Meet The Digital Family

To produce PM’s three-part Digital Family project, contributor Rebecca Day spent dozens of hours arranging to have the latest and most interesting home electronics shipped to Jamieson and Peggy Jones, who live with their two children in western Connecticut. The Joneses have spent literally hundreds of hours setting up and testing all those goodies and reporting back to Rebecca in near-daily e-mails. Here’s a sampling of the correspondence (mainly by Peggy) leading up to Part II, published in the September issue of POPULAR MECHANICS magazine.4/14/05: Hi Rebecca. Thanks for all the stuff you’re getting for us. I’m totally excited about this phase of the project. We have been busy with a new soccer season, school stuff, Jami’s mom moving to Florida next week, and other spring projects. Here’s what I have been doing with phase two so far.1. I took the video camera to Ben’s soccer practice on Tuesday afternoon, and it was fantastic. I hadn’t read any of the instructions on the unit, I just picked it up and tried it. I was really shocked at how far I could see with it and liked the feel of the wide/tele button. It’s amazingly steady. The only problem I had using it was finding the play button. It looks more like a still-camera button and I wasn’t expecting that. Now that I know what I’m looking for, it’s easy to spot it. Anyway, it made for a few laughs with the others around me.Also, during practice Nina loves to play at the school playground next to the soccer field, but it is a bit far away. With the camera I felt like I had a pair of binoculars! It was able to zoom into her face from about a football field away. That was nice because usually she runs off to play with other siblings and I’m a little uncomfortable with the distance. I felt much better knowing exactly what she was up to without straining to see her.2. Loaded Ulead VideoStudio last night, read a little of the manual but have not used it yet. I think I’ll use the soccer practice as the first project to try the software.3. Cable people hooked up the HD cable box yesterday. Wow! What a difference it made on the HD channels, especially Discovery Channel. I saw a program that had lava flowing from a volcano and taped it for the kids. It was really impressive. Haven’t shown them yet, but plan to. I think they’ll be amazed, too. The only downer was the fact that “American Chopper” was airing on Discovery HD, a show I’m not particularly fond of but which Jami is. So, I guess I had to watch it but only because it’s part of round two. On the brighter side, I think that some of my PBS shows are going to be nice to see in HD. Will give you more feedback on this as we watch.Jami is measuring for the cable now and will call later this afternoon. Thanks again for organizing all this stuff for us and for the furniture for the TV. I’m looking forward to the systems all coming together this weekend! Will keep you posted as we progress. We’ll have a lot more to say once everything is hooked up. Also, DirecTV sent the DVR unit but not the dish, so I’ll let you know when that arrives. Thanks Rebecca! Peggy4/20: Just got back in about an hour ago; dog for dinner on road, yuck. Sorry I don’t have the name of the guy who called last night. This is the flat wire. Goertz. Sent me 120 ft. with four speaker ends and custom cutting tool. This stuff may look kind of odd mixed in with the Harmon Kardon (HK) stock 16-gauge wire. This wire would be great for car audio, no carpet bulge. The Sony unit came and looks the business! The new cable box woke me out of bad sleep last night. Singing hard drive! Figure TiVo will have same effect.Listed longish cables with Monster request so as to locate boxes far from bed. Came up with neat idea for routing Monster cable on wall, using custom-made standoffs to show off high-end wire and reduce installation time. Hard drive-supported multimedia, battery backup and surge suppression would, of course be, great.The RCA set shut off twice today while kids were watching. I don’t think this was because of an outage, though. I’ll run it all day tomorrow and see if I can make it happen.Took me ages just to get Monster order straight today. Great job with all this stuff, it’s quite a task. Thanks. Yours truly, JamiesonMedia Platforms Design Team4/25: Hi. Hope the weekend went well. Installed HK speakers and almost all wires for Niles stuff. Also all Niles speakers. Went great, I am using flat wire and it is solving some installation issues for not-new construction. Niles did not send out infrared control unit that needs to accompany wall switch. I believe it’s the main system control unit: MSU250. Have enough wire left to install my old speakers in library room. The Niles distribution hub I have will accommodate one more volume control. Could you do your magic again with them? One infrared volume control, please? Also, as it applies to the volume control they already sent, do they come with their own controller? If so, and I think it would, it did not come either.The sony DVD unit is hooked up at my desk with the plasma and a very nice HI8 DECK I already had. Peg can start burning