How, exactly, do you connect outdoor speakers to your stereo system? If you’re a DJ, how do wire speakers to your console? If you’ve got a home theater system and a picky spouse, how do you wire your rear speakers?

Airfonix, which specializes in wireless audio connectivity, will have an audiophile solution for your remote speaker dilemma in January with its AFX-19IP001 (who comes up with these ridiculous model numbers?). It’s a compact USB hub/iPod dock that transmits frequency hopping 24-bit uncompressed audio to its receiver modules connected to standard speakers. This wireless hub will run you around $300 plus receiver modules, probably cheaper and a lot easier than long high-gauge speaker runs.

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Want to keep track of your kids’ or spouse’s comings and goings? Electronic combination locks from Kiwkset, a subsidiary of Black & Decker, and Schlage send an email to your cellphone when someone unlocks your door.

Locks from both companies are designed to be integrated with a more ornate wireless whole house automation system; Kwikset is partnered with Control4 and Schlage has its own system called LiNK. In both cases, you can program the lock so when you enter your code, the system can be programmed to initiate all sorts of other activities such as lights going on, music or TV switched on, window shades lowered or raised, thermostat brought to room temperature, etc. Control4′s system includes A/V controls; Schlage’s does not.

Kwikset’s lock (pictured) comes in three metallic finishes priced between $100-$110, can store up to 30 programmable codes, are equipped with motorized bolts for remote control (so you don’t have to get out of bed to lock the doors). To get the notification email (and get all the other automation) you have to have a Control4 system of some sort installed.

Schlage locks ($200) can handle up to 19 different codes, and come in either lever or deadbolt (not motorized) versions. While you won’t need a whole system to enable the Schlage email notification, you have to pay $13/month for a monitoring system to get them.

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As you can see, Evie’s favourite place is on the sofa! She’s a 10 year old Dalmatian and she’s had quite a sheltered life. She’s looking forward to finding a forever home where she can enjoy all the new experiences of walking, playing and socialising. A comfy sofa would be nice too of course!

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Tyza is a 13 year old Lab cross and he’s looking for a quiet, adults only home where he can settle down and get loads of love and attention. He’d be quite happy to live with another dog – he is particularly comfortable with the female of his species, so a nice lady dog to welcome him would be great.

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Cleo is 7 years old and she’s spent more than half her life in a kennel, having no love or attention. She’s now hoping that someone will come along and give her back those missed years and show her how enjoyable life can truly be. She needs a special home with someone who has Rottweiler experience.

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One of the neat features of the iPhone, is the way its display switches automatically from portrait to landscape mode when you rotate it. Therefore, it seems obvious that any dock should let you do the same thing; but most are fixed in the vertical portrait mode.

This very cool dock made by Steven Combs not only lets him rotate his iPhone, it also has an appropriate high-tech look made entirely from gray, black, and white Lego parts.

While there are a couple of commercially available rotating docks, you could always just copy Steven’s design and make your own.

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CEDIA is well known for its wildly wild-looking and expensive speakers. But you figure that for a five or six figure price tag, you’d get plenty of bass from a pair of skyscraper-sized floor speakers.

You’d figure wrong. Revel’s 225-pound ottoman-sized (around 28 inches square) Ultima Rhythm2 subwoofer is capable of outputting 5600 watts of boom boom at peak, for which you will pay 10 g’s. And I’ll be honest – based on the price tag of some speakers I’ve run across on the show floor, this might not even be the most expensive subwoofer available.

Since this is the second gen Rhythm, you have to believe that there’s a market for this kind of bottom. I just don’t know anyone in that market. If you are in the market for a $10,000 subwoofer, you’ll have to wait until January to buy it and, after you buy it, can you buy me a new 65-inch plasma?

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Kim thinks retirement is absolute bliss and she spends every day going for walks and having fun! She sends her thanks to Oldies Club and Dogs Trust for helping her find the perfect retirement home.

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There’s always been an annoying problem with iPod/iPhone speaker docks: with your iPod/iPhone across the room on the dock, you can’t fully control the music, and all you can do is listen to music since your player is 20 feet away in a dock.

Yamaha figures the best iPod/iPhone remote is, well, your iPod or iPhone. So it’s new MCR-140 and PDX-60 iPod/iPhone docks work wirelessly. You snap your iPod into a tiny module, and your music is aired wirelessly (or, as Yamaha cleverly calls the technology, yAired – I give up, why aired?) through the speakers, which can be located up to 30-50 feet away, depending on obstructions.

You can now keep your iPod/iPhone with you, even answer calls, check your email or surf the Web while your music plays. I didn’t test it, but one presumes you can play games and hear the game play through the speakers as well.

