home

Now you can put a big, impressive-looking tome about the Age of Enlightenment on your bookshelf without having to wade through any Descartes or Voltaire.

Dutch design studio Studiomeiboom has come up with The Enlightenment, a lamp that poses as a book on the 18th century intellectual movement, but really just enlightens your room and not your brain.

The $130 lamp is made of white Plexiglas, with "The Enlightenment" etched onto its spine and cover. It's about 9 inches tall, 6 inches wide, and 3 inches deep, and comes with a 9-watt energy-saving light.

Studiomeiboom says 10 … Read more

With HD DVD looking more and more like it's on the ropes, it would seem like the ideal time to commit to Blu-ray--right? Not so fast. There are at least five reasons to stick with your good old-fashioned DVD player--at least for the next few months. (And, as always, there are some key caveats and insider secrets for those who can't resist pullling the trigger as soon as possible.)

1. Nearly all current Blu-ray players are obsolete: The Blu-ray standard is still evolving. Most models currently available use the original Profile 1.0 standard, while some newer models … Read more

Do you think valve amps have a place in today's home cinema systems? If not, look away now, because Philips is about to annoy you.

Its MCD908 micro hi-fi is an affordable blend of DVD upscaling, DivX playback, and potentially decent speakers. It claims to be an audiophile system, in part as a result of using a valve-based preamp, and while this is of course fairly gimmicky these days, its combination of neodymium ribbon tweeters, silk dome tweeters, and a whopping great woofer in each 150W speaker rather makes up for it.

For 239 pounds (about $472), this extremely … Read more

The New York Times is reporting that HBO is launching its own online distribution service for a portion of its content both past and present. Starting this week, lucky residents of Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin will be the first to get dibs on the new software application that can be set up to download and stack episodes old and new that can be watched on their PCs. Cable provider Time Warner (the same folks working on the lovely bandwidth metering down in Texas) is sending out the application on an CD to current HBO subscribers "soon."

Already … Read more

To the chagrin of home-entertainment aficionados, there will always be people who want all their media functions in a single box. We're not talking about a high-end convergence phenom like the $10,000 "Q," by the way, but something more like a TV/DVD/VCR combo that can be found behind the counter at Walgreens. But with TVs getting thinner all the time, the design and manufacturing may get increasingly tricky.

There is, however, an alternative. The "Razor Home Entertainment Theater" is a combo unit that can be mounted below a flat panel on the … Read more

As more bored millionaires spend untold sums on movie-themed theaters, we're pleased to find that not all of them are based on Star Trek or Star Wars. (Just 99.9 percent.)

Yet none of these, in our humble opinion, can compare with the "Bat Cave" seen on Slippery Brick. The latest custom job by Canada's Elite Home Theater Seating provides an impressive subterranean atmosphere, from its dramatic lighting to ersatz stalactites.

As far as options are concerned, the sky's the limit (to mix a few metaphors). The bat-shadow screen cover, however, should be required.

The iPod accessories are hitting hot and heavy at Macworld. DLO has used the occasion to take the wraps off its HomeDock HD. As you might guess from the name, the latest iteration of DLO's HomeDock Deluxe now offers upscaled HD video output (720p or 1080i) from an HDMI port built into the dock. (For those that still haven't made the leap to HDTV, it'll still connect to standard televisions via the composite or S-Video jacks.) In addition to playing back iPod-based videos on the big screen, the HomeDock HD also provides TV-based navigation to all of … Read more

One more quick CES-inspired post:

Work-life balance may seem a bit off-topic from parenting and technology, but if you are like me, your "digital leash" is a large part of both work and family life. It's mostly a blessing, but can be a curse when you find yourself pulled in so many different directions that you feel that you aren't doing anything well. Nonetheless, I had gotten so used to the idea that blending job and family in the most flexible way was always a good strategy that it took a trip to CES to remind … Read more

You won't find a more institutionally conservative category in the consumer electronics space than home audio. More than any other industry segment, audio is one where technological advances tend to be lamented rather than celebrated, viewed with suspicion rather than embraced. And that's understandable: Subpar speakers are now passed off as good enough and used to listen to digital music, which is often highly compressed compared with CD or (even better) LP equivalents. And the music itself is coming from a dying recording industry, struggling to stay alive in the digital age, and often relegated to background music--fewer … Read more