this week.Used TiVo while installing speakers to watch a car race. I loved the triple FF speed the unit has. No problems with the RCA stopping. Tried to surf channels on DirecTV. A joke. It takes forever for the list to scroll. I brought in the Acer tablet PC and used Web page to surf for channels. This worked. However, it did not show which would be broadcast in HD, which surfing on the TV does. Also, so many of the channels are PPV and, unlike cable, these stations are not at the end of the list, so as to be easy not to scroll through, but are in the middle. Finishing HK setup now. Thanks for your patience. Oh yeah, the cat5 wire was really great to install, very slippery jacket and extremely flexible. A 10 on my scale. Peg’s writing you now, it will be off momentarily. Thx jami.4/25: When I was in high school, my parents would often take me to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic. Now, they have started playing in my living room Rebecca, the sound is fantastic! Jami just hooked up the speaker system and it sounds like I’m in a concert hall. Just had to tell you. It’s really incredible. We’re listening to classical guitar right now. Never expected quite this much of an improvement over what we had! I’m looking forward to listening to some other genres and comparing them to the pre-Harman Kardon sound. Talk to you soon, Peggy.4/25: Hi Rebecca. It’s been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks, but I think I’m back in action! Just wanted to give you some of the feedback on the equipment. Windows Media Center: I really like the front end of this software. It is so easy to use that I haven’t even opened the manual to read how to use it! I made a great find last week(s) regarding the use of the Media Center to listen to NPR stations and listen to shows in the NPR archives. I was in the car and had one of those “driveway moments” NPR always talks about. Listening to a story about Billy Crystal’s Uncle Milt and his involvement with early jazz recordings. I waited in my car until the story was over because it was so gripping. I thought Jami would also enjoy it and planned to find it on the PC and play it for him.That night I was flipping through the Windows Media Center checking out new menus I’d not yet tried, and I came across the OnLine Showcase. Well, there was the NPR logo and I went to it and found the story I’d heard! It was great. I put it on my playlist, and, well, now I can’t find it! I don’t know if I thought I’d recorded it and didn’t or if we have so many files in our playlist that I haven’t been able to locate it. I’m going to keep on trying, but the archive on the media center only goes back two weeks. Initially, all I had to do to find the story was to remember what program I was listening to and the date. Then it popped right up. I was so happy to learn this because now that we are going to have speakers on the deck, I can listen to the shows I like or put them on my playlist. I’d love to be able to hear stories while I’m in the garden. I’ll be interested to see whether the Web site will allow me to take a story from earlier than the two weeks the Media Center holds and somehow get it into my playlist. What a combination: being able to connect with the Earth and engage my mind in learning new things about the world!FedEx arrived. Just got another battery backup APC 725VA, 450 watts. THANKS! I have also used the Media Center to play the photos of my mother-in-law’s trip to Africa and play music from the movie “Out of Africa” as background to it. She loved this. I tried this weekend to use the Ulead software to create a DVD (as you suggested earlier, thanks) for her and it was pretty easy. However, I’ve had trouble with some of the details like playing the music at a specific time and coordinating the pan feature to match the picture (it’s actually a scanned picture of a painting she made while on her trip). There is some text on the paintings that is really beautiful and I’d like to zero into it and fade away on some of them. I’ve had some trouble with applying these effects to single slides, and plan to go back to it after we reinstall the software on the Sony Vaio.I think Jami mentioned to you that my computer was really dogging after I installed the two packages on the Dell laptop. Now the software is off the laptop and I’ll work more on the Africa DVD when the software is up on the Vaio. As I recall, it took quite a while to install the software initially, fyi.The kids have been using the Media Center to watch shows that I’ve recorded for them. There’s a new show called “Dragonfly TV,” which is a great show on PBS that Ben likes. Nina has been watching “Madeline,” which is on at 5 am or something like that, and I’ve often missed recording on the VCR due to forgetting to set up the machine before bedtime. Now that’s not a problem. Media Center makes it so easy. In fact, now I have more shows on there than I expected. I have to change some of the settings on the record menu to “delete after I view program.” That way, the maintenance will take care of itself. This is more true for the kids shows than mine. They don’t want