It’s not really fair. My TV (and every other piece of home electronics) is a slave to a remote. But because the remote only barks out orders and never asks questions, or listens, it’s a cause for frustration.

We have a Logitech Harmony remote, and it’s a great thing. But because the communication is one-way it’s often as frustrating an experience using it as trying to find the right one of the half dozen remotes scattered around the living room.

Now, imagine a world where every TV, Xbox, Squeezebox, and amplifier had a Bluetooth (BT) or other wireless chip in and as well as listening for orders they can communicate their status both between devices and to their controller.

Couple that with a smartphone (or a dedicated smart remote control) and you have a real universal remote that can be task driven (I want to watch Cable or play a DVD on the Xbox or listen to music), query the relevant devices (to confirm what state it thinks they are in) and then make intelligent decisions about they need to do (on or off, change source, adjust volume levels) – including powering on or off devices in the correct sequence.

Today’s IrDA based devices don’t offer that sort of flexibility or control – the communication isn’t two way, the protocols defined in the 1970’s don’t really have the flexibility or richness and the limitation of line of sight control starts to interfere with talking to multiple devices concurrently anyway.

In this solution there would be no more line of sight problems (can even talk to equipment in a cabinet). No more getting out of sync with the source channel on the TV (because it's cyclical rather than direct access). No more pop from the speakers when the TV turns off before the amplifier (they can communicate... if the TV "knows" it's using the speakers - or the remote does - part of the shut-down process could be to mute the speakers, shut them off and then shut down the TV, or if changing over to the Squeezebox then mute them, change source, start Squeezebox, turn off TV, un-mute speakers returning them to the default volume and EQ for listening to music as opposed to for TV)

The problem today is that while BT to IrDA devices exist that's only half the solution... The back channel to the remote doesn't exist. For this to work the Bluetooth, ZigBee or WiFi SIGs would need to be more aggressive in promoting the value of something like this to the hardware manufacturers. Bluetooth and WiFi are already supported in most smartphones, but ZigBee with its lower power requirements would be an interesting solution if it has the living room range.

For it to work there needs to be one standard that can be rolled out cost effectively. Who is going to step up and lead the charge from the three incumbent wireless technologies (or will we see a new player emerge to eclipse them?)

Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms—I can’t tell if there are four or eight or sixteen—stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.

It could have been a description of me (well, apart from the number of arms) but it’s actually a description of a book scanner from Robin Sloan’s short story Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store which I stumbled upon recently.

The story really caught my attention and left me wanting more.

That’s when I discovered that there was an option to help that. Robin is using Kickstarter to solicit patrons for his first full length novel. If he hits his target our contributions (hopefully including yours) will go towards the costs of publishing, distribution and promotion.

By contributing to Robin’s project you get a copy of the book as well as an inside peek into the creative process. The premise of the story intrigued me: “Imagine a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. All the really good cases are on the internet. And Holmes is a woman, and Watson is an A.I., and San Francisco... oh, poor San Francisco...” so I decided to pledge.

Even if Robin’s work doesn’t grab your attention you should check out Kickstarter to see if there are other projects where you can support and become a patron.

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.

Every time I get all excited and add another computer to the setup at home I get in trouble.

It means more cables (the Media Center is a big culprit there) or another remote control (Media Center and Xbox360 are in the bad books there), something new to learn (that happened when we went to Vista and Office 2007 as well) or (my personal favorite gripe) yet more flashing blue lights.

Luckily our newest addition to the family isn't going to cause those sorts of upsets for a couple of reasons.

First of all because the server is designed to be headless it's going to live in a cupboard (just as soon as we drill a hole in the floor to drop the Cat5 cable down to the crawlspace) and because it's pretty transparent in operation no-one will really know it's there until it saves the day.

So what the heck is Windows Home Server? That was the question I asked when I first had a look at what was at the time called "Q". I couldn't see what was so special about a headless box that I could back stuff onto - after all I had a Maxtor NAS that could do it already didn't I?

But because I can't help myself when there's something shiny to play with I grabbed my spare desktop machine, flattened it and installed the first of several betas. After a pretty painless configuration process I had a box sitting happily on the network with the router configured to its liking and both the house PCs, the Media Center and my laptop running the Connector client. Everyone had access to the shared storage for personal data, music, pictures and movies and backups were running happily.

We slowly moved a lot of the video content for the Media Center off the various external USB drives that I used because we'd run out of space on the internal drives to the box upstairs.

A few weeks went by and we didn't really think about it. It was great having all the media in one place again and we moved the SlimServer software from Storms machine to the WHS box and no-one noticed any different (apart from Storm who got a few more responsive machine and better web browsing because she wasn't sharing her WiFi now the SlimServer was on the wired segment).

Then my work laptop had a bit of a moment and had to go for surgery. Now I'll admit that I'm not the king of backups - in fact I've not actually done anything apart from random files here and there since we got to the US - so I expected life was going to be painful. Not so. Grabbed my old laptop, installed the connector, connected to the Windows Home Server, mapped the backup and drag'n'dropped the files I needed.

