There are tons of great little appliances taking advantage of the fantastic miniaturization and HD video capabilities of the Intel Atom platform and its competitors – specifically, NAS appliances like the Synology Diskstation and HD media centers like the Western Digital Live HD and Asus O!Play.

For those of you, like me, who have tried to build media centers using Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms in the past, you know it sounds a lot better in theory then in practice.

There are a lot of tough details to work out so that your media center is more of a transparent pleasure in your entertainment center, and less of a klutzy hassle.

1. Form Factor.

You want it to look nice next to your other components. The last thing you want is a beige box in your living room.

2. Silence.

It shouldn’t make any noise, whether its busy or not. Nothing detracts from a superb but quiet moment in a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound blockbuster then the scratching of a read head from a hard drive, or the sudden enabling of a fan.

3. Connectivity.

Ideally, its nice to have Ethernet, wireless, component, composite, and HDMI available , plus USB ports for external storage and an IR port for a remote.

4. Power.

It shouldn’t use much. A regular desktop PC can easily suck 200-250 watts. Appliances like the WD Live HD use about 10 watts!.

5. 10-ft Interface.

This is the toughest part of all, because while their are HTPC apps like Boxee which work fine while you are inside Boxee, if you want to switch to another app or if it crashes (which Boxee is want to do), you are stuck with a desktop and a remote. Plus, if you want to move between apps, like between Boxee and EyeTV, things get a little tougher.

6. Efficient design.

My Synology NAS does more things than I ever thought a NAS could do, and it does it in 128MB of RAM. That’s because the software and firmware are carefully designed known quantities. It’s extremely difficult for DIY’ers to get the same results from similar hardware.

7. Support.

I don’t mean calling a support line. I mean, one day your firmware in your media center pops up and offers to download a new version automatically and solve problems and add features very specific to its usability as a media center. Plus, being able to hang out on forums with other users with the same hardware and software as you makes debugging much easier.

8. Your Family.

OK, so you are a tech-head who actually gets excited about tweaking a home media center and doesn’t mind a bit about pulling out a keyboard to fix stuff. Guess what? Your wife hates that, and so does everyone else in your family.

All of this is incredibly expensive and difficult to get ‘just right’ and stay that way, compared to the lowly $120 of a great product like the Western Digital Live HD.

But there are some drawbacks to the WD Live too. It has no DVD/Blu-ray, TV tuner, DRM, Hulu, Netflix, or DVR capabilities, all of which you could enable with a homebrew setup.

So what CAN the WD Live do? In a nutshell, it allows you to navigate and play a wide variety of audio and video digital formats either locally on a USB drive or over the network to a shared folder or DLNA server, and it does this pretty well. I was surprised at how quickly and comprehensively it automatically found my network resources – it was better at this than my Windows 7 box.

The WD Live HD sports support for Pandora (yay), Flickr, Live365 (meh), and YouTube (which at this point my toaster supports). HD users should be aware that it seems YouTube is dropping support for HD in non-web browser appliances.

It’s a very solid, lightweight and seemingly reliable unit, that responds well to input, boots fast, and will alert you to firmware updates and install them instantly over the air with no fuss at all.

Setup should be straightforward, but for me it wasn’t as slick as I had hoped. Like a lot of HD devices, you need to hook it up to component or composite inputs to get access to the menu to change the settings to HDMI, which really takes out some of the fun and ease of setup promised by HDMI.

I have hooked about 5-6 network devices up to the switch in my entertainment center, and none of them have had problems with DHCP autoconfig. The WD Live did, but I’m not going to get down too much on them for this as to be fair, I have two networks on the switch that most people don’t have to worry about confusing the WD Live HD.

My HDMI cable was only partially inserted, which is always a fun debug. The WD Live HD is so small and light, a stiff HDMI or network cable can move it out of place very easily, which might jar other connections or adjust remote line-of-sight just enough to cause you trouble. Use the included rubber feet.

Once booted, you will find the WD Live HD easy to learn, but unnecessarily cumbersome to move through quickly.

A universal problem with video convergence appliances is that they don’t let you configure your own home menu to show only things you do 99% of the time. Imagine using a web browser without a bookmarks toolbar, Windows without a start menu or quicklaunch, or MacOS with no dock.

Instead, it uses the very predictable and ‘safe’ method of providing top-level menus for movies, music, and photos, then you drill down to the network share, USB storage, or online service you want to use, then perhaps folders within. This is made worse by the obligatory fade-in fade-out animations.

Ideally, my media center would start up and read ‘Movies on Diskstation’ ‘Music on Diskstation’ ‘Photos on Diskstation’ and ‘My Pandora Account’ – because those are the only network objects I ever intend to use. It really would be so easy to do, but no one does it.

