Technology : Gift-Giving Guide
1999; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 81; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Business Strategies and Innovation
ResumoTHIS YEAR'S guide to holiday giving will focus on technology that helps solve nagging problems, enhances what you can do with technology, and moves you from one generation of equipment to the next. For more information on handcrafted high-tech gifts and other ideas, please refer to previous December columns. Before I get to theme-related gifts, I need to keep up with a tradition I started last year. Last I named a audio CD of the year & Henry Mancini's Time Goes By' and Other Classic Movie Love Songs. of the reasons I selected this CD was the fact that it was recorded in surround sound and contains a killer version of the classic song Unchained Melody. More about Dolby ProLogic later. This I would like to name two must-have CDs. My first pick is Touched by an Angel: The Album. (I don't watch the television show of the same title, but I like the album anyway.) This CD is packed with music & 16 tracks & performed by a variety of artists, such as Della Reese, Celine Dion, Deana Carter, Wynonna, Bob Dylan, and Amy Grant. The CD has a bit of a gospel/country flavor, but most people I have suggested it to have thanked me. My second pick is Visions of Love, a CD produced by the legendary Jim Brickman. It's worth buying this CD just for the second track, After These Years, by Anne Cochran, which is likely to become the new official anniversary song for couples who have been together for more than a few years. Obviously, these two CDs will not appeal to the under-20 crowd, so I'll mention a new CD just out from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Edge of Forever. It has a cut that is getting a lot of air time and may well be a chart climber & Tomorrow's Goodbye. You might say that this CD is pure southern fried rock 'n' roll. Now to the theme of this year's column. My wife has been bugging me for years to have an entertainment center built for our living room. She hates seeing audio components stacked up with the requisite wires dangling everywhere. I finally got around to having a friend who is a cabinetmaker build the entertainment center. It's now in place, and we love it. But, when my friend was drawing up the plans for the unit, he asked me if I wanted glass or wood cabinet doors. Since the design was in a traditional style, I wanted wood doors. The problem is that wireless infrared remote control units for stereo gear cannot shine infrared light through wood doors. The solution is a nifty device made by Home Producer that costs $80 and is called the One for All. Technically, the device is an RF/IR remote-control unit & a universal radio frequency-to-infrared remote-control unit. Although it is not a learning remote, it will still control nearly everything. The device broadcasts your button pushes via radio frequency to a device inside the entertainment center where a miniature receiver translates the radio signals and sends them on to a powerful infrared light that effectively bathes the stereo components in the infrared that they can understand. While the human eye cannot see infrared radiation, this device works great. It comes with a hand-held remote controller that has giant blue-lighted buttons that are especially nice at night. This remote may be one of the ugliest ever made, but it allows me to adjust the volume of the stereo and change CDs from nearby rooms in my house. Radio signals go through most walls nicely! This unit works so well that I could have put all the stereo gear in the closet, but we like the entertainment center as furniture. downside is that it takes about an hour of fiddling with the remote to get it to operate your components; however, the manual is easy to follow. As an added bonus, One for All comes with the codes necessary to operate home automation systems. For example, you can dim the room lights from this unit if you install any one of a number of inexpensive dimmers. …
Referência(s)