Torgny's Profile

You missed the best cocktail app out there: Flip 'N Drink. Speaking as a former bartender, it has gorgeous photos, top notch recipes from one of the best cocktail revivalists out there, and cool facts about every drink. It also skips silly drinks and sticks to the classics, which is a plus that you don't have to wade through hundreds of college bar drinks to find the good ones.

Unplugged does a lot of things well, but home theater advice is not one of them.

You often get a bigger bang for your buck with a projector than with a flat-screen TV; a sub is probably a better addition than headphones; cheap speakers are never a good option (you'll regret it in the long run); and mis-matched speakers are also not a good idea. You should also run as fast as possible from anyone who advises you to spend hundreds of dollars on cables!

If you are planning a real HT, a media room, or just a living room with a TV and speakers, and want to get the most for your money, go to a real audio/video site such as avsforum.com and get accurate advice tailored to your specific goals and needs.

I have a functional fireplace but one we don't use often. I put a framed photo of a log fire in it. It's gotten a lot of good coments from visitors!

While trying not to be rude, I agree that the title of this piece is grossly misleading. "Before & After" implies changes someone made to a room they decorated both before and after. It does not apply to rooms decorated by different people or to a room decorated for the first time (as in new construction). And it is very tacky to publish the interior of someone's home without their permission, especially when you publish it as the "bad" styling. Shame on everyone involved in deciding to do that.

I love Desire to Inspire's sense of style. But I utterly loathe the site's silly pets on furniture feature.

Move the TV from over the fireplace (never a good place for a TV) to that corner on top of some funky entertainment unit.

I have this vacuum. While it is very quiet, light, does a good job, and is cool looking (as if how a vacuum looks really matters), it also has some big flaws: bags are very expensive and fill up fast if you have pets, the lack of a power button on the handle gets old fast, it blows hot air up at your face if you get too near it, and, most annoyingly of all, the power cord is so short that you constantly have to switch outlets, even in a small house. So good vacuum but could be much better designed.

I have to give Bose credit for making audio easy to set up (color coded connections, etc.), easy to use, and unobtrusive enough to disappear into a room. And their marketing is amazing, if somewhat misleading. Other audio companies should take note of their good points.

But small speakers are not the best for accurate audio reproduction, easy set up often limits flexibility, and I have yet to hear anything from Bose that sounds as good as other brands that can be purchased for the same, or a much lower, price. For me, Bose's bad points greatly exceed their good points, but many people obviously reach a different conclusion.

I like Office and don't think that the free alternatives are nearly as useful. But I object to the price of Office, especially as new versions of Office don't support add ons for prior versions such as the foreign language paks that are not cheap themselves. If you upgrade Office, you also have to upgrade all your language paks, which is a lousy thing for a business to do to its customers.

I wish the media would get their terms right: a "home theater" is a space dedicated to movies; a "media room" is what you mean here. And neither of these spaces is even half-way decent. Lousy speakers (or none), bad speaker placement, bad TV placement in the upper photo, hard surfaces that mess up the sound, etc. It does not take a lot of money to make a good media room, but it does require following some basic audio and video rules. And decor and design seldom play an important role in whether a HT or media room is actually any good for audio or video. I wish you'd leave decor issues to your sister site and pay a bit more attention on this site to whether a space provides good audio and video presentation.