to watch the same show twice, and remember right away if they’ve seen it before.I have also utilized the feature that allows you to record shows only once, and not double-record the repeat of the show even if it’s on at a different time. I watched the B&W version of “The Secret Garden” with the kids on Friday afternoon. I recorded it using the Media Center and was pleasantly surprised to see it was the original version. It was very timely as the middle school just put on a play by the same name and Ben’s class went to see it as well as reading the (abridged version! Ugh!) of the book.Love the idea of letting the kids watch only the shows I record for them. Talk about censorship! Anyway, will try recording some programs on the DirecTV system and anticipate being able to have them FF through the commercials. Now they just mute the commercials (on live TV) when they remember to (or when I hear some ridiculous ad for Oreo Cookie cereal, etc. and call out to mute the TV) so they see the whole thing and just can’t hear the sound. Now they’ll only glimpse at what the commercials are about, I hope. Not that much better I guess, but I’m still trying to keep advertising to a minimum. I don’t want my kids to ask for these junky snacks they see on TV or, worse yet, have them exposed to the “teenage stuff” on some of these channels. Boy, I’m sounding old and conservative! Anyway, until they start advertising organic foods and normally dressed girls/boys, the kids are going to have to mute and FF through the ads!I recorded a great show on the Discovery HD channel on the bedroom TV. The kids loved it and so did I. They had shown lava flowing and it was quite realistic. I let the kids watch this show when they didn’t have anything else to watch on live TV or on the Media Center recorded TV (this was at the beginning before all the shows started to pile up!) I’ve also been able to see some shows on scrapbooking in the bedroom. Now I’m looking forward to having the Media Center in the master bedroom so that I can record some gardening shows. I have also used the cable TV unit to record a show I was watching and postpone my watching to another time. It was great. Also used the pause feature to stop the show for a phone call. Loving this stuff.I’ve moved the laptop from the kitchen to the den and set up my own “office”–there. This has been great, I feel a lot more organized and the paperwork is coming under control now that I have a bigger desk area to work at. I do sometimes miss having the laptop right there on the counter, and probably will try to bring it in every morning to check the calendar and to-do list. With all the sickness (me and kids) lately it’s been hard to maintain a regular schedule, but now that the school vacation is over it should get better. I’ll send more feedback as I use the Ulead software more. Talk to you soon. Hope all’s well. PeggyMedia Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design Team5/2: The swing-away frame for the bedroom TV is now complete, and I am working on an elegant solution to wire routing. The Monster cables that arrived are 4 meters long, or 13 ft. My intention has been to make some sort of wire chase so as to run the wires along the outside of the wall around to meet the Media Center and cable box sitting on top of the bureau. I thought of running these wires in the wall, however it would be a long wire run and is not too practical. The 4m-long wire, incidentally, is the length I ordered.I spent an hour or so today and made a wooden wire chase molding that was going to be fastened to the wall like a chair railing, and the wires would be hidden behind it. The molding turned out pretty well. However, I got to thinking of having a thin flat monitor against the wall and a large bureau or bookcase to hold the cable box and the Media Center. Why not just put the TV on the bureau? Looking at all the stuff in place, it looks as though that’s what I should’ve done. This is not to say the TV on the wall doesn’t look good and function well, it does. It’s just that it would be so much better if it didn’t have to be connected to these boxes, which are sitting on some big platform–kind of defeats the purpose.And then I started thinking about using the Palm 72 as a remote control. Now sitting in a chair using this type of control seems to me will be just fine, because you can look down at the Palm screen and the infrared light from the unit will be pointed at your TV. However, this is not the case while lying in bed. As we all know, with our remote in bed we must first select with our finger the button we want, then point the remote at the TV and press the button. This works all right because we are using one hand to operate and we have the tactile feel of the buttons, but this will not be the case with the palm remote.Then I was also thinking that I don’t want either the Media Center or cable box even in the room. Then it occurred to me that other than the infrared receivers, they don’t need to be. So the simple solution is this: the Monster cables, which are plenty long enough, will run down through the wall behind the TV into the