About the best I could say about this is that there aren’t exactly a Boxee-hodgepodge of (mostly uninteresting) features in the WD Live HD, so its less annoying than Boxee’s drill-downs.

Text input with the remote is about the worst I have seen. I mean, they could have ripped off just about anyone’s technique and it would work better – especially for entering IP addresses – the numbers appear linearly – just using a phone dial layout would be more efficient. Luckily, it gets the job done and it mostly needed only for manual setup and account logins for services like YouTube (which, thankfully, it remembers).

The interface is obviously designed to scale down well and while it is rendered very nicely, does not take advantage of HD resolution to make navigation easier. Having a left-hand menu of bookmarks and recently accessed media with a drilldown or preview window on the right would make it twice as usable instantly.

I am a big fan of having a ‘now playing’ window that PIPs to the corner while you use menus, which Comcast and most other cable provider HD DVRs do. It amazes me that my TiVo HD does not – it just plops the guide down over whatever your watching, or completely leaves the video entirely to navigate menus. This would also be a nice interface feature for the WD HD Live. This is a minor gripe for this type of device however, where there is less need to do ‘other stuff’ while watching.

While we’re on the topic of TiVo HD – one of my favorite inventions of all time, I need to take a moment to punch them in the gut, because they are totally asleep at the switch.

Rather than use popular network sharing features like DLNA, TiVo has always gone with its horrifically slow and unreliable TiVo Desktop software. Although I have never had too much trouble downloading video off my TiVo with it, its rare I ever want to. The real problem is in the opposite direction – watching video files off the Windows box with TiVo. TiVo will ‘see’ my Windows box about 99% of the time, but I have probably only been able to get it to see any *media* shared by TiVo Desktop about 1% of the time.

Even if it did work, I have no interest in keeping my 250-watt Windows box up and running 24/7 – that’s why I have a NAS. TiVo Desktop does not support NAS devices.

The support for TiVo Desktop has historically been terrible as well.

The whole point of me bringing this up is that if TiVo would simply get off its butt and support DLNAB, there would really be no reason for me to need the WD Live HD box or change inputs on my TV to switch between TiVo and my digital media. To take it one step further, to have at least *the option* of a TiVo with a built-in DVD or Blu-Ray player would also reduce my need for additional devices and inputs.

When TiVo allowed third parties to make its hardware, Pioneer had an exceptional TiVo model with a built-in DVD *burner*/player, with 480P component out. It was my favorite TiVojust because I could switch between DVDs and DVR instantly with one box, one input, and one remote. How does TiVokeep stepping ‘back’?

To its credit, the inclusion of Amazon On Demand to TiVois an exceptional feature, especially since at this point in time HD Cablecards do not support On-Demand cable services.

I can hear the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 users clamoring ‘but we can do ALL of that!’ and its true – but at the same time, they aren’t HD DVRs either. The XBox 360 only has a DVD player, and the Playstation 3 sucks about as much power as a small refrigerator just to play back an MP3.

If you already own either one of these boxes, you really aren’t going to get much value out of a Western Digital Live HD, except for massive power savings and perhaps file format support (MKV?). I am not sure about Pandora/YouTube on < a type="amzn">XBox/< a type="amzn">PS3, but I know both also have downloadable movies and at least one if not both has Netflix support, neither of which are supported by the Western Digital Live HD.

When browsing DLNA on the Western Digital Live HD, I noticed that all of my DLNA media – photos, images, and video, would appear under each category, but it won’t play, for example, music files if you are drilled down into the video category of the menu. I don’t know if this was my NAS DLNA server not being specific about the content of each category to the media center, or the media center not caring, but it’s annoying and magnifies the fact that you have to ‘drill down’ to access different media types, even if they are on the same server.

Western Digital, being a hard drive maker, really wants you to use this device with an external hard drive. In fact, the setup documentation seems to infer its *required* for setup, ‘but you can turn it off later’. This is completely untrue, you can setup and use the box entirely over your network with no hard drive attached from the get-go.

As far as picture quality goes, no complaints here, playing back big DiVx movies on the Western Digital Live HD was quick and looked nice, fast forwarding working better than average.

Conclusion

The Western Digital Live HD is an exceptionally affordable, tidy, professionally made, and extremely efficient and adorable little device for what it does – but what it does is somewhat limited and while I hear its interface is more professional than its competitors, its not going to win any usability awards for its navigation.

If you have an XBox 360 or PS3, or anything connected to your TV with decent DLNA and file format support, you probably do not need or want a Western Digital Live HD.

