Cohenville

Lifehacker had a post from freeantennas.com on how to boost your wireless signal using household products.  Some reported gains of 100%, but others found gains of only 5%.  But of more interest is a link to another post that shows you how to change your router from a $60 to a $600 one by hacking the firmware.  Might be worth a try (at your own risk).

Source: Lifehacker 

I have been preparing to purchase a nice HDTV for my basement, but I was curious what size is right given the size and layout of my room. Amazon had a good article discussing just this. Once I know the size, how do I know what type of TV to get. It differs based on size and cost (obviously), but the set up of the room may effect things as well. About.com has a good post discussing some of those issues. And finally another good article from an HDTV forum based in England.

TiVo has just released version TiVo Desktop 2.4b. What’s new? Well you can now take programs that are on your portable media player and push them back to your TV.   Notable new features include the ability to broadcast “HD” photographs (1280×720) from comptuer to Series3 TiVo (doesn’t help me any) and the ability to transcode several video formats (other than DivX) for transfer to and playback on Series2 units. A less glamorous, but useful, feature allows the software to map beyond the default TiVo folder.

Source: Zatz Not Funny

Good post at Lifehacker (again) under Alpha Geek on how to back up DVDs to your iPod, Zune, or other portable media player. Good instructions, descriptions and links that will get you going. What you need to 1) extract the information from the dvd, and convert those files to the format you need. It’s not as simple as DVDShrink, but it’s not that bad.

Source: Lifehacker

This interesting new site called PriceProtectr will help protect you from the drops in price that always seem to occur after you buy your new TV or entertainment center. Many of the big electronics stores (Best Buy, Circuit City) offer price protection – if something you purchase drops in price in the next 30 days you get a refund for the change. But how do you know when this happens? This site will let you know when it happens!