basement. There they will be plugged into both the Media Center and cable box. Now, in the ceiling above the bed can be an infrared extender receiver, which will send the infrared data to the basement where it will be seen by the cable box and Media Center. One will be able to relax in bed holding either a standard remote or preferably the Palm Pilot, in the natural vertical position and manipulate the TV peripherals easily. The TV will stand alone on the wall in full glory without the impedance of visible connectivity. So you like?I now understand what the remote volume control units are from Niles. I had thought these units were designed to allow one to adjust the volume in the room using a remote control instead of turning the rotary knob on the volume control itself. Now I see it is to allow you to use the stereo’s remote control in remote locations and send a signal to that stereo by aiming the stereos remote at the Niles volume control. This functionality, however, will be superseded by the wireless Media Center controller that we were looking at on the Web site for the whole-house automation unit.This was the unit we talked about that uses the Windows operating system on the small handheld. Superseded, of course, if that unit is to be used. This would be preferable to the infrared remote via the Niles system because you would be getting visual feedback as you made system adjustments.The Pioneer DVD recorder arrived today and is on the shelf awaiting your arrival. All the best, Jami.5/6: Funny things, remotes. As you were sending your last e-mail I was sorting through six remotes in order to listen to music, and two manuals not including the three Niles install guides I just put down; and Post-it place holders. I think the whole article could be on the remote saga. Sound system is up in kitchen and on deck, sounds great. Also running signal to bedroom TV to use its speakers to also broadcast HK sound. 7.1 sound system works with HK even if zone 2 is on. This is because internal amp is not being used to drive zone 2 speakers.Running lines through wall today for bedroom TV. I may go to Radio Shack and get infrared extender. Thanks for helping with remotes. I set up DirecTV with preferences. Jami5/17: Hi Rebecca. We’re recovering from the whirlwind yesterday. The shoot went really well, I think. Here are some random comments that I’ve wanted to put in writing to you.Home Theater/JVC: We really have enjoyed the whole television experience as a family. During the shoot we hooked up the JVC camcorder to the RCA TV and watched the kids playing soccer and flying kites at the park. The quality of the video taken by the JVC was much better than the analog TV feed (just as you told us it would be). Maybe because I’m partial to the two main actors, but I think more because the video camera just takes great shots. I was able to follow the kids running to keep the kite aloft and it did a great job of both zooming in on the kite/kids and not being too shaky to watch.I think the video of the soccer games was even better, but that may be because the light of the evening was very pretty. I never thought that I’d be one of those people who continually videotape their kids, from first sneezes to playing sports. Well, maybe this new camera has changed that a bit. It is fun to watch them on the huge screen, and they love to see themselves, especially after a great run or a goal or a save. In a way, the camera is like a pair of binoculars while I’m at their games. The picture is so clear and it makes it easy to see what’s happening when there is a lot of action around the ball. I know Nina is always right in there, and now I have clear proof! She’[s unstoppable. Interestingly, Nina is sometimes camera-shy. Once recently I caught her dancing with Jami and she ran out of the room screaming, “Ooooh! You’re taping me!” The photographer wouldn’t have believed it after she hammed it up for him yesterday.JVC/Vaio: I have also watched our very first JVC video recording in which Nina and Jami were getting ready for a father-daughter dance for Brownies. On it were some funny movements of Nina’s and some “break dancing” from Ben. To look at this video, I attached the JVC to the Vaio and downloaded the movies into JVC’s software. It was fairly straightforward, once I found the software disk. With all the equipment, instruction manuals and accompanying CDs that come with all this audio-video stuff, it was tricky putting my hands on the software. Once I came up with it, it was pretty easy to use.However, as I started to load the video onto the Vaio, it was indicating that it would take 45 minutes to complete. Actually, the number of minutes remaining kept increasing, so at Jami’s suggestion, I just used the videos he had already downloaded to the Vaio so that I could seize the moment and use the software with previously downloaded videos right then and there.JVC/RCA: The still photo shots from the JVC are really clear on the RCA. The photographer took a shot of Nina sitting on the beautiful entertainment center (thank you Rebecca and PM!) with a huge close-up photo of her with a fan in her hand (and, in