Electricity prices are only heading in one direction — up.  You may have already taken some steps to try to get your electric bill back under control.  Maybe you’ve replaced your old incandescent light bulbs with new CFL bulbs.  CFL bulbs make it easy to see their potential savings because they tell you right on the package how many watts they use compared to your old bulbs.  But some of the bigger electricity users in your house can’t be measured so easily.

Look at your clothes dryer, for example.  How much electricity does it use?  Sure, you may know how much it was supposed to cost you each year when you bought it ten years ago, but how much is it using now?  How about your water heater?  Would it pay to replace it with a newer, more efficient model?  How about your central air conditioner?  Is it better to keep your house at a constant temperature while you’re at work or is it better to let it warm up and then cool it back down when you get home?

You get a bill each month that shows how much electricity you used but that’s not really enough information to tell you what to blame for that check that you have to write. Now there’s a way to see how much those appliances are costing you.  Its name is TED (“The Energy Detective”).  Let’s check it out.

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There’s good news and bad news when it comes to watching streaming internet video.  The good news is that there are now many new legal ways to watch video on your PC (think of web sites like Hulu, YouTube, and even NetFlix with it’s new streaming service).  Those sites have an amazing amount of content available and more and more is getting added every day.  Hulu lets you watch full episodes of hundreds of TV shows like “The Office” and “The Daily Show” as well as a growing catalog of movies with very few commercial interruptions.  NetFlix allows their subscribers to stream over 10,000 movie and television selections (see my previous posts here and here).  And YouTube lets you watch just about anything that isn’t copyrighted (and even some content which is).

The bad news with many of these services is that you’re still tethered to the computer when you want to use them.  Hulu and YouTube are designed to be viewed from within a browser.  NetFlix works the same way, although it does offer the Roku NetFlix Player which can be connected directly to your TV (read about that here).

I’ve talked about various ways to be able to watch that content on your television instead of on your PC but, outside of Roku’s NetFlix Player, most of those solutions get pretty complex.  But now there’s a new piece of software out there which may finally allow you to easily watch that web content on your television.  It’s from MediaMall Technologies and its name is PlayOn.  Let’s take a look.

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When NetFlix first came out with their “Watch it Now” feature I thought that it was a big deal (you can read that post here).  Here, finally, was a way to be able to watch a good chunk of the NetFlix catalog right there on your PC without having to wait for your DVDs to arrive in the mail.  And, best of all, it was free for people who were already NetFlix members.

Unfortunately, in order to play those movies you had to use a special plugin for Internet Explorer, and that meant that you had to watch them on a computer.  So, if you’re like me and you wanted to watch those movies on your TV, you had to be able to hook your PC (I used a laptop) up to your television.  It worked, but it wasn’t exactly convenient.

Next came the vmcNetFlix add-in for Media Center (read my post on that here).  This add-in allowed people who were running the Vista version of Windows Media Center to watch the NetFlix streaming videos inside of Media Center instead of through Internet Explorer.  Even better, it allowed people who had Media Center Extenders (like an XBox 360) to stream that content to their TV without having to have a PC in the living room.  That worked better, but it still required a PC (running Media Center) and a set-top box (the XBox 360 or other Media Center Extender).

But now there’s a way to watch NetFlix streaming videos without using a computer at all.  It’s from Roku, and it’s called the NetFlix Player.  Let’s check it out.

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In a previous article I talked about the “Watch it Now” feature available to NetFlix customers (you can find that post here).  That feature allows users to stream some of the massive NetFlix catalog over the internet so that they can watch the content on their PCs without having to wait for the DVD to arrive in their mailboxes.

One of the main problems with using Watch it Now is that you are required to watch the video content using a special Internet Explorer plugin, and that means that you can only watch that content on a PC instead of on the TV in your living room.  The solution to that problem was to use PC or a laptop which was hooked up directly to your TV.  Now there’s a better solution, and its name is vmcNetFlix.

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In a previous post I’d talked about how to run MythTV, the very popular multimedia software, under Microsoft Windows (you can find that post here). The basic problem is that MythTV only runs under Linux — there’s no such thing as a port of that application to Windows. That previous post talks about how it’s possible to use a virtual machine to set up a Linux virtual machine within a Windows OS so that Windows users can run MythTV, with a few caveats.

Now that I’ve been using andLinux I wanted to see if it was possible to run MythTV on a Windows installation without having to use a virtual machine. It is — and here’s how.

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In the past I’ve shown how easy it can be to run a full Linux operating system from inside of Windows (see my previous posts VMWare: See How the Other Half Lives and How to Create Your Own Virtual Machine Using VMWare Player). In both of those examples the Linux OS runs inside of a “virtual machine” where an entire virtual computer is created through software, right down to a virtual CPU, network card, graphics card, sound card, and disk. The Linux installation runs within this virtual machine and the virtual machine runs within Windows. This solution works but it makes a clear distinction between the Linux applications which are running in the virtual machine’s window and the Windows applications which are running natively on the desktop.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software named andLinux which allows me to run my Linux application from within Windows without using a virtual machine or any other type of emulation. Let’s check it out. [Read more →]

These days just about everything used in a home theater, from DVD players to video game consoles to amplifiers to the televisions themselves, is some type of computer. Because they are computers, many of these devices have capabilities far beyond their originally intended purpose. D-Link, for example, makes a line of DVD players which can also play videos stored on your PC, and DirecTV’s DVR can be used to listen to your music collection.

Like anything else that deals with technology, though, these devices don’t always play nicely together. Many of the devices have special quirks or requirements that make it difficult for them to interact with each other and trying to overcome those obstacles can be a frustrating process. That’s where TVersity come into the picture. Let’s check it out.

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One of the most frustrating things about stargazing (aside from the cold) is not being able to actually find the objects you’d like to look at. Picking an object of interest while you look at a map of the heavens in your nice, warm house is very different than finding that object when you’re freezing to death out in your back yard, trying to figure out why the stars above your house look so different than they do on your star atlas.

If you have a laptop computer and a desire to simplify your stargazing you can make your experience a lot easier with Stellarium. How? Let’s take a look.

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