Other Tech

Ticket prices at the box office may be at an all-time high, but the cost of admission for good home theater continues to plummet. Case in point: the three home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) systems gathered here. While enthusiasts might find one of these nice for a bedroom or summer home, they're just the ticket for those getting in the game.

On first glance, Slingbox looks more like a giant foil-wrapped candy bar than a piece of sophisticated electronics. But it's actually a new product that lets you watch TV from your cable box or digital video recorder (DVR) on any PC attached to your home network or, for that matter, any PC in the world with a broadband Internet connection.

As I unpacked the box, I kept asking myself, "Yes, but where are all the speakers?" Your friends will ask, too, when they see the SurroundWorks 200 from Cambridge SoundWorks - and might wonder if you've decamped from the 21st century and returned to the days of mono.

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, nearly every piece of electronic equipment you own creates heat. Some, like projectors, create a lot. Others, like DVD players, don't create very much at all. Depending on how you have your gear set up, though, any heat can create a problem. What's worse, you may not even know there's a problem until it's too late. There are solutions, though, and they vary depending on how you store your gear.

When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers decided to retire their Jumbotron screen last fall, they weren't worried about finding a place to dump it. After all, Sony, manufacturer of the 14,000-pound behemoth, had publicly announced that it had partnered with Waste Management and that any Sony product brought to a designated Waste Management collection site would be accepted at no charge.

Nat Hentoff has just celebrated 50 years of writing about civil rights for The Village Voice. We at S&V would like to point out that, in February 1958, Hentoff was also a contributing editor to this magazine's earliest progenitor, HiFi & Music Review.