true Nina form, tongue sticking out). It was neat, and the photo really captured the large on-screen image as well as Nina sitting alongside it. We watched more of these still shots and the soccer/kite movies taken by the JVC while eating Chinese food around the TV, a habit I’m sure the kids would love to get into. It’s all in the photographs: full mouths, chopsticks and all.Now I really want to work on getting those videos on the Media Center, so that we can flip to them easily with the remote, just like the digital pictures we have. It makes such an impact when it’s on that huge screen! I really love it. So many of our home movies just collect dust in the closet. If they were all accessible to us this easily, I know we’d watch them more often. The kids are always asking what they were like or what they used to do when they were little. It would be a fun family time to spend together on a Friday night watching some of their early antics.Speaker System/Media Center: On a different note, I absolutely love the scramble feature of the music we put onto the HP desktop computer. It’s great to be able to select a genre, such as jazz, and then just listen to so many different artists play randomly. Of course, now we have music blaring throughout the house. I’ve decided that we have some really great CDs! Most of the time I want to hear a certain kind of music, not just the CD of one artist, usually to suit a time of day or create a mood. It really does this nicely, and effortlessly.On the other hand, it still allows you to skip to the next song in the queue if you don’t like the current selection. Between the scramble feature and the fact that all our CDs are stored on the computer with such accessibility, I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of having to insert new CDs into the player. I find myself much more apt to listen to music now that everything is fully functional. The only thing I’ve not yet done is to listen to NPR live in the morning over the speaker system.While we’re on the topic of listening to the whole-house stereo, I found a really great way to get hold of my NPR shows via KQED’s Web site. They now have these “podcasts” available for two of their shows (“Forum” and “Perspectives”). They are already in mp3 format so getting them to the player is a breeze. All I had to do was load a program called iPodder to my laptop and add these shows to its list. Simply clicking on the show will automatically download the file to my iRiver Music Manager software. Then it’s a mere drag and drop to get it onto my player. Voila, I have some NPR shows whenever I want them. I also downloaded software that allows you to do the same kind of thing for listening on your computer.RCA/Harmon Kardon DVD Player/Surround Speakers: Sunday night we watched a rented video called “Secondhand Lion,” a cute story of a kid spending the summer with his uncles in Texas. The quality of the movie was superior to anything we’ve yet seen on the RCA. Not only that, but the sound system was–and I’m not exaggerating–completely realistic. When I first listened to some classical music, it did really sound like the Philharmonic was in my living room. This time it was someone knocking at my door! Listening to the old codger uncles shooting their rifles in the movie sounded realistic, but unlikely to be happening in my own house. Doors opening and the sound of objects falling, however, really had me fooled. I was startled several times in the movie thinking something had actually happened in the house. That’s all for now. More to come tomorrow. Good night. Peggy5/18: After the hustle and bustle of getting the kids off to school, I sit in the kitchen to sip my coffee and start up the Akimbo. It’s 8:45 am and I figure I’ll just spend a few minutes relaxing with the new toy. It’s my first time “soloing” on it, having seen some of Jami’s shows running on the unit earlier.Well, I have to say it was anything but relaxing. The Akimbo menu screens were painfully slow to change. It took me a few times of clicking the remote and getting into places I hadn’t intended to, before I realized there must be a huge delay in my remote choices and the actual carrying out of those choices (in fact, I’m waiting right now for the menu to switch to Food Network, having pressed the down arrow key a couple of times to get there. I’m still waiting.) There seems to be no indication at all that the Akimbo has received my input, nor is there any indication that it is even working at all.I’m stuck at a screen called Recent Additions on which is listed the Food Network, CNN and a few others. Akimbo seems to want to keep me stuck on IFILM, one of these recent additions, and isn’t allowing me to move up or down the list to Food Network. Rebecca, I really want to give you some positive feedback on the Akimbo because the concept of it seems great. I came into this looking forward to just cruising around, but to my disappointment, I’ve encountered nothing but frustration. Moving on to other tasks. I’ll have to try again later and hope for better results.Two hours later: Jami returns home from Ben’s school. He does what