Iron Nail

In case you were wondering,The Iron Nail broke his brain trying to provide a clear and concise description of home entertainment center setup, and was checked into a psychiatric rehabilitation facility for several months. He emerges from his psychotropic stupor, however, with renewed energy, and a regained sense of optimism that there are some technologies of great potential benefit to the masses that many people haven't yet grasped.

In Input This, Part 1, I suggested that coming to terms with your home entertainment system is a manageable task. If you don't particularly care about audio quality, you can do just fine without the need to purchase or hook up a component system. If you like the idea of listening to everything -- music, TV, DVD's, and so on -- through the same, high-quality speakers, then the bulk of the complexity is focused on one component, which is the A/V receiver. The receiver is the heart of your system, and everything else hooks up to the receiver in a pretty straight-forward way, if you get the right receiver. A receiver is "right" for you if it is suitably powered, has connections for the components you want to watch and listen to, and fits your budget.

 

Did you enlist your nephew to hook up your home entertainment system? Do you live in fear that your VCR or your DVD player might break, and you will be forced to try to figure out how to hook up a new one? Do you buy a new home entertainment component only to have it sit in its box while you get over the setup gumption trap? Is that what's bothering you, cousin?

I love technology. In literary terms, I phile techno. But it is not an unconditional love.

One condition I have is that to receive my love, technology must not be annoying. I occasionally run across a technology that is annoying, and I want it to be gone from my sight and my consciousness as quickly as its two little techno-legs will carry it.

Is there such a thing as safe, family-oriented computing? I believe there is.

'Safe' is, of course, a relative term. Once you connect your computer to the internet, there are many dangers, such as these, that you need to educate yourself about. If you are part of a family with more than one computer in the house, you can substantially improve your family's safety, and vastly improve the quality of your family's computing life, by installing a home network.

I don't think anyone has seen my TiVo that doesn't covet it.

It will come up in a conversation. I will say something like,"No, I haven't seen that episode yet, but I TiVo'ed it." ("TiVo," you see, has become a verb.) Their eyes will widen -- "You have a TiVo?" They have all heard someone talk about it, but it sounds like a techie thing that is probably too complicated to get involved with. I then have to explain that you don't have to be a nerd to have a TiVo. You pretty much just hook it up and go. In this day and age, I say, I don't understand how anyone can live without a TiVo.