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Kitchens aren't just for cooking anymore
Two other gadgets round out the list for the serious cook in need of electronic accessories. The first wins on looks: the exceedingly cool $60 Salter 1004 digital scale, a sleek, low-slung stainless steel and glass platform that weighs up to eleven pounds in increments as small as 1/8 ounce. The other is for kitchens with, uh, rodent issues: the Sharper Image Mouse Mover at $50 is a small plug-in module said to emit ultrasonic sound that will keep Mickey and all his relatives at bay, without bothering pets or humans (although the directions also suggest that you “remove food scraps” as well).
One place, of course, where Mickey Mouse and his friends are welcome is on the other side of the kitchen counter, where the family gathers around the media center. Previous installments of Digital Life have covered big-screen televisions and surround-sound as well as video projectors and videogames. The next step in home entertainment is networking your audio and video systems so that the cool stuff that resides on hard drives in the home office or the kids’ room can also be viewed and heard where the family gathers.
In the old days, when a home had networked audio or video, that meant that wires ran from the home entertainment center to all the other rooms where you wanted music or video. Now, however, two advances have fundamentally changed the game: wireless networking has arrived via Wi-Fi, and increasingly all our sources of entertainment are digital files.
Thus arrives the “home media hub” — in simplest terms, a Wi-Fi enabled box that sits with your home entertainment center. The box pulls audio, video and photographs off all the computers (or similar home media hubs) around the house and then converts them into audio and video that can play through your television and sound system.
That may sound simple, but it’s still early-adopter country. For starters, there is a veritable alphabet soup of file types for digital audio and video — MPEG, DivX, MP3, AAC, WMA, to name only a few — and your home media hub needs to be able to translate all the ones you use. And Wi-Fi may not always have the bandwidth for high-quality video. In addition, some digital rights management systems may not easily let you play music from one computer on another device. Some home media hubs handle just audio; a few require a wired, rather than wireless network. Those are just a few of the issues you need to think through if you’re jumping into this area.
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ViewSonic ViewSonic's Wireless Media Adapter is one of several products that let you fling digital media files from one room to the other. |
On the consumer electronics side, both Sony and Philips have entered the fray. Sony’s $200 RoomLink Network Media Receiver works with their VAIO line of PCs. Philips offers the Streamium series of “Wi-Fi enabled multimedia receivers” in the $150 - $400 range. And TiVo offers "Home Media” features on its Series2 models that let the boxes transfer audio, video and photographs between other TiVo boxes as well as home computers.
If all that choice sounds a bit dizzying, it is. Getting computers to play nice with consumer electronics is not easy, but those who manage it usually love the results. As more manufacturers pile on — look for a plethora of new products at this January’s Consumer Electronics Show — perhaps the process will become a bit more plug and play. But for now, we’re stuck with that old joke about the personal computer industry: it’s a business that believes standards are important. After all, they have so many of them.
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