I did, but it works! How frustrating is that? No delay in the remote choices, nothing. He thinks it may have been an Internet problem we were having, not a problem with Akimbo. Anyway, I’ve asked it to record some cooking shows. One thing I hadn’t realized is that it takes a while for the shows to download. I thought it was quicker, didn’t realize I’d have to wait. So, I’ll get back to that later.Here’s what’s been going on this week: Let’s start with Jami. I haven’t seen much of him lately, something about remotes. Well, last night he finally got one working! He was ecstatic. This morning I turned on the TV (something I rarely do in the morning–much more likely to switch on the radio). I remembered seeing a show on Discovery HD Theater called “Sunrise Earth,” so I decided to check it out. It’s a silent program, except for the sounds of nature, and it was really cool.I even called Ben in from his Lego building session to see the program. He was equally fascinated by it. The picture on the Toshiba screen was like looking out the window at a real scene. Seriously. I was really impressed. And now that all the speakers are set up in the bedroom, it was like being outdoors. There were sounds of birds and underwater sounds that were so realistic that I asked Jami and Ben if they were our birds or from the show. This is the kind of show I’d like to wake up to rather than an alarm clock, though I must say it would keep me in bed instead of encouraging me to get started with the day. Maybe it should be viewed at night, as a way of slowing down after a busy day.Anyway, it took place at a state park in Florida where lots of manatees congregate. We have actually been to this park with the kids when they were toddlers. I must say this show combined with the excellent picture could make you an “armchair traveler.” You don’t have to leave home to enjoy these scenes from nature. Although I enjoy the real outdoors more than seeing it in my bedroom, I can see tuning in to this program in the middle of the winter when I’m trying to tune out the cold, gray weather! Can the TV also produce the warm weather that goes along with the realistic pictures that I’m seeing? Only seems fair that it should.That led to a discussion of taping this HD show. I realize that the cable box isn’t part of what we’re reviewing, but it couldn’t record very many of these shows from a storage standpoint. It’s an interesting perspective to see that these HD shows are so mesmerizing, so much so that I’d want to record them. However, what about the idea of TiVo or DVR being an on-demand kind of television viewing. After all, shouldn’t I be able to tape a few of these “Sunrise Earth” shows to look at whenever I want? With the amount of space they take up, I would not be able to record very many of them. So, I’m brought back to the old idea of watching them at the time of their broadcast. I never thought that we’d be able to fill up all the storage capacity of this technology, but with HD shows, I can see where it would happen easily and rather quickly.Along these lines, I’m finding that I want to watch HD shows exclusively. They are wonderful and usually involve animals or nature or travel, which are some of my favorite kinds of programs. I’m also spending more time in the living room at night watching the RCA. I love the closed captioning feature at night, because it doesn’t disturb the kids when they are just falling off to sleep, yet I’m able to flip through some of the shows that TiVo has recorded for me. There is so much to choose from!I’ve been playing with some of the features that are in the settings mode. I like the children’s filter and the currently playing list that is created by TiVo and by the shows I’ve asked it to record. I did finally get the “Popular Mechanics for Kids” shows to record, which is great because I haven’t seen them on our PBS channel in a long time. Ben and Nina really liked them, even before we became involved with this article. Really!I like the idea of the children selecting programs from a list that I create. I’m not so taken with TiVo recording shows for the kids, because not all children’s programming is the same–though the TiVo children filters seem to think so. Anyway, I really am looking for educational children’s programs for Ben and Nina to watch. I think it is a much better use of their time to view from this list. There is no flipping around on channels that have “children’s” programming that I think is a waste of their time. Instead, they can make choices from the list so they have some control over the decision-making process. And (believe it or not), I do include some fun shows like Tom and Jerry, so they’re not always in the “educational” mode!We have been renting lots of family movies. Last night we finished “Herbie,” which we had started watching on Sunday night. It was really clear on the screen and the stereo surround sound was fun with all the cars racing around the track. Nina also watched “Annie” in the living room. It is surprising to hear the surround sound in these movies. It makes me jump. I’m not used to such realistic sounds, and I keep thinking