Good Idea
In many respects, your yard serves as the welcome mat to your home. Make sure your house looks just as friendly at night as it does during the day by placing a sensor beneath the driveway. Naturally, the best time to install a sensor is before the driveway is poured (sensors that mount beside the driveway are also available if your path is already finished). When installed and programmed by a home systems installer, a driveway sensor can produce a variety of effects. For example, when a car pulls onto the property, the sensor could activate a path of landscape lights that would lead your guests from the gate all the way to your front door.

A Nice Chianti
You might be able to stuff plenty of cheese into the refrigerator, but a tall bottle of wine? Good luck. A wine cooler is a great addition to any kitchen, butler's pantry, master suite or rec room. Look for a unit that offers two separate temperature zones, suggests professional kitchen and bath designer Dave Custance of International Kitchens, based in Seattle. Each zone can be set to suit the type of wine that's stored inside. A unit that lets you maintain a humidity level of about 60 degrees is also important.

The Lowdown on Home Theater
Putting a theater in the basement offers several advantages. For starters, the entire room can be dedicated to movie viewing, which means the noise will conflict less with that from other rooms. Also, it can cost one-third less to finish a basement than an upper-level room.

Kid Proof Electronics
A TV is high on every kid's wish list. Hanging a set from the ceiling protects it from pillow fights and greasy fingers.

A Smarter TV
The first generation of digital televisions was a lot like some Hollywood starlets: slim and beautiful -- but not especially smart.

That is changing with the second wave of digital TVs, according to Vamsi Sistla of ABI Research, based in Oyster Bay, NY. New models from Hitachi, LG and Philips offer "enough intelligence to play a much bigger role in the home entertainment experience," Sistla says. "They have hard-drive storage, built-in Interactive Program Guides (IPGs) and are digital cable ready."

Currently, the drives are ostensibly there to support the software-based program guides, but some new models boast 80-GB drives -- far more space than is required for any program guide. ABI believes these enormous drives may eventually be used to store downloaded video.

Recording content to an internal drive for later viewing will clearly offer users a much more seamless and convenient experience than using an external device, such as a digital video recorder.

5 Technologies To Watch
Each year, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) names five technologies that are poised to dramatically change the way people live. Here is what the list includes this year:

• Media server It may look like just another black box in an entertainment cabinet, but a media server can do things that no other piece of audio or video equipment can do. It has a gigantic hard drive, so it can store just about any form of entertainment out there, including music, movies and digital photographs. It can also distribute the files to other devices in the home.

• Portable entertainment Advances in digital technology are changing not only the types of portable entertainment devices on the market but the way we use those gadgets. You can expect to see portable music devices like the Apple iPod converge with cell phones and personal digital assistants, for example.

• Hybrid appliances Refrigerators that can monitor the shelf life of their contents and ovens that can download recipes via the Internet and then execute them automatically are two examples of highly efficient kitchen appliances.

• Online games and portable games These elements are becoming an integral part of the growing gaming trend.

• Telematics This technology will enable users to download music directly to a car stereo from a wireless broadband connection. TV, movies and games might also be piped into autos.

Photography By Laurence Taylor

Top Of Page

Subscribe to Electronic House Magazine!