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When the house I currently live in was under construction, my family decided that they wanted our living room area to have a very clean appearance. In our previous house, the entertainment area was a complete mess due to a combination of poor cable management as well as clutter created by equipment such as the home theater receiver, HTPC, smart tv box as well as the Blue-ray player. To eliminate the presence of such devices from the living room, HDMI, USB, ethernet as well as coaxial cables were installed behind the TV mount during the framing stages of the house. These in-wall rated cables ran to the basement where a specific area was allocated for all the Audio/Video equipment in the house. Unfortunately, fixing the “clutter” gave rise to another problem; how would we control the equipment in the basement without physically going to the basement each time we wanted to alter a setting? For devices such as the Blue-ray player which featured an Infrared input (IR) the solution was to purchase and setup an Infrared blaster (or RF universal remote). However, this was not possible for the HTPC which featured no IR ports. In turn, Wake on LAN as well as a 2.4Ghz Keyboard/Mice was used.
Flash has always had a tarnished reputation amongst the internet community when it came to resource usage. It is not a surprise, seeing that a 480p Youtube video running in fullscreen mode is capable of triggering over 30-40% CPU usage (A task that only uses about 10% on VLC). For many of us still holding onto older hardware, the sluggish web browsing experience created by Adobe’s monstrosity of a plugin caused nothing but headaches. This is all true until now. Recently, Adobe announced the latest generation of flash player: Flash 10.2. One of the key features highlighting this version was the ability to tap into the power of the GPU in order to offer full hardware acceleration. This feature was codenamed, “Stage Video” and is an API that will be implemented on all major sites upon the release of the final software.
Over the christmas break, my sister was given a Keyboard as a gift from my parents. Since she has never played a music instrument before, it was nothing fancy. The Casio LK-110 was just like any other 61 key entry level keyboard with one exception: It was MIDI capable. For those unfamiliar, MIDI or Musical Instrument Digital Interface is a protocol that allows musical instruments to communicate with other electronic devices such as a computer. In turn, this allows one to do some pretty fancy stuff as shown in the video below. Through software such as Ableton Live, it is possible to change instruments, adjust variables such as pitch, and even record tracks without any distortion. If MIDI is paired with the correct software it can also be used reproduce realistic sounds achievable by only more expensive keyboard models.
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