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I was reading a review of Vizio P42 HDTV linked from the product page on Yahoo! Tech, and couldn’t help but agree with the reviewer on pluses and minuses, being an owner of Vizio GV42L 42 inch LCD HDTV for roughly a month now.

The pluses include a bright picture, a nice viewing angle, and a great price to boot combined with Costco’s exchange policy. There was a week when you could purchase the item at Costco for $1,399, using Costco’s own coupon, which they usually give away in front of the store. The TV was extremely easy to set up, and the process of taking it out of the box and setting it up took about 10 minutes.

The minuses mentioned in PC World review are relevant for GV42L and probably are applicable to an entire Vizio brand of HDTVs. The remote needs to be pointed directly at the television set, even slight angle gets ignored. The speed of the remote is also something that leaves much to be desired, as sometimes in an effort to bring up the volume, or, vice versa, turn it down, you’d be hitting the volume key quite frequently, only to see the bar increase or decrease slowly, so there’s obviously a speed or data loss issue between the TV set and the remote.

The location of inputs (on the back of TV facing down, so requires much crawling) is hardly relevant, as most of the cables get set up initially and then rarely touched. The number of inputs offered by this specific TV set is also quite impressive:

1x Co-axial RF (ATSC/QAM/NTSC), 2x HDMI with HDCP (1 with StereoAudio RCA), 2x Component YPbPr plus Stereo Audio, 1x RGB PC plus Stereo Audio,1x S-Video plus Stereo Audio (shared in AV2), 2x Composite Video plus StereoAudio (AV1 & AV2)

The quality of the image is comparable with other LCD HDTVs, and I haven’t had or heard any complaints about it. Overall, GV42L is a great LCD HDTV, and my next project is to try it out with HDMI cable.

Couple of days ago I notice a weird charge on a credit card of mine that’s used to do two things: pay the phone bill, and pay the hosting bill. The charge in the statement has the name of the business, which happens to be the URL, to which I navigate only to find out that it’s a porn site selling subscriptions to its content (this should be the moment when the boss walks in). Since I didn’t remember buying any porn, it’s apparent that the card has been compromised.

AT&T now issued a release saying that the database with the details of its DSL customers has been compromised. I didn’t buy DSL from AT&T (or SBC, which it was called at that time) directly, I bought it from a reseller of theirs, but apparently sooner or later all credit cards meet in one happy place, which has been compromised since then.

If you’re a paid customer of Yahoo! Voice (or you might know it as PC-to-phone calling from Yahoo! Messenger), you can now give away 100 free minutes of Yahoo! Voice service to 5 of your friends (or enemies). Log in to Yahoo! Voice to take advantage of the promotion.

With the proliferation of social news sites relying on users to submit and vote for content, quite a few of newcomers to the industry face with the need to pay top submitters or hire people away from other social news sites, Washington Post reports. The phenomenon also led to the appearance of the surfing jobs, where people are paid mostly to surf the Web and find out new links.

I am returning the Archos AV 700 40 GB Portable Video Recorder after spending a day with it. The promotional copy mentioned it was the easiest PVR ever without actually telling you why or via what means. Archos AV 700 uses a composite output to play any audio and video on TV, but it also uses the composite input (those yellow-red-white cables that get shipped with it, and probably came with your TV or DVD player) for input, which means that the source of data cannot be a simple coax cable (the one that your cable company supplies) or TV itself (outside of S-Video connection).

Moreover, Archos support is pretty much non-existant, as during the call to Archos US support center I was told the wait is 8 minutes and the call is very important to them (to Archos, that is). 45 minutes later the call was just as important, but the estimate of a few minutes went away. An email sent to support after that remained unanswered, and it was quite obvious that after one spent a three-digit amount on personal video recorder and player, Archos really wanted you to use a set of boilerplate FAQs on their Web site. After spending some time with the cable set up, I figured out I could record the video successfully off the DVD player, otherwise I was required to have a digital cable tuner or a TiVo to provide me with composite output.

Third, the video quality was quite grainy, but was generally acceptable. The controls for playing with the volume levels were also quite grainy, and it looked like the video encoder was designed for a 5″ screen and just ported to the 7″ screen without any concerns for pixellation or video quality.

Anyway, the concept is great, but requires some additional work and maybe placing actual support reps on the other end of the phone line.

The New York Times provides a pretty good overview of volunteer-based and other projects posting free audiobooks online. Here’re the sites that are worth checking out next time you need to fill up on good reading for the daily commute.

A few years ago Internet commerce was supposedly all about eliminating the middle man and connecting buyers and sellers. One of the occupations most likely to go away? Real estate agent. However, quite a few sellers wishing to rely on the Internet only found themselves receiving ridiculously low offers and therefore went back to real estate agents, MarketWatch reports:

Many sellers have come to realize they’re better off with the services of agents armed with the best possible marketing schemes they can find, either online or off. Sellers also benefit from neighborhood expertise agents bring when pricing their homes. Buyers use the local expertise to find the right home, and they depend on an expert’s skills at the negotiation table.