But in a world of 55-inch 1500-watt 1080p Plasmas, always-on HD DVRs and 400-watt gaming systems, the little $120, 10-watt (!!) Western Digital Live HD will fill many peoples needs in an adorably affordable and efficient package.

Western Digital Live HD

File Formats Supported

Video – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9

Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG

Audio – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL

Subtitle – SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI

Note:

- MPEG2 MP@HL up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30 or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- MPEG4.2 ASP@L5 up to 1280x720p30 resolution and no support for global motion compensation.
- WMV9/VC-1 MP@HL up to 1280x720p60 or 1920x1080p24 resolution. VC-1 AP@L3 up to 1920x1080i30, 1920x1080p24 or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- H.264 BP@L3 up to 720x480p30 or 720x576p25 resolution.
- H.264 MP@L4.1 and HP@4.1 up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30, or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- An audio receiver is required for multi-channel surround sound digital output.
- Compressed RGB JPEG formats only and progressive JPEG up to 2048×2048.
- Single layer TIFF files only.
- Uncompressed BMP only.

For details, please refer to the user manual.

File Formats Not Supported
Does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes® Store, Cinema Now, Movielink®, Amazon Unbox™, and Vongo®

Connectivity
Interface Ethernet, HDMI, Composite A/V, Component video, USB 2.0

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Western Digital Live HD Media Player Review [WD Live HD Review]

As of August, 2009, the average retail cost of electricity to Connecticut residents was $.2038, which includes the actual cost of the kilowatt of electricity plus the delivery charges and fees.

As far as I know, you are pretty much stuck with Connecticut Light and Power as your electricity delivery agent, but I do know you have a wide choice of options for who your electricity generator is – and in pretty much any case anyone else is cheaper than CL&P.

I have been using Direct Energy for the past year or so after a call from one of their telemarketers, but recently came across this comparison page and found I could not only get a better rate, but I could also be using provider which had a higher percentage of renewable energy.

Unless I’m blind, its really a no-brainer to switch to Viridian – they have the lowest rate in Connecticut AND the highest percentage of renewables (except for a more expensive 100% renewable plan from ConEd). If you have a copy of your electric bill, you can go over there and switch to them online in about 60 seconds – its *really* easy, doesn’t cost anything, and there is no fee if you cancel with them.

Like I said, no brainer.

When the switchover happens and you get your next bill from CL&P, you will see the generator broken out in the bill.

So, how much would you save? Well, the average Connecticut household uses 764 kWh/mo over the course of a year, so at the current prices you would save $240/yr!

I just wanted to note that while this sounds like a sales pitch, I don’t have any relationship to Viridian or any power supplier – I have just been spending a lot of time this month trying to lower my bills and save electricity around the house – I have some more tips for both coming up.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Change Your Connecticut Electricity Supplier In 5 Minutes and Save $240/yr

That’s a 3-year low – less than half the price it was just 5 months ago, and even less expensive than during some periods of 2004!

The skyrocketing cost of gas this summer dug the grassroots of conversationalists down deep, past radical environmentalists, crunchies, long-range commuters, encouraging celebrities, the stingy, run-of-the-mill thoughtful people and deep into upper-middle-class territory (even my Darien Real Estate agent drives a Hybrid Lexus).

It absolutely fueled Obama’s election win (how appealing was McCain’s ‘multibillion-dollar tax cut for oil companies?’), and spurred a great deal of interest and investment into ‘green power’ technologies.

So what happens now? OK, we are in a depression/recession (I like to call it a repression), and money is still tight so gas conservation is still going to be popular for across-the-board budget reasons. Green power is still a high agenda item as well thanks to global warming, inertia, and wont-get-fooled-again mentality.

Regardless, low gas prices are bad for green power, because low gas prices puts excruciating price pressure on green power prices which already operate at razor-thin margins (or less).

Hybrid cost-of-ownership is still higher than comparable gas vehicles, and people who live in our neck of the woods can’t make solar panels pay for themselves on most contractor’s back-of-envelope calculation.

So, while investment dollars have disappeared, probably nowhere is this going to be more felt than in green technology investment. Green power is risky business regardless, but investors sure liked seeing the trend.

Now the viability, much less profitability, of certain Green business endeavors seem unclear – but what’s worse is that future rising gas prices will always loom large with the threat of a massive deflating price cut if oil feels threatened.

Not a comforting economic environment for green investors.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Will $1.96 Gas Kill Our Green Agenda?

I have been doing some research into alternative energy solutions lately, and I have come to my own conclusions about how we really need to address the energy and global warming crisis in the near term.

