George Orwell’s vision of a flat wall-mounted screen that displays broadcasted programs has finally broken the surface of reality. FlatTV, Phillips Electronics’ version of the latest toy for entertainment technophiles, comes to public attention on a Web site (www.flat-tv.com) as cool as the product it promotes.
A terrific animated sequence introduces the site, providing the mesmeric appeal of the best commercial advertising. Browsing the pages, users can learn about product features (160-degree wide-angle viewing makes the letterbox format a thing of the past) and the technological innovation of plasma (the gaslike substance that conducts an electrical charge illuminating more than 1 million pixels of high-end digital resolution), which brought a 50-year-old design idea to life.
Speakers are built into the frame surrounding the 4 1/2-inch-deep monitor. The screen is connected to a separate television receiver, which connects to any external equipment, such as a tape player or additional audio equipment.
While FlatTV steps up the television industry’s coming shift to digital broadcasting, the product’s chunky receiver may simply give designers a new version of the where-to-put-the-box problem.
Searching for books about home: Chronicle Books, publisher of lavish and thoughtful design books, joined the on-line retail game offering an extensive inventory of titles covering interiors and art at www.chronbooks.com/Adult /Shopping /artbooks.html.
The publisher’s year-old distribution agreement with the Princeton Architectural Press crowns Chronicle as the distributor of the largest number of architectural titles in the country. The site offers the usual book retail interface of cover images and informational blurbs, including excerpts and author biographies, along with a link to reviews. Among the interiors titles offered are Sara Slavin’s luminously luxurious “The Art of the Bath” and Barbara Mayer’s “On Arts & Craft Style,” an examination of the practical use of the movement’s great design innovations.
Those looking to fill gaps in design libraries likely will benefit from browsing Chronicle’s list, which offers the publisher’s specialized focus on design categories, rather than shopping the monster book retail sites.
The site also offers Caliente! (www.-chronbooks.com/Adult/Caliente/), featuring news on new titles, author events and discount promotions.
Tech-head’s gardening bible: Maybe you’re not exhibitionist enough to set up a camera in your bedroom-or even your living room-and then feed images onto your personal Web site, a la Jennycam and the multitude of others now showing on a computer screen near you.
But what about your garden? There’s a place filled with sex, death and other stuff that gets Web sites lots of hits. Plus, it’s a chance to show the world beyond your fence your gardening successes every day.
Techie gardeners who are into enhancing the personal Web site with a feed of periodic garden shots will find practical advice in “The Gardener’s Computer Companion” (No Starch Press, $39.95), by Robert Boufford, an Ohio horticulture professor. Among other tips: Boufford suggests using a video camera designed for home surveillance. You’ll spend less on an already weatherproofed surveillance camera than you would buying a tethered digital video camera–the kind indoor welcome-to-my-world Web sites employ–and weatherproofing it yourself.
Not everything in Boufford’s book runs at this high level of techno-sophistication. He starts with basics like the makeup of an e-mail address, then ramps up toward garden-cam technology. Along the way, he offers useful advice on how to make an on-screen gardening journal something stronger than a mere word-processed version of the traditional handwritten plant diary, what to do and not do with garden-design software, and methods for calculating a home landscape’s water and fertilizer needs.
The back of the book is a directory of Internet addresses expressly for gardeners that, although slim, offers a good introduction to what’s available on-line so far.
