About a month and a half ago I wrote about the HDE wireless USB infrared remote control that I bought for my home theater personal computer (HTPC). If you haven’t read that review yet, here’s the short story: it sucked.

My dissatisfaction with the remote led me to buy the Lenovo wireless multimedia remote with keyboard, which I bought at half off. The Lenovo is very well built, does many things well, but still had room for improvement. I thought the full retail price was too expensive, and the device needed a backlight very very badly. The device is very difficult to use if you are watching TV in a dim room.

I was given a chance to review the iPazzPort wireless touchpad remote by Unisen USA. I was not compensated for my time in any way other than the chance to mess around with the remote. I sent the remote back after the completion of my three week evaluation.

Originally, I was going to compare the iPazzPort to both the Lenovo and the HDE. But let’s be honest: the HDE is a non-starter. It’s garbage. So how does the iPazzPort stack up against the Lenovo? Let’s take a look.
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Funny how Facebook has become the Switzerland of instant messaging among my friends. Some of us were on AIM, some were on Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and some were holdouts on ICQ. Before, in the ICQ/YIM/AIM days, the client and the protocol were the same thing. If you wanted to talk to someone on YIM, you had to use YIM. There was some “openness” to the various protocols (although a lot of it was reverse engineering in the beginning), and you saw clients like Pidgin able to talk on multiple networks.

Then Facebook came out and folks started spending a lot of time on there. Eventually Facebook implemented its own instant messaging chat.

The problem with Facebook’s Web-based chat is that it was that you had to be on Facebook all the time. Furthermore, it was always a little flaky. Sometimes messages would get stuck in “sending” mode, and sometimes friends would drop on and off without reason. I also think a fair number of chats were terminated because a user would navigate — accidentally or on purpose — away from Facebook.
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Here’s a nice problem to have: too many high-definition doo-dads and not enough high-definition ports on your television. That’s the situation I was facing on both of my televisions. I have FiOS TV, an Xbox 360 and an HTPC on both sets. I have two HDMI ports on my upstairs TV, and my downstairs television only has a single DVI port.

I picked up an IOGear 3-Port HDMI switch from Amazon last week for about $25. There are cheaper, no-name switches out there from sellers I’ve never heard of, but I was new to HDMI switches. I wanted to be able to return it easily if there was something flaky about the technology.
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I’ll be honest. I had laptop envy. It struck me pretty hard over the winter holiday, wherein my friends and family spent time cruising the Internet and doing work while all sitting within thirty feet of each other. I retreated up to my office to dink around on my workstation, labeling me both as anti-social and a gaming dork.

There was a problem with joining their mobile computing ranks, however. At the end of 2009 I bought a sweet Lenovo G450 laptop on sale for about 60% off the original price. It was equipped with an Intel dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and had everything necessary for daily computing. It could play high definition video, had a built-in Web cam for Skyping, and plenty of output ports. I liked it so much I wanted to buy another one.

The issue was that Lenovo (and just about every laptop manufacturer, apparently), was about to transition to Intel’s new mobile processor architecture. That meant the dual core laptops were undergoing deep discounts, and that remaining stock (namely the then-top-of-the-line Core2Duo) was at full price. I waited a few months, checking deal sites and our employee purchase program discounts, but never found a comparable deal.

I resigned myself to waiting for the i3, i5 and i7 machines to come to market, get some age, and then lower in price as the second-generation of ix came to market. Essentially, I was going to have to wait for two generations to pass me by.

That is, until I saw the Acer Aspire AS 5740 i5 laptop on sale at Costco for $599.99.
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If you’ve logged into GMail or Google Reader recently, you may have noticed Google Buzz, a new social networking platform from Google. I don’t think Buzz is very useful, but whether you use Buzz or not, your Google profile was set to “public” by default. That means that regardless of your previous privacy setting, your Google profile could be viewed by anyone — including your contact lists. Ars Technica ran an article about the privacy concerns today, but if you want to skip ahead to the “how the hell do I disable Google Buzz?” part, here’s my tutorial. I recommend everyone do this as soon as possible.

Important note: this will delete your public Google profile

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Sedagive? and I were able to run a little ad hoc test of the camera capabilities of three mobile phones. I have a Samsung Alias 2, Sedagive? has an LG enV2, and our friend has a Motorola Droid.

We shot roughly the same picture at the same time with standard settings for each phone. We expected the Droid’s 5.0 megapixel camera to produce better photos than the nearly year-old Alias 2’s 2.0 megapixel camera or the 2.0 megapixel camera in the enV2, which was released in March of 2008.

We were pretty surprised with the results, and further convinced me to wait on Verizon’s latest super smartphone.
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I run up to six computers in my house. I turn them off or suspend them in order to save money and reduce my impact on the environment. I recently discovered a problem when doing this, though. I want to watch a television show or movie when I power on my HTPC. When I shut them off or suspend them most of their “lives,” all of the system health stuff runs at the same time I am trying to watch a program.

For example, I run Grisoft’s AVG antivirus software and Windows Defender. Both run on schedules and both can take a fair amount of CPU, RAM, and hard disk I/O resources. If you leave the machine off long enough, it’s possible to have both programs running at the same time.

This makes the rest of the system run slowly. This is particularly annoying when watching a 720p HD show via Boxee, which takes a pretty healthy dose of resources up on its own.
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I’ve gone through a bit of an odyssey with my home theater personal computer (HTPC) setups in the house. I originally hoped to use my Microsoft 360 remote to control the Microsoft Media Center, but I wound up using a cheap USB remote instead.

There are many wireless keyboards on the market, but the suffer from at least one of the following problems:

1. They are very large and not suitable for use in a bedroom environment — they are too big to store on a nightstand or other accessible area.
2. They are too small and don’t have an integrated touchpad or trackball.
3. They have a “touch stick” similar to what IBM / Lenovo embeds on their laptop keyboards.
4. They cost a lot of money, around $80 – $150 depending on the model.

I had resigned myself to using the HDE USB remote for the majority of my needs and then getting up to use a USB keyboard when needed. Then I found a small wireless remote with integrated keyboard from Lenovo. Better yet, I found it on sale at 50% off.
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Well, the wait is over. A long, long seventeen year wait if you had (or lusted after) an Apple Newton: Apple’s return to a hand-held, touch-sensitive computing device. The iPad was unveiled today and attempts to fill the niche between full-fledged laptop computer and a smartphone. Yes, you could say the iPod Touch or iPhone are hand-held, touch-sensitive computing devices, but the iPad is designed to be a portable Internet appliance first and a communications device second. And even defining the iPad as a “communications device” is a bit sketchy, as I will get into in a bit.
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I’ve spent the last two months migrating towards home theater personal computers (HTPCs) in my house. It’s an effort to simplify my home audio/visual system, play high definition content, and allow for some quick Internet access. Along the way I’ve learned some interesting things, like how important keyboards and on-screen zoom are when you try to control a computer from across the room.

I have a pair of Xbox 360s in my house, and I was hoping to use the Microsoft Xbox 360 multimedia remote to control my HTPCs. The problem was I didn’t have an infra-red receiver on my computers. After searching around on the Internet, the best advice was to buy a cheap USB remote control and steal the “dongle” that allowed the remote to talk with the computer.

I sprang for two remotes by HDE, sold by Amazon.com. They were about $16 each and were eligible for free Amazon Prime shipping. I learned a few more things after they arrived, including that you shouldn’t be cheap with your remote controllers.
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