The answer is neither unique nor sexy – its good ol conservation.

Like a lot of people, I really would like to have alternative energy sources like solar and wind power just pick up the slack and allow us to continue our energy-gobbling lifestyles guilt-free. But that’s not going to happen, not in my lifetime.

The fact is that solar and wind power simply do not have the practical cost and efficiencies that burning fossil fuel does, and that’s reality.

I know a lot of people would like to blame our government, oil companies, or some secret cabal from making solar power be a drop-in replacement that takes us off the grid, but this is conspiracy fantasy. Many of the wealthiest energy and technology companies and zaibatsus in the world have put billions into solar energy research over the last 30 years, and we’re at where we’re at.

The promise of owning the technology of practical clean energy generation which competes with fossil fuels is about as good as it gets as far as corporate incentive to innovate is concerned.

Not all tech works off of Moore’s Law – in fact, very little does.

Contrary to popular belief, we do not have ‘unlimited’ amounts of solar and wind power – we have a fixed amount of solar energy per square foot (which varies widely based on time of day, locale and season), and we can only efficiently convert a small amount of that square foot into electricity.

Even if we could be 100% efficient in collection, solar energy is not produced at night, and excess power, if any, generated during the day must be stored in batteries, which are notoriously inefficient in themselves. The success of solar is married to the success of battery technology, lifespan, and cost.

As it scales to available space, it is also often tied to the cost of real estate – one recent proposal stated that to replace only 90% of our electricity generation in the US with solar, we would need a space equivalent to the size of the state of Vermont. This would obviously be the largest engineering project in the history of mankind.

Wind power is even more limited – unlike solar power, most of the United States does not have the excess wind required for practical energy generation from this resource. Like hydro, wind power is severely limited to locale.

But the crux of the problem is this: it doesn’t matter how you generate your electricity, it is ALWAYS FAR cheaper and far more environmentally beneficial to conserve any given watt of electricity then to generate it.

No one likes to hear this. It’s much easier to point fingers and insist that we could all be running of solar pv right now with our same consumption levels – again, fantasy.

Recently I posted about how I saved about 1000 watts of electricity simply by switching from halogen to CFL lamps in my basement. In order to generate 1000 watts of electricity from solar would require an initial investment of about $5000 in panels, inverter, wiring, installation, and batteries so that lighting would actually be available when I needed it. Also, there would be more panel space required than I even have on my roof. Most people with solar panels do not even have 600 watts of panels.

The CFLs cost about $200 (probably cheaper by now), and require no installation or maintenance.

Additional savings can be made a number of ways technologically – people sensors that turn lights on and off automatically, smart power strips that shut down electronics rather than sucking standby power, and energy-efficient appliances are some of the low-hanging fruit.

However, its been pretty clear that the cost of energy and An Inconvenient Truth have not spurned the kind of individual conservation efforts we need to address global warming. It is for this reason that rationing truly needs to happen.

In order to force conservation, saving energy needs to hurt. We need to *do things*, we need to be *mindful*. This will suck, but it has to happen, and it has to be enforced.

We need to ration.

I am a realist and don’t have the details on how to do this, and I don’t have the answers of how to prevent the collapse of the domestic energy industry which could result by suddenly reducing our power consumption by 15%.

But after studying this problem, I do know that the low hanging fruit – and even a lot of the high-hanging fruit – of fighting global warming lies in us shutting off our electronics when not in use, switching to CFL’s, keeping our homes well-insulated and using energy-efficient appliances.

The idea of carbon-neutrality gets tossed around a lot – the idea that for every $1 in electricity you use, you invest $1 in green energy, but this is NOT being carbon neutral, because, as we know, conservation beats any sort of usage both in carbon expenditure and cost.

At some point, we will have to individually justify the energy being consumed by our homes and businesses individually, and our access to it will have to be limited.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: The Real Solution To The Energy Problem: Rationing

Earlier this week I posted about an idea I had which led to some research about living ‘off the grid’ via renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro.

My initial conclusions were that it was prohibitively expensive, and varied widely based on local natural resources, tax breaks, real estate costs, etc.

Well, after reading the chaper on ‘off the grid’ living in The Renewable Energy Handbook, my opinion hasnt changed.

In the book, there is only example of an ‘off the grid’ household which committed to maintaining a ‘common’ energy lifestyle. However, even these folks required the use of a diesel generator (ok its 30% BIOdiesel) – even after spending $31,000 on their system (!). There were some concessions on the home design as well which weren’t appealing to me – its basically a greenhouse built up against a berm.

The other examples were a summer cabin style home with minimal power usage and a family which was dealing with a very inconvenient-looking refrigerator and no dishwasher (you can pry my dishwasher away from my cold, dead hands!).

