H-P Products has introduced the MaxAir power unit, designed for its Hide-A-Hose retractable hose central vacuum system.

Media server manufacturer Kaleidescape will release a new player that adds support for Blu-ray playback in 2009, and ?is optimistic that it will be possible to import Blu-ray Discs at that time.?

Last week, Vudu (now available for $295) rolled out system software 1.2 in conjunction with HD movie rentals. For the instant playback touted by Vudu, you’ll need about 4Mbps download throughput. Unfortunately, the bedroom segment of my LAN is experiencing some sort of bottleneck. According to a Vudu engineer who pulled my logs, my session was capping out at 2.6Mbps - resulting in frequent buffering pauses during The Italian Job. (For comparison, my laptop reports about 17Mbps wirelessly to router via Speedtest.net.)