Things to dislike about the RicaVision SideShow Remote

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RicaVision SideShow Remote Arrived

For all 4 of you that have ever read anything on this site you’ll know I am a bit of a Distributed A/V : SmartHome freak and part of that quest is creating a remote control system with an extremely high WAF(Wife Acceptance Factor). I thought I had that set with my Phillips Pronto and room based content switcher but then Microsoft introduced SideShow and the first devices started appearing in glass cages at tradeshows.

Devices with color screens, Media Player control and easy navigation.

A/V Rack Cleanup

Recently my wife and son went out of town for a week to visit family leaving me plenty of time to engage in ‘Low Value Housework’, such as rewiring my Media Rack in the garage so that its easier to work on, looks better and actually -works- better.
Here are some pics of the final product […]

HOWTO:Listening to SomaFM on my Media PC

Lately I have become addicted to SomaFM. Previously I used Orb (http://www.orb.com/) to stream music from my home library but when I had the home gigabit network disassembled during our latest system overhaul I lost that capability.
Whats a guy to do at the office with no music? Turn to streaming music of course. This is […]

Matrix Switcher Control Appliance (In progress)

EDITING IN PROGRESS
STARTUPDATE (Sept 8.2006)
Some interesting things have happened.
1) A LIRC module was released for Ruby and this will let me accept the raw codes and get rid of the totalitarian lird.conf file! Hooray! Now I can allow people to, via a RIA app (Flex) remap arbitrary IR codes to switcher activities!
2) Ruby actually works […]

Infrared Distribution in a Structured Wiring System

Introduction
In order to make my switching system ‘Wife Compatible’ (verified) I had to devise a simple and bulletproof method of managing it. At first it was a web portal but I realized fairly quickly that not only did it have to be simple, it also had to be in context and unfortunately browsing a website […]

Introduction to my A/V Matrix Distribution System

Over the last year I have been building a fairly elaborate Audio/Visual switching system in our home. The original purpose was to allow us to watch Tivo in any room that we might be in without having to use a non-DirecTV Series 2 Tivo . We wanted it to be SIMPLE, one remote, anywhere in […]