Finally, there is an electric car which is really desirable. The Tesla Roadster is fast (0-60mph in 4 seconds), has a good range of over 200 miles, looks great and drives like a real sports car.

It seems that battery technology is just about good enough to make this happen. Together with a number of other maturing technologies and some good engineering, we now have electric vehicles which can be taken seriously, and in the case of the blisteringly quick Lotus Elise derived Tesla Roadster, we have a car you really want, not just because of its environmental benefits.

As a leading edge new product it is still a bit expensive, but not excessively so. As battery technology improves and production volumes bring economies of scale, cost will come down and performance and range should go up. What a tempting prospect!

Environmental credentials

The Tesla makes so much more sense than the ludicrous hybrids – like Toyota’s Prius – which still need an internal combustion engine and offer economy little better than a modern diesel.

You might be thinking that CO2 and other pollution is released in the production of electricity, so doesn’t this just shift the problem from the car to the power station? As someone at Tesla pointed out, it is easier to clean up at the power generation stage than it is to clean up what comes out of the tailpipes of millions of cars.

More significant is the thought that electricity can be generated from zero emissions sources like hydro, wind, solar, etc. In fact some Tesla owners have already installed solar panels (at home) to charge their Roadsters.

Up until now, previous attempts at designing electric cars had shown little progress in almost 100 years. Tesla – and to be fair, a few other manufacturers – are now taking a big leap forward.

This is seriously good. It shows there is hope for personal transport after the fossil fuels run out, and if a lot more green electricity comes on stream, cars like this could become zero emission heroes.

The humble tape VCR has improved very little over the past 30 years; its replacement is long overdue. Digital (Personal) Video Recorders – still commonly referred to as PVRs – record video digitally on to a hard disk and offer a whole host of benefits over the mechanical tape-based analogue VHS machines that went before them.

DVD players are actually responsible for the demise of the VCR, but the recordable DVD formats offer only limited advantages for recording.

DVRs have been around for a few years now and the market is maturing. The two front-running Freeview PVRs are still the Topfield TF5800PVR and Humax PVR-9200T. You also have the choice of Sky+ for satellite subscribers and Virgin Media V+ for UK cable users.

So why are these machines so much better than their predecessors? Here are some benefits:

• Record two channels simultaneously while watching a third or a previously recorded programme
• You can record everything of interest to you and watch it at a time of your choosing
• Pause or ‘rewind’ live TV
• On-screen programme guide with one-button press to set a recording timer
• No tapes to find, machine stores all of your recordings internally
• No degradation of stored and frequently played recordings
• Instant play/resume of your recordings, no tape winding delays
• If the tuner/decoder is built in to the unit, you get maximum quality digital recording
• Most PVRs can store/play photos and MP3 files
• Receive DAB Digital Radio stations which can also be recorded

Any disadvantages? Apart from cost – good PVRs still cost about £200 in the UK – the only down side is that if you are not reasonably disciplined, it is easy to fill up the hard drive, even with the 100-200 hour recorders. Overall, it’s still a win-win situation.

What to look for in a hard disk video recorder

Make sure the tuners/decoders are integrated. This makes a huge difference to overall ease of use, simultaneous record capability, recording quality, flexibility, etc. Recording with separate hard disk recorder and video source is clumsy even with some of the kludges that manufacturers have come up with to get around the limitations.

With Freeview PVRs, make sure the unit has two built-in tuners, the hard disk is at least 160Gb, and it does have a dual record and watch capability; you will be surprised how often this is useful.

If you have an HD TV set, look for the ability to ‘upscale’ and output via HDMI. The analogue SCART connections on most Freeview boxes is poor 1970’s technology and won’t give you the best result with HD viewing equipment.

When we talk about usability, we are usually referring to information architecture, navigation structure , interface details, and so on. Mature PVRs show that consumer electronics products can make a step-change in utility and overall usefulness.

Of course, when scrutinised in more detail, the PVRs I have looked at could still be more usable, but that’s another story…

Unfortunately, there is still a down side to widescreen caused by a sorry lack of technical standards, perpetuated by that shoddy video device connector, SCART.

So what is the problem? Picture distortion. It really irks me to see a 4:3 aspect ratio picture stretched to fit a 16:9 widescreen TV set. In most cases this is down to bad setup. Most people don’t know about aspect ratios or obscure equipment settings, nor should they need to.

Why does this happen? Video sources, like Freeview boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc. often default to 4:3 ’squarevision’, even though most TV sets they are likely to be plugged in to are widescreen. Of course this equipment shouldn’t just default to something, it should know automatically how to deal with what it is plugged into, as should the TV set.

Even worse, the video source sometimes outputs 16:9 while the TV set thinks its got 4:3, then you get 16:9 compressed and displayed at 4:3.

We put men on the moon in the 1960’s, yet in the 21st century TV sets and video sources cannot figure out something basic like aspect ratio. We could blame SCART again, but that’s a poor excuse. Roll on HDMI.

One final oddity while I’m on this subject – why do people deliberately stretch a 4:3 picture to fit a widescreen TV set? It looks awful. It’s like they’ve paid for that extra screen space and they’re going to damn well use it.

It means freedom from broadcast schedules. You watch what you want, when you want. If there are three programmes you want to watch on at the same time (which does happen), it’s usually not a problem.

The Topfield TF5800PVR is probably the best of the bunch. It works pretty well and despite being a little buggy at first until a firmware update was applied, it has now proved itself to be solid, clever, a revolution.

Some key features:

• Two built-in Freeview tuners
• 160Gb Hard disk stores about 100 hours of TV, 250Gb option
• 7-day programme guide
• One-button timer/record
• Ability to record two channels simultaneously whilst watching one other or something previously recorded
• Chase play: start watching a recording even before it has finished recording
• Pause and ‘rewind’ live TV
• Organise recordings into folders
• Much more!

Setting a record timer is an absolute doddle – just browse the 7-day programme guide and press a button to mark the programmes you want recorded.

It’s very much like Sky+ for Freeview, with the bonus of greater storage capacity and no subscription. This is a massive leap forward from ye olde mechanical VHS tape recorder.

I find it remarkable that it’s still normal practice to control a central heating system with a crude 19th century device like this.

Digital/programmable thermostats offer a great deal more control over your heating than a traditional timer/roomstat combination. You can set different temperatures for different times of day and days of the week.

The drawback with old-style roomstats is that you can only set one temperature and when you don’t want your house heated to that temperature, you have to use the boiler’s timer to switch the whole thing off. So it’s ‘off’ or one temperature. Pretty crude.

A programmable roomstat does the whole job – set your existing CH timer to ‘on’ 24/7 and at times when you do want the heating off or low, just program the roomstat for a low temperature. If it gets really cold the heating will fire up, which is what it should be doing anyway.

It is more efficient to keep your CH ticking over at a low temperature, rather than let the house get really cold, giving the heating system a lot of work to do hauling the temperature up from a cold state. Using an old-style timer means that ‘off’ really will be off, even if your pipes start freezing.

Programmable roomstats allow you to keep your house at a suitable temperature at all times, they improve energy efficiency, are cheap and simple to install; in most cases you can just replace the old roomstat with no other modifications required. It’s a no brainer.