I was all excited when I found Insteon products made by Smarthome. It is basically X-10 improved. It is a powerline system that has two way communication (and other technical improvement). What that means is that when a controller sends a command to a device, it will make sure that the device got it, and […]

Shoe storage is very important to keeping the house tidy. Us Asian especially like to take our shoes off at the door. Any normal shoe storage solution is likely to be too small. What to do?
We bought two IKEA MAGIKER short shelves with doors for our entry hall. Out of all the series at IKEA, […]

Taking advantage of my moving lofts, I have finally decided to upgrade video equipments. Under the general direction of upgrading to HDTV, I bought the Sony Grand Wega 50 inch LCD rear projection TV KDF-E50A10, and got hooked up to HD and DVR service from Comcast with a Motorola 3412 set top DVR cable box. […]

I often hear these from friends — “you live in the city, right?”, “loft? How about those nice luxury condo buildings?”, “No? Why not? I thought that’s real city living….”. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up in Hong Kong, and lived in many high rise buildings. I was/am used to them. But given the […]

Only took us four years, but I finally decided to get some solar shades for the lofts. The new loft is high enough that the sunshine pours into the space all thru the day, which I love. However it is also blindingly bright. Since time is money we decided to get them ordered and installed. […]

I don’t know how I missed this one. You know the problem — no matter how much hard disk space you have, you always ends up with just 1 gig free on it. How do you find out what’s taking up all the space? Enter Win Dir Stat — “WinDirStat is a disk usage […]