Comcast in my area went to switched digital video in June killing any usefulness of my Windows Media Center PC with the clear QAM tuner card. I tried hooking up a spare cable box to the composite input on the card. WMC detected it and even showed me a preview, but then it was trying to detect an IR blaster which I…

@TheFu: Comcast is going to Switched Digital Video, not encryption. Basically your tuner tells Comcast which channel you are requesting to see and that's what they pump to you. Since they've done that the only options for anything outside of local stations is either the HD-PVR with a set top box, or the Ceton…

@varun: Woops...replied to the wrong post...sorry

One key logger malware and you're done....security is moot at best for those who don't scan their computers often. Just a thought.

The king of single use kitchen tools:

Another option I've recently stumbled upon to solve two problems is [www.mp3tunes.com.] It's an online storage locker that syncs your music between your PC and the web. This gives you the best of a couple of things including cloud backup of the music you own and the ability to play right from the website, your iPhone…

If you have Roxio Creator, it has some great easy to use tools for digitizing LPs and cassettes built-in. You can select presets for each type of recording or tweak them to your desire. Unfortunately there is no preview to see what your settings will sound like, but you can just do a small sample and check. It also…