Ken C. Pohlmann

Wake the kids. Call the neighbors. Mark your calender. October 14. The Ultimate Matrix Collection will be released on Blu-ray. Seven discs, $129.95, from Warner Home Video. This set has long been available on HD DVD, but that format is history. Now it's Blu-ray's turn. Warner straddled the HD/BD fence, but tended to release its big titles on HD.

How many times has this happened to you? You're giving a big presentation to the boss, and the projector bulb burns out. The boss gets mad and fires you and you're poor and your wife leaves you and your kids hate you. Well, that's happened to me plenty of times. But no more.

Recently, we reported on an environmentally unfriendly aspect of LCD screen manufacturing — the use of nitrogen trifluoride as a cleaning agent in the production process. (Some sites are incorrectly reporting that NF3 is contained in LCD TVs themselves; this is incorrect).

The crystal-ball gazers over at SNL Kagan are predicting that the various new telecommunications building projects in the U.S. (and around the world) will lead to intense competition among programming providers.

Well, they did a survey, and it's official. The end of the world is near. Parks Associates surveyed 2,000 broadband households in the U.S. and Canada, and found that roughly two-thirds of them are regularly using PCs to play music at home, and one-third are listening to music through their televisions — a percentage equaled by MP3 players.