An insiders perspective on development of Windows Home Server can be found on the WHS blog on TechNet and a glossy overview on the Microsoft site. If you want some more in-depth documentation check out the various Getting Started and SDK guides.

Yes, there is an SDK and folks can develop add-ins to extend the capabilities of the WHS configuration. I'm using WHIIST but check out the list at WeGotServed for more great add-ins. They're also keeping a list of OEMs who will be shipping units you can buy and put in your own cupboard later this year... meantime you can discuss the possibilities and future directions at the WHS Forum.

We still need to drill that hole so we can hide the wiring but Windows Home Server is staying.... and I'm looking forward to what v2 will bring ;)

It had to happen.

Singing LOLCats.

Is nothing sacred?

It's hard to describe so check out Kittahcore, the home of FeetFirstFalling with their first single "Killin' yr d00dz".

I'm not sure if it's going to change the face of popular culture as we know it today but it's a great use of "found" footage, original content (I assume the rendered cat is original content) and some pretty wicked beats...

It's LOLtastic ;)

Over the last few years I've worked on a number of projects where a pretty important deliverable was streaming video. Lots and lots of streaming video. Some of it edited on-demand clips but a fairly significant portion of it has been live content.

Luckily using Windows Media Server as a platform it's not that difficult to deliver, manage and report on either type of content. The on-demand stuff just needs a big enough server to cater for the variety of demands placed on it and the live content needs a very reliable head end encoder to feed the distribution platform.

Even content protection and billing mechanisms, while sometimes complex and often annoying, are not that difficult to do right.

The big pain point for a lot of the projects has been the bandwidth costs. Shifting terrabytes of data every month incurs a fairly hefty data center bill that's pretty hard to avoid (hence the need for advertising, sponsorship and subscription access to content).

Ironically too late to help me be a hero on any of the projects I used to work on (but hopefully it'll prove to be a suitable platform to help out the folks now running them) a Microsoft partner called Skinkers have developed a very clever new platform that addresses the pain point square on.

LiveStation (currently in Beta test) is a live streaming client designed to facilitate delivery of live TV to users PCs. LiveStation makes use of Silverlight as the display technology (so can utilize the streaming optimized codecs specifically engineered for that platform) and a peer-to-peer engine developed in conjunction with Microsoft Research which shifts the bandwidth demands from the publisher to a shared support mode where the more consumers there are of the content the more robust and responsive the delivery network becomes - instead of the opposite in a traditional internet broadcast model.

The concept is similar to what is behind Joost, Veoh and the Democracy (soon to be Miro) Player except where they are designed for on-demand, non time critical content (most of them need a buffering time) LiveStation has the added challenge that as a live content platform every frame is time critical.

I've been running the beta for a while (as well as Joost and a number of other next generation TV solutions) and it's not just because Skinkers are giving me a taste of home during the trial... I think it's the best player of the lot. They (in conjunction with Splendid) have done a great job designing a functional, elegant interface on top of a very powerful platform.

Don't take my word for it. Check out the interview that Steve Clayton (from MS UK) did with Matteo Berlucchi from Skinkers which explains the background as well as shows it in action.

There's been a lot of things floating around on the net recently about multi-touch displays and the new interface design that it's going to enable.

Movies like Minority Report and The Island have set expectations about how a multi-touch wall-screen or table interface should work

Now Microsoft have delivered a real world product. At various stages in its life it's been know as Play or Milan and has combined technology from Microsoft Research, the hardware group and the WPF team.

Visit the official site, and have a look at a 15 minute walk-through to see the power at on10.

Initially the hardware is going to appear at a number of partners including Sheraton Hotels and T-Mobile stores, but expect to see them turning up at technology and entertainment shows and when the volume ramps up ... a store near you ;)

The Microsoft Surface platform runs Vista with most of the UI developed in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation - the big brother of Silverlight). It uses a set of cameras sensing differences in Infra Red light to track objects on the surface and a DLP projector under the diffuser to project the images that you see and interact with.

Wonder what the processor specs are on this machine?

Amazingly people have already started to reproduce the Surface UI using Silverlight!

Update: A fairly detailed overview from Popular Mechanics with a couple of great videos showing Surface in action.

Having lived in Australia for several years, and watched the weather change in both the UK and US I can't help but be aware that something is going on.

Too many people however are not even aware (despite documentaries like Al Gores "An Inconvenient Truth" ) that there is even a risk or reason to be concerned.

Luckily this July - 7/7/07 to be precise - MSN are presenting a series of concerts called Live Earth around the world (in the US, UK, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia, and Turkey) to raise awareness of the problem.

To kick the process off, for the next 7 days a new song written and performed by Madonna exclusively for Live Earth is available for download from MSN so check out the site, find out where your closest concert is and check out the new track.

Then spread the word....

From Gizmodo some great news - Proposed House Bill Kills Internet Radio Royalty Rate Hike.

Looks like the RIAA and their short sighted attempts to price internet radio out of the market may be coming to an end.

Of course, it's still got to pass so make sure you follow the links in both stories to show your support.