I’m on a quest to find the best of the affordable smart home automation systems that are available (or will be shortly). The first couple of review samples have come in, and one of the primary aspects these two systems have in common is the impressive amount of engineering and design effort put into making installation and set up as easy as possible. That’s vitally important because for home automation to really get its foot in the door (so to speak) and appeal to more than just gadget-freaks like me, the system controllers need to be smart enough that the end user doesn’t have to commit an overwhelming amount of brainpower to the process of setting them up and getting them running. If the initial installation of a smart home automation controller is anything close to the pain involved in creating a bunch of macros in a programmable universal remote control, there’s going to be a lot of product returns from unhappy customers.

The first system to arrive was...

Evidently, Polk has a thing for XM Satellite Radio. About six months after they introduced a stand-alone, home-component XM tuner (the XRt12), the speaker company is pulling the wraps off of a new XM-ready tabletop entertainment system called the I-Sonic. Sure, you might think it's just a new compact stereo system designed to sonically kick the you know what out of you know which (heavily advertised) tabletop system from you know who. (And who am I to say that you're wrong?) But a quick look at all of the I-Sonic's features and capabilities makes it appear to be something more - you know, the kind of thing your grandmother could use but will still impress the heck out of your more techno-sophisticated friends.

Gefen's new analog-to-digital video scaler takes the VGA output from a single analog video source, such as a computer's analog video output or a DVD player's component video output, and scales it to 1280 x 1024 (for computers) or 1080i (for HDTVs). The input resolution is automatically detected while the output resolution and refresh rate can be selected through the unit's on-screen display menu or front panel push buttons. As a result, the company says, installation can be accomplished "in seconds." (That seems a bit optimistic, unless they're talking about double or maybe even triple digits. But we get the point.)

Hide your credit cards now before it's too late.

My son, Nick, recently attended an engineering weekend for high-school seniors at a nearby university. After splitting into teams, the attendees competed in several engineering challenges, one of which was to build a contraption made from a meager assortment of supplied materials (including an Alka-Seltzer tablet) that would move a small toy car across a pan of water.