There’s not much in life dad can lay claim to; unless, of course, you count taking out the trash. By the time your kids reach adulthood, just about everything Dad considered to be his and his alone has been borrowed, broken, beaten-up or just plain co-opted by others in the house.

Except the remote.

The last vestige of alpha maleness remaining in our PC world (the other PC), many “enlightened” men still reserve exclusive control of the TV remote like some treasured weapon of war from a bygone era. Even the most sensitive philosopher will viciously smack any hand that dare reach for this treasured icon of masculine domination, and grunt, “remote mine!” like some irritated Neanderthal.

We at The Geek Beat say celebrate this last crumb of Dad exclusivity by giving your pop a shiny new remote for Father’s Day. We offer the following two reviews for your consideration:

Logitech’s line of programmable remotes have long been the king of multi-device controllers, allowing users not just to control a device, but to cluster device operations into tasks that make it easy to run even the most complex home entertainment set-ups.

With the Harmony 1000 Advanced Universal Remote, Logitech has severed its last tie to the traditional remote by eliminating 90 percent of the buttons. Instead, most of the remote (which isn’t even remote-shaped anymore), is a big touchscreen that configures itself automatically with the controls necessary for the task at hand, and that task alone. This makes the 1000 capable of controlling a plethora of devices while at the same time operating like a single-device remote. (more…)

With everything electronic these days getting smaller, it’s nice once in a while to see something getting big – really big. Big enough for those of us with poor vision and big, clumsy fingers to still hit the right button every time.

That seems to be the idea behind Brookstone’s new Super-Sized Remote, which is a gigantic slab-sized universal remote control measuring 5″ x 11″ x 1″. In all other respects this is a fairly basic 6-in-1 remote control offering one-button selection for TV, VCR, DVD, satellite, cable box and an auxiliary device (and codes for 296 of the most popular A/V equipment). The buttons are correspondingly huge and glow-in-the-dark, meaning if you ever lose the remote again you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. (more…)

There have been many great quests in the annals of myth and legend – The Golden Fleece, The Rescue of Helen of Troy, The Holy Grail, The Fellowship of The Ring. Here at The Geek Beat, one quest has loomed above all others: The Quest for A Functional HDTV Antenna.

Seriously, we’ve tried them all – indoor, outdoor, amplified – and they’ve all failed miserably. It’s embarrassing, really. The Geek Beat offices are based on a hillside overlooking the westside of Los Angeles; we have direct line of sight to every major digital transmitter in the L.A. basin. And yet not a single antenna we tested could manage to tune in more than one station at a time. Position it to get CBS, you lose NBC. Got NBC? Forget about FOX (actually, if it wasn’t for Bones and House, we would; but that’s for another article). It was truly crazy-making. (more…)

Got $70,000 to spare and a really big room? For that, plus another $10,000 for peripherals, you can own the world’s largest high-definition plasma TV: Panasonic’s 103-inch TH-103PF9UK.

It is, in a word, breathtaking: the kind of display that commands all eyeballs in the room, leaving everyone mesmerized. We got a look at this behemoth at Panasonic’s premiere event in Los Angeles today. It’s pretty darn nice – with a bunch of caveats. (more…)