We spent the entire year ogling over home theater, lighting control, and a lot of other accoutrements inside the Electronic House. If you want to share the tech love, many of those items can be very useful, very expensive holiday gifts.

Then, there are times when you just want to get a little weird. Weird gifts can get people talking, wincing, and laughing. Of course, they can also be surprising useful.

When it comes to weird gifts, the DIY options are endless. Fortunately, so is the mass-produced mayhem. Weird sometimes means wonderful; sometimes it means crap. We’ve decided to include a little from column A and column B in our selection of Weird Holiday Tech Gifts.

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Forget donning a Jason or Michael Myers mask this Halloween. If you want a truly hair-raising holiday, try handing someone a pair of 3D glasses.

Currently, most 3D movie options fall into two categories: kiddie flicks and freak-shows. In other words, there should be enough scary movies available in the Blu-ray 3D format to make for one monster film festival.

Of course, most of these scary movies aren’t about ghouls and creatures of the night. Some don’t even care about the plot line. While there are a few frightening gems out there, most of the horror-themed 3D movies concentrate on a high kill count and special effects hurling at the screen.

That said, we’re guessing that most of these will have you checking the locks, letting the phone go to voicemail, and staying away from the basement—unless that’s where the home theater is located, of course.

So before you blow through that stockpile of bite-sized Snickers, consider stocking up on some of these 3D-enhanced flicks for your own fright night. Enjoy!

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The beauty of a sports bar—besides the awesome hot wings on the menu—is the luxury of being able to watch several games simultaneously. And let’s face it, picture-in-picture on your own set at home doesn’t cut it when you’re a hard-core fantasy football fan.

To recreate the impact and viewing enjoyment of a commercial sports bar, the owner of this renovated game room choose to have three 70-inch Sharp (LC70LE732) mounted on the front wall of his 23-by-20-foot room. “One large 130-inch TV was another option,” says David Huse of Theater Advice, Frisco, Texas, the firm hired to handle the design and installation of the electronic gear, “but the three TVs seemed more authentic.”

Each TV rang up at $3,000, which helped keep the budget in line, too. “TVs of this size are usually much more then $3K, closer to $8,000 each” says Huse. While the budget-friendly TVs have “great brightness and movement control,” says Huse, they lack ISF calibration modes and deep levels of color correction.

Selecting an affordable, good-performing 70-inch flat-panel TV was the easy part; mounting them was another story. Any wall that stretches 23 feet is never going to be completely flat, says Huse. “This one buckled so much it looked like a giant wave pool.”

To get the TVs to lay flush with the wavy surface, Huse carefully shimmed each one by using pieces of rolled cardboard. Behind each Huse attached a Control4 HC-200 Room Controller. This component allows each A/V source to be wired via Category 5 cabling directly to each TV.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that YouTube will unveil the first of its planned premium video channels by 2012.

According to the news outlet’s sources, a series of contracts for channels set to focus on themes like fashion and sports are being finalized. Furthermore, content for said channels have been requested over the next two months.

The online programming giant will dole out anywhere from a few hundred thousand to several million dollars to content creators for each channel. YouTube’s parent company, Google Inc., will make a return on its investment into the project through ad revenue and partner share ad revenue.

Google is said to want to create an alternative to typical TV watching.

Sources have also noted that the company plans on launching a total of 20 premium channels.

Logitech Harmony’s remote control system has long been considered one of the simplest for do-it-yourselfers. And now the company is extending that functionality to Apple and Android devices through the new Link, a hockey puck-shaped device that allows users to control home AV equipment with an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Android device.

Once the Link is set up, and the app downloaded, customers program their home theatre devices into the app, much like they’d do with the old Logitech Harmony PC-based software. The puck-like Harmony Link device communicates with the iPad via WiFi. WiFi signals are sent from the Harmony Link App and turned into IR commands that home entertainment devices can understand. Harmony Link can control up to eight devices, and includes an IR mini-blaster accessory. Just like with the traditional Harmony remotes, users can set up activities like Watch TV or Play Xbox, which then triggers all of the right devices to power on/off, and toggle to the proper inputs.