The music travels in the 2.4 GHz band using a proprietary bit rate. We have no idea how the stream would be affected by other 2.4 GHz traffic in your home , such as Bluetooth or WiFi, but it seemed to operate fine on the CEDIA show floor.

The MCR-140 ($400) is a modular metal-encased system that also includes a CD player, and comes in 10 colors – orange, dark blue, light blue, white, red dark green, brown, light gray, dark gray and pink. If you want more bass and no additional wires, you can add a wireless subwoofer.

Even more clever is the PDX-60 ($300), a single piece speaker dock, also available in multiple colors. Along with the standard dock up top, there’s a second wired dock for a second iPod or iPhone to charge. The wireless module snaps in and out of this wired dock for wireless music play.

Both the MCR-140 and the PDX-60 will be available next month.

But wait, there’s more.

Yamaha also unveiled the most clever soundbar ever. The YHT-S400 3.1 2-inch-high soundbar includes a combination AV receiver/100-watt subwoofer. Maybe that doesn’t sound that clever, but by including a full-blown 50 wpc AVR, Yamaha has incredibly simplified connectivity.

Regular soundbars require two connections to your TV, a digital audio connection from your HDTV to the soundbar, then separate video/HDMI connections from your sources (cable box, game player, et al) to your HDTV. That’s a lot of cables running to your HDTV.

With the AVR/sub combo, there’s just one HDMI connection to your HDTV and three HDMI inputs to connect your other gear. Brilliant. But you’ll have to wait for it – it won’t be available until early next year for a quite reasonable $600.

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Local power companies all over the country are helping to built a 21st century smart grid, complete with smart meters, which talk back to the grid, attached to your home. Control4 is getting ready to deploy its home Energy Management System (EMS) EC-100 so you can monitor and control not only your home’s energy consumption via data provided by the smart meter, but your A/V system, security, lights, HVAC, etc.

In March 2010, the EC-100, which has a 5-inch LCD touchscreen, will be initially deployed by the Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative in Austin, TX, in 35,000 homes in the first wave and an additional 30,000 in a second wave. The control module actually displays your energy use in a variety of sub-categories (lighting, kitchen, air conditioning, etc.) in dollars, and lets you automate your home to conserve energy. For instance, as the sun comes up, an expanded EMS Control4 Home Area Network (HAN) system could automatically lower the shades or, when you leave a room or your house, the system automatically adjusts the thermostat to use less power – in other words, your house could run on energy-saving cruise control.

In case you’ve never heard of them (honestly, I hadn’t until I got to Atlanta for CEDIA), Control4 sells arguably the most affordable and simplest home automation system around, along with a whole bunch of inexpensive modules to control everything from your A/V system to window blinds, all controlled using the ZigBee wireless control spec from your HDTV via one simple remote.

As the smart grid/smart meter trend grows, Control4 will supply the EC-100 to local power companies to distribute or sell at a subsidized price to their customers, or perhaps sell them directly to consumers. All to be decided.

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It sounds like a Billy Mays spiel: a 55-inch LED backlit LCD 1080p HDTV with a built in b/g/n WiFi, a first for a connected HDTV, with access to Yahoo Widgets and maybe VUDU, a USB jack that can play H.264, Windows Video 9 and other video formats along with music and photos from a connected drive, a remote with a Bluetooth-connected slide out horizontal QWERTY keyboard (another first for a connected HDTV) – all for just $2,199 list, which means less than $2,000 in the real world.

This $2,000 55-inch HDTV is the VF552XVT VIA (an acronym for Vizio Internet Apps) HDTV from Vizio, and it’ll be available in December.

If 55 inches is too large and/or $2k too much, there’ll be an identical 47-inch LED LCD VIA (pictured) and a regular LCD 42-inch version as well for $1,700 ($1,500 street) and $1,300 (less than $1,000 street) respectively. Both will include the QWERTY remote.

Just to repeat: this will be the first connected HDTV from anyone with built-in WiFi and a QWERTY keypad on the remote. How Vizio has managed this before Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, et al, is anyone’s guess. Operators, however, are not standing by. You’ll likely have to go to Costco or Sam’s Club to get one.

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As some of you have already noticed, Apple’s new generation of iPods isn’t much of a generational leap. And if you looks at the details, they’re actually a step backward in some ways.

Follow: Our comparison chart for the iPod Classic shows the new model gets a 40GB bump to 160GB — a capacity it had previously enjoyed in 2007 — and its screen isn’t as crisp as it was the previous generation, going from 480×320 to 320×240 pixels.

And that’s not all. The iPod Touch took a similar step down. Click Continue to find out more.

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