Awesome!  I finally got around to programming the Harmony 525 programmable remote control that I bought in Singapore a few months ago. It was getting more and more cumbersome to use the five (5) different remotes in the home theater (from left, clockwise, the remotes below are for the Denon AV receiver, the eGreat media player, the Panasonic projector, the Sony PS3 and the Velodyne Subwoofer).

The Harmony remote is great! It took me a while to figure out how to get the sequences just right, but once I did it was such a relief to put away the remotes and keep just one sleek-looking device on the armrest:

Mind you, to tell the truth I cheated a little: I never use the remote for the subwoofer, since it just sits quietly in a corner and does its thing, so I didn’t bother programming it in. As for the remote for the Sony PS3, since it needs a special accessory to deal with the RF link I haven’t added that one in yet either. But since we mainly watch movies using the HD-based media player, not being able to use the PS3 won’t bother me for a while. At least the Harmony 525 replaces 3 frequently used remotes:

I didn’t like the software much; the user interface is awkward and non-standard, and there is too much jumping back and forth to figure out how to do things. It also requires that you remain connected to the Internet at all times. On the good side, it connects to a very impressive database over at Logitech with data on the operations of over 225,000 devices. It also allows you to train new remote control commands, which came in real handy when I had to add two commands for Page Up and Page Down, which were missing from the database for the eGreat EG-M31B.

I think the warm blue light from the backlit display of the Harmony 525 will be a source of great comfort from now on…  It even has a Help button and a built-in assistant.

One of our favorite “household appliances” is a cute little media player we got a few months ago. For those of you who don’t know what a media player is, they take many different forms but are typically small embedded computers that play audio and video from hard disk storage or from Flash memory. Kind of like souped-up iPods.

We got an Egreat EG-M31B from eHome. It’s not the best one out there, but new ones come up so fast that as long as it does what I want it to do, I’m happy. I can always get a new one next Christmas.

This box happily streams full HD movies with 5.1 surround sound via HDMI to my Denon AVR-1908 receiver all day. I’ve also heard good things about media players from Popcornhour and Western Digital.

I’ve never had any problems with this player, and as long as you have good media files it’ll play them flawlessly. The support from eHome has also been great, and they’re one of my favorite stores in Manila.

For those of you who have seen my home theater, you know that I have a Sony PS3 which I use to play DVD’s and Blu-ray discs. It works, and is probably still the lowest-cost Blu-ray player on the market, but I get a little tired of waiting for it to boot and to start playing a disc. Unfortunately, the EG-M31B also takes its sweet time to power up. I’ll be looking for something faster on my next upgrade.

Or maybe it just takes a while to start up because I have 3TB (yes, three terrabytes) of hard disk connected to it, and it needs some time to catalog the content before it displays a menu. The EG-M31B has a 1TB drive internally, and I have an external 1TB My Book Essential Edition from WD connected via USB 2.0. Then I needed somewhere to store all the pictures and video from our family vacations, so I added a 1TB My Book Studio Edition, also from WD. I connect this drive to the EG-M31B via eSATA, but more importantly it also has a Firewire 400/800 interface which allows us to transfer video to and from our iMac at a decent speed.

The main problem with the setup is that movie watching has become so addictive… You come home from a long day at work and it is so tempting to sit yourself down in the home theater, select from hundreds of HD movies with a few presses on the remote control, and then just sit back, and mindlessly fry your brain.

It has been a while since this blog was updated. My sincere apologies to my small but ardent fan base. Due to insistent “public” demand (from all five of you), I’m back!  But just to let you guys know: the more comments and the more email I get, the more interested I am in blogging. Together, we can build and connect some seriously useless gadgets and conquer the world.

As for news, The Asia House is finally connected. It took months before we got an intermittent phone connection, and well into May before we got a so-so Internet connection. The reliability is still not what it should be, but at least now it is on more than it is off.

The technician from Globe Telecom was scratching his head when he arrived at the house to install the phone and the ADSL line: “You want to install what, where?”  I don’t think he was used to having the ADSL modem installed so far from the phone. In The Asia House, the phone goes in the kitchen and the ADSL modem goes in my office in the basement. Usually they’re side-by-side. Anyway, I had him install his thing in the kitchen first, then after he left I ripped it up and did it again.

I took the ADSL modem down into the basement and spliced the “Phone” output of the line splitter to the in-house phone line that goes up to the kitchen. The “Modem” output goes to the ADSL modem, and the “Line” input was spliced to the incoming phone line. So far, so good. In the near future, by the way, the phone in the kitchen will only be an extension connected to a PABX I’m installing in the basement, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

Once the modem was connected, my problems started. The Asia House has 15 LAN connections scattered throughout the house (don’t ask). So I connected the Siemens SE260 ADSL2 Ethernet Modem, which was delivered by Globe, to a D-Link Ethernet Broadband Router, and from the router to a 16-port D-link switch. Sounds straight forward, right?  The router provides a firewall, network address translation, DHCP server, etc, while the switch routes traffic throughout the house.

Two weeks of on-and-off experimenting later I still had not been able to configure things properly. So I gave up and called in a real geek. His alias is “Xenix” and he works at a local Internet cafe. Interesting individual. Anyway, to cut a long story short, he cloned the MAC address of the ADSL modem onto the router, configured the router’s IP address generation range properly, and figured out that my 16-port switch was busted. Alright; we were in business. At least, I will be as soon as I get my 16-port switch back from the shop.