Zibblog

Note: For the impatient people that just want to browse photos of my renovations, you can go to the Flickr photoset.

As you may or may not know, while I was in between employment, my parents drove out from Nebraska to “help” me remodel parts of my condo (where “help” means that my dad was doing the real work and I helped out where I could. I had decided to skip the kitchen for the moment because of the amount of up front work that was required in terms of ordering cabinets and such combined with the fact that it was probably going to be a lot more expensive. Therefore, the initial idea was for my parents to come out, assess the place, and determine how much of the living room, dining room, and guest bathroom that we thought we could do. By the time they got there, I had gotten a ceiling fan from Lamps Plus (a store that I would highly recommend) and some in ceiling speakers for the kitchen, but that was about it.

After my parents got out here, we settled into a routine of getting up for a real breakfast somewhere, heading to Home Depot and/or other places to pick up any necessary supplies, and working until around 8pm before getting dinner. In the middle of the week, Mike was kind enough to let my mom and I come along to the NCAA basketball tournament in Oakland since he had a couple of extra tickets become available at the last moment. We decided that we probably had enough time to do painting of the main areas (living room, hallways, dining room, and guest bath) along with crown molding, baseboard, and light fixture replacement. The ceiling needed to be painted as well, and there were multiple other little projects along the way.

As a result of all of this, I learned some valuable lessons about home repair.

• Bathrooms are expensive (a lot of money was spent at Restoration Hardware)
• Crown molding really does make a big difference (I underestimated the amount of the effect until I saw the difference).
• Ikea is cheap.
• The service at Home Depot is lousy.
• Paint may not solve everything, but it certainly helps.

Anyway, as I posted in the beginning, there are a lot more photos here arranged loosely in a before and after format.

In the past few years, most remote controls that you buy will have some kind of universal remote features. For example, the tivo remote will let you control the volume on your tv set, and most DVD player remotes will let you do the same sort of thing. This was fine for me until I finally got a surround sound system. Since I don’t have built in speakers on my plasma, the surround sound system is used for everything. It also acts as a video switcher controlling virtually all the video (except for the HDMI from the DVD player) going to the TV. At this point, it sucked to just turn the whole system on and off. I had read good things about the Logitech Harmony remote controls. After looking at the different models, I chose the entry level 510 model.

Note: At this point, it looks like the 510, which was mostly sold at Wal-mart and Target, has been replaced with the 550 that looks very similar. It is also virtually the same as the harmony remote for the Xbox 360.

The picture shows the remote control and all of the remotes that it replaced. The main selling point behind the harmony remotes is the idea of “activities”. You set up an activity like “Watch Tivo” and the remote control knows what all of the buttons should do. The remote also has a scrollable list of LCD buttons at the top. To program the remote, you walk through a web application that asks you what the different components of your system are and how they are hooked together. For example, that your digital cable box is connected to input 3 on your tv. After that step, the application will suggest different activities like “Watch Tivo”, “Watch TV”, and “Play Game”. For the most part, I thought that the application was really easy to use (except for the fact that it had a lot of odd characters show up on the screen when used with Firefox, which is why I use Safari with it), and the default setup worked pretty well. When you’re relatively satisfied with it, you connect the remote to your keyboard with a standard USB cable and the remote is programmed.

One of the drawbacks of the remote is that the LCD button section tends to be pretty overpopulated by default, so it was one of the first areas that I cleaned up. The design of the web application overall is pretty non-intuitive at times when you are trying to figure out where some option is set up, but it has some pretty powerful features like being able to say that you don’t want to ever shut off your digital cable box without having to modify individual activities. There’s some ability to set up your own activities, but it wasn’t easy to figure out where to go to set it up. When I was reading reviews of the remote, a few people said that the buttons were kind of small and the remote was too flimsy. I’ve got relatively small hands/fingers and I haven’t broken mine yet, but your mileage will vary. In the end, I think it is a great remote, and I was able to get my mom using my tv setup and switching between different activities like tivo and HD cable with only a little bit of teaching.