One of the major issues I keep bumping up against is power *storage*. The sun don’t shine at night, so you have to *store* the energy collected during the day – which means big, ugly, deep-cycle batteries.

Another thing that bugs me is that the author isn’t very objective about the installations – he is encouraging and optimistic. For example, he will show a picture of a solar array and caption it as producing X watts of power ‘when the sun shines’, while the quote from the owner clearly states that figure is only the best-case scenario under optimal seasonal weather conditions.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: More on Living ‘Off The Grid’

This weekend my best friend Bob was in town, and we were sitting around brainstorming business ideas. We tossed around the idea of building a development in a sunny place which generated its own electricity off-the-grid.

Currently, a single home off-the-grid is so difficult to pull off that examples are rare and impractical. Folks living in rural areas with a basement full of miscellaneous daisy-chained car batteries and power inverters – usually home-brewed out of used parts, as a commercial system would be prohibitively expensive. Least appealing, these owners usually have already curbed their power usage to minimal levels to be able to make their claim of energy independence.

For the time being, off-the-grid living seems more obsessive sport (or necessity) than any sort of reasonable option for your average homeowner.

However, we wondered if you were to build a small or medium sized development in an especially sunny area, at what point could the economy of scale (and federal tax breaks, grants, and selling excess power back to grid) allow you to do a professional, commercial solar farm installation (perhaps augmented by wind or hydro)?

After some initial research, it does not look promising.

Compared to alternative energy generation (like Solar), energy *conservation* seems like a WAAY better idea with FAR more short, medium, and long-term impact than the alt-energy technology we have now.

Lets look at some examples.

-A small personal hydro generator (remember, more efficient than solar or wind) off a mountain stream can generate about 500W – not even enough to run my (embarrassingly power-sucking) desktop computer, phone, and peripherals (about 515w). However, it could EASILY keep my laptop battery charged 24/7 through regular daily usage, even if connected to a monitor, kb, and mouse.

Similarly, I have 18 recessed lights in my finished basement. When I moved in, they were 75w Halogen spots (1350w). Now they are 15w compact flourescents (270w).

When you see how much easier and cheaper it is to conserve then to produce energy, generating your own is not at all appealing!

So, yeah, I think you could build an off-the grid development – but the only path to success would be if the homeowners committed to low energy usage as well.

Towards that end, I would like to recommend two products which I have used to great success in helping curb energy usage in my home, and one I haven’t tried yet.

1. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs - these are more or less a no-brainer as you can see in my example, but they have some caveats over normal bulbs you should know about.

Unless you buy special ‘dimmable’ CFs, DO NOT use CFs on a dimmable circuit – even if you don’t use the dimmer (I found this out the hard way) – they will work, but soon fail – and CFs arent cheap. I don’t have any experience with the dimmable models, as they are more expensive and hard to find.

I personally tried to use CFs for task lighting, but prefer halogen. I have compromised with incandescent ‘miser’ floods over my desk.

Everyone probably have at least a few sockets in their house which CFs would be impractical for – for example, I have some very high recessed cans which really need a halogen to throw light down to the space, as well as some specialty lighting in the kitchen which does not even have a standard socket for CFs.

CFs do have one annoyance – they take longer to get to full brightness after you turn them on – however, I can attest this is very much adaptable. For me, its no longer an annoyance, just a reminder I am saving energy.

When buying CF’s, I recommend shopping around for the best price and buying all the bulbs you need at once plus a couple spares. Don’t buy them one-by-one – you’ll pay more – and don’t ‘stockpile’ them – as they are coming down in price and will continue to do so.

2. A Wall-Socket Electricity Meter. These plug into a wall socket, then you plug your appliance into the meter – an LCD readout shows how much power is being drawn – this is REALLY helpful – especially behind your home theatre or under your computer desk. I use it to manage power settings on my computer and identify peripherals which draw a lot of standby power.

This unit doesn’t save power automatically, like the CF bulbs, but instead allows you to do some detective work into which products you use which draw the most power.

Finally, here is a product I haven’t used yet, but plan to order one this week, that many people swear by:

3. Standby Power Strip I have read that there is a standards initiative underway to certify home electronics which draw minimal power in ‘standby mode’. Standby modes are what allows your tv, XBox, receiver, etc., to turn on via remote control even when the power switch is off, among other features.

Standby modes are notoriously inefficient, so this power strip will allow you to turn off ALL power to devices when they aren’t in use.

I will have more on the subject of energy conservation and renewable energy this week.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: My Preliminary Research Into ‘Living Off The Grid’