Even when you put your TV in standby it's still sucking energy. The wall wart that charges your cellphone - yup, that's still using juice when your phone isn't plugged in.

The simple answer is to turn devices off or unplug them from the wall but sometimes that's not as easy as it sounds. For instance, the plugs for my home entertainment system are all down behind the cabinet so getting access to unplug or turn things off can be a little challenging.

Belkin think they've come up with the answer to that problem with their new Conserve power strip.

Their solution is actually quite elegant. You get a larger than normal power strip with 8 or 10 sockets and a large toggle switch that is the remote control.

The remote has a wall mount so you can stick it somewhere obvious and it's simple enough my dogs could use it!

The power strip contains a surge protector and for the larger capacity unit the protection also extends to a coax pass-through for your cable connection.

Both versions have two always-on sockets, the others are switched by the remote. This means that you can keep your DVR and Set-top box or VoIP phone always powered up but only send power to the TV, amplifier etc when you need it.

One cool feature is that using the DIP switches to select the channel the remote/power strip are using you can pair a remote to more than one power strip so you can control equipment on different sides of the room or even in different rooms.

For a home theatre set-up this is really easy to install and use. The spacing on the sockets is a little tight but I was able to consolidate two power squids to a single 10 socket Conserve.

Will this actually save me money? I think it probably will. They claim up to $60 in savings a year so should pay for itself by about September. I searched Live Cashback for my Belkin Conserve and got a great deal - you could get an even quicker return on your investment.

I can think of a couple of features I'd like to see added (that of course would make things a little more complex).

For home theatre setups it would be nice if the power strip was switched in two banks.In my setup I have both audio and video setups in the same cabinet and it would be nice to control the audio and video equipment separately (but I don't need a second power strip for that - especially as they recommend not daisy chaining them). Of course the added complexity is that when we're using the Media Center PC we need to power up the amplifier as well as the TV so I'd need to be able to turn both banks on at once.

The Media Center PC solution is the other scenario where the Conserve could be a bit more functional. With a running PC it's bad form to just pull to plug. They can get a little unreliable if you keep doing that to them. It would be great if the Conserve had a USB connection to report UPS type status information to the PC so when the "off" switch is pressed on the remote then the switch can warn connected PCs that it's about to shut down and then actually complete the shut-down a few minutes later. That would allow the PC to either save its state elegantly and in a controlled fashion or, if you're leaving the PC running but powering down some peripherals, let it disconnect from devices in a timely manner.

Hulu and Netflix are two amazing examples of using the internet to deliver content but while I don't mind watching a 30 second funny clip on youTube or Soapbox there's no way I'm going to watch an episode of Gemini Division or Dr Horribles Sing-a-long Blog, let alone a full length movie unless I can lean back in my chair with the dogs at my feet and remote in my hand and enjoy TV as it's meant to be.

At home we already have a Media Center PC (it came with us from Australia and it great for watching DVDs that are not Region 1 encoded or has interesting codecs that need some extra support), an Xbox360 (can front-end the Media Center and play back content from network) and the majority of our content living on a Windows Home Server with some Maxtor external drives to extend that a bit further.

Until now most internet content has required jumping through hoops to get downloaded and delivered... but now it's time to PlayOn!

All you have to do is install the PlayOn transcoder application on a Windows PC (WinXP SP2, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Home Server - if it can run Windows Media Player 11 it should work) that's on the same network as your Xbox360, PS3 or HP Media Smart TV (they want to get it working on the Wii as well), follow some simple instructions and you're pretty much good to go.

On the transcoding PC (which takes the Flash video or other formats from the web to something that your Xbox or PS3 can display) you can enter your Netflix account details or Hulu credentials and the application displays your queue [Actually, at the moment they don't have the Hulu queue working, but you can still access videos by navigating categories and drilling down alphabetically]

You still get to see the adverts that pay for Hulu (or need a log in to get to a Netflix queue) so it's not a way to bypass the monetization models of the providers but it's another wake-up call to the old school TV providers that they need to deliver more content when the audience wants it rather than rely on their programming schedules....

I'd happily pay what I currently pay for Cable for an online, on-demand delivery mechanism that uses much better ad targeting to reduce the interruptions to make for a much better end user experience.

I mentioned the very cool BigScreen Pictures the other day, well in related and very exciting news a DelicateGenius has a couple of licenses for both the Photo and Weather apps to give away.

The competition ends on Jan 30th so you'd better hurry... but even if you don't win check it out (there's a free trial for all-comers)

Although there's been a bit of news recently about Dave Winers new FlickrFan product for the Mac Mini it's not the break-through technology that folks have been touting it as. It's pretty neat and certainly offers some value to the very small Mac Mini user base.

But there's nothing new under the sun. Before I left Australia I was running some of the BigScreenGlobal add-ins for my Media Center (news, weather etc).

Today a DelicateGenius and FrankArr both gave me the scoop on version 2 (that's right, the second generation) of the BigScreenPictures app which lets you use Media Center (either the Media Center Edition version of WinXP or the functionality included in Premium and Ultimate versions of Vista) to display a photostream from Flickr (and other data sources) on your high def TV.

I guess because it's running on Microsoft technology and Niall doesn't have quite the same blogsphere presence BigScreenPictures (which doesn't have quite the same catchy name as FlickrFan I'll admit) probably won't get as much attention, thought it certainly deserves it. Give it a try, and while you're there check out some of their other great apps.

I'll leave the last word to Loren Feldman.

I was pretty excited with the December update to the Xbox360 Dashboard that provided some additional codec support but after using it for a while I'm less sure that it's solved my problems.

For a start the big downer is that, unlike with a Media Center, I still can't use the system to view archived DVDs - that means we still have to expose the physical media to scratches if our daughter wants to watch Barbie rather than have her able to stream it from a remote location (or she has to use the Media Center in the living room which does support DVD Library mode).

The other frustrating thing is that some archived content still refuses to play back - though it's encoded with the same codec as content that's fine. It also appears that I need to be logged in to play back content (though this may be a limitation brought on my my current Gamertag not being US) - which means if my daughter is watching something she still gets messages popping up from folks who think it's me logged in.

Here's hoping the next Dashboard update brings some more Media goodness (though I am questioning the value of a noisy and power hungry Xbox360 as a component in our home entertainment setup.... maybe a dedicated Media Center extender would be better).

In the meantime we're supplementing support with TVersity. This transcodes on the fly the content we're having codec issues with (it runs on the Windows Home Server where the content is archived) and is pretty reliable. Again, it currently doesn't support archived DVDs and it's not a native WHS add-in (but there are enhancement requests being considered for both). For Wii users TVersity (like Orb) provide a very good Media Experience using the built in Opera browser to render a Flash user interface - on the Xbox360 TVersity etc are limited to the simple folder hierarchy and text listing.

Although my Media Center has been a well behaved and loyal companion these last couple of years it does sometimes do weird things that I only discover by accident after the fact.

Luckily that looks like it won't be the case any more... Ian Dixon has written what sounds like a very near little utility to monitor the health of many aspects of the Media Center.

I hope to be able to try it out soon....

As I'm often away from home (and the girls are not that technical!) having it alert me via a remote method - email or Windows Live Messenger Alerts would be fantastic - then I know I've got to remote in and fix something.