something is falling in the house or someone is really at the door. It takes a little getting used to. I guess I need to have more of a “willing suspension of disbelief” when I’m watching TV and allow myself to be more “in” the movie.We also taped the Ziegfeld Follies to DVD, although now I can’t find the DVD! I wanted to watch it with Nina because she loves those old dancing movies with Fred Astaire. Actually, that gives me an idea to search by actor name for more of his movies that I don’t know about. I did that for Albert Brooks, and found some movie I’d never heard of. A good use of TiVo I think.JVC Video camera: This has been such fun for me to use. Yesterday I spent a good part of the day cutting and pasting the soccer footage I have taken in the last few weeks. On Saturday I taped one of Ben’s games and got most of the important parts on tape. Naturally, when he scored the goal (!) I was busy trying to figure out how to delete some files on the JVC so as to have more room for the game. Hmmmm.Ben and I are working on his final book report/project and he came up with a great idea to create a movie trailer for the book he read. The kids were given a list to choose from, and though this idea wasn’t on the list, his teacher loved it. Jami added that it would be cool to show it to the class using the handheld. Ben seemed to like that idea, though it could also be hooked up to a larger monitor for easier viewing by the entire class. So far we have a list of scenes and we are searching the Web for audio clips and pictures of things he wants to put in the trailer. It has taken lots more time than it would have taken him to do another project on the list, but in the end I’m hoping he will be glad that he did it.We are going to edit the clips and moving pictures we take with the JVC video cam in the software packages you gave us. Ben has been playing with the software to get used to it. He and Jami imported a blimp that Ben created in solidworks. It’s a nice tie-in to his school work with Jami, in which he’s using the solidworks program in conjunction with algebraic equations to create 3d objects. I’ll keep you posted on this one.JVC software is very easy to use and necessary for viewing the videos. I tried to use the files with Microsoft software and it couldn’t read it. JVC software allows you to step forward or backward 15 frames at a time or in single frames. I’ve been able to remove the parts of the video that are really wobbly due to my arm movements while filming. This is great because sometimes the camera is capturing the grass or the sky and then returning to the game and producing a sick-to-your-stomach feeling to the viewer. Good to eliminate this.It seems limited in its editing capabilities, though I think that another one of its packages has more of this capability. However, it seems like you’ve given us lots of software programs to do all the editing we could possibly want! It’s just a matter of devoting the time to all of this and finding the one that does what we’re looking for.I’ve also been able to take some of the wedding slides and view them on the plasma in the den. This is nice because I can use the Dell laptop to capture the pictures, saving them to the shared files and using Media Center to view them on the big screen. All this without leaving my chair! That has been helpful in deciding which format to use to scan the old slides. I’ve experimented with various dpi to see which is the best way to capture the old images. Some of them are just not that clear, but it’s still fun to see them. I should say that with these slides, I’m using the HP photosmart machine to scan them in. This is the machine that Jami’s uncle gave us.Let’s see, what else? Oh, the Sony gizmo is great and really easy to use. I particularly like the sync feature, which allows the Sony to control the video camera. You don’t have to press the play button on the camera and the record button on the Sony to get the recording going. All you have to do is sync the two and when you press record on the Sony, the video camera starts to play. That’s it. Couldn’t be easier.Actually, the day I used the Sony DVD Direct was the same day I was using the Akimbo without success. I must admit, the morning was a techno-disaster for me. I didn’t have Jami to rely on for setup of the equipment, so I just had a trial-and-error method. I made a series of errors before hooking up the equipment correctly. Then when I finally had it all set, the Sony told me the disk I had inserted was full or couldn’t be read, and it asked me if I wanted to delete its contents. Well, by this point I was pretty flustered and decided to delete the contents on the disk.Something was still wrong after that, and Jami returned home just as I was about to give up. Naturally, he was able to get the whole thing working by pressing the same buttons that I had, adding to my frustration. I couldn’t understand it. I was doing the same things he was just a few minutes earlier, and it didn’t work for me. There was a time when Jami relied on me to get the VCR to tape properly. Not that morning. Just part of the ramp-up time, I guess. Peggy