About a year ago, I found a great deal on a 19″ touch screen on eBay (which would be the only place I would ever go to if I wanted another touch screen – brand new screens are simply not a good deal, in my opinion). As a result, the 15″ that I had currently mounted in the living room was replaced. I mounted the screen in my family room, and it has been sitting there for months without use (a complete waste in my opinion). Last week, Buy.com was running a special one day sale offering a refurb’d Dell PC for $139 w/free shipping ($150+ w/tax). Rather than try and reanimate a PC laying around the house I decided to drop the $150. I figured it was worth at least that much for the time savings alone.
It was shipped last week and I turned it on for the first time this morning. The box is running XP Professional, with a 3gig processor, 1gig of RAM and a 160gig hard drive (not bad for $150). Since all it has to do is run Promixis NetRemote, that is plenty. Sh*t, I am using a similar PC to run the arcade setup.
I need to begin to think about modifying the menus on the touch panel. They are not as functional as I would like regarding the selection of songs. I think at the end of the day just a simple search function with pop-up keyboard would work nicely. I also tend to have problems syncing the different zones (which is needed when you are entertaining). I also need to improve the automation control as well – I really don’t like the fact that the NetRemote skin that I am using has to load a web page to operate Homeseer. I would rather have integrated buttons in the skin that can be pressed to run scripts (such as “Normal Lighting Mode” in the living room, which is a script that turns lights on in the living room to certain brightness levels).
Either way, at this point I have the touch screen in the family room. Since it is near the door to the back yard, I am able to easily begin playing music in the backyard, which is nice when I am grilling some steaks for dinner. I also have the ability to more easily control the music streaming to my home theater receiver in the family room.
Hmm… what to do next…
Sat, Feb 5, 2011
Fine Living, Gadgets, Home Automation, Home Life