.

Also, most highrise are designed so that the connecting spaces, the corridors on each floor, are narrow and have way too many units per floor. It becames a very impersonal space, very disconnected. You live in a box within a box, and don't know anyone around you. That's not city living.

Redi Shade

Only took us four years, but I finally decided to get some solar shades for the lofts. The new loft is high enough that the sunshine pours into the space all thru the day, which I love. However it is also blindingly bright. Since time is money we decided to get them ordered and installed. After comparing different brands and installer, we settled on Soleil solar shades -- No we did not go for the full motorized version. Those are rediculously expensive. But our installer is kind enough to put up some temp shades while we wait for ours to be made. What did he use? Redi Shade. They are about $5 a set, functional, perfect for temporary use. We may even get a few to put up in our hip (meaning cheap) office loft space.

WinDirStat -- Hard Drive Cleanup

I don't know how I missed this one. You know the problem -- no matter how much hard disk space you have, you always ends up with just 1 gig free on it. How do you find out what's taking up all the space? Enter Win Dir Stat -- "WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows" from their creator. You can check it out here. I particularly like the pacman status display.