The basic user interface will be very familiar to anyone who’s used the highly popular, touch-based Harmony One remote. But in addition to extending the function to smartphones and tablets, the Link adds another level of interaction. When using an iPad, users can also browse a schedule of shows right on the iPad from a variety of content providers, search by genre, standard or high definition, and even tap a “watch now” button to immediately switch to a channel. Through a partnership with Rovi Corp., customers also have access to additional show information, like episode synopses, movie overviews, and images.

According to Ashish Arora, Vice President and General Manager of Logitech’s Digital Home Group, the company’s research shows that many iPad owners are using their iPads on the couch while watching TV anyway; something even this writer can attest to. “Many of them,” he explains, “[are] seeking ways to find out what shows are on. We set out to make this experience easier.”

Users can also leverage the touch capabilities of the iPad by performing actions like swiping and tapping to control volume and video playback. Just shake the device to initiate gesture controls, then do things like swipe up to increase volume, swipe down to decrease, or swipe left and right to rewind and fast forward, respectively.

Harmony Link can connect with more than one iPad simultaneously.

While the remote control functionality of Link works with the iPhone or iPod touch, as well as with Android smartphones, the full program guides are currently limited only to the iPad.

The Logitech Harmony Link is expected to be available next month for an MSRP of $99.99. The app will be available as a free download from the iTunes App Store and Android Market.

Facebook and its latest competitor Goolge+ have both introduced new features for users to explore.

Aside from getting out of beta mode and opening its doors to all Internet users, Google+’s Hangouts feature (which allows up to nine people to link up and chat with a user on video), is now available on camera-equipped Android smartphones. Apple device users will have to a wait a little bit on this.

A user can also now host an online broadcast using Hangouts, by recording the session and then airing it live across the web for anyone to see.

Facebook introduced a “ticker” function onto its users’ home pages that offers real-time notifications of what friends are doing within the service. The main news feed page has also been revamped, to flag important items so that users who haven’t been online for a few days won’t necessarily miss out on a big announcement (like a wedding date). Photos displayed in the news feed are also larger than before.

Facebook has over 750 million users, while analysts estimate that Google+ is currently at about 25 million

Through a new initiative and starting next month, Facebook members in Canada will be able to connect their social networking accounts with Netflix to share movie and TV watching information with Friends.

Announced at Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco, CA, the service will actually launch in Canada and Latin America before anywhere else in the world. Oddly enough, the reason the U.S. is excluded from the launch is due to a 1980s law that “creates some confusion over our ability to allow U.S. members to share what they watch,” says Tom Willerer from the product team.

According to a blog post by Willerer, the idea with this collaboration is to help add a more social element to the Netflix streaming experience. Friends can discover new titles by seeing what their Friends watch, or communicate about a movie or TV show, fueled by this shared information.

Once the feature is enabled, an option will appear in the Netflix user interface to connect to Facebook. Then, details about what Facebook Friends are watching, regardless of the device they’re streaming on, will show up in Netflix, as long as they’re also online. Sharing can, of course, be turned off at any time.

Sometimes hanging a flat-panel TV can be a challenge. And that’s part of the fun being a CE pro, getting an unusual request to conceal a video wall in the ceiling and have it drop down at the press of a button.

CE Pro and Sanus are looking for more interesting/challenging flat-panel mounting jobs in the third annual Mount This! contest.

In the meantime, we thought we’d revisit the winners and entries from the first two contests as a challenge to you to blow them out of the water. Can you top these flat-panel mounting jobs?

Integrator Meets Mason
Clients love flat panels over fireplaces, regardless of whether or not it makes sense logistically. In this case, Premiere Audio and Images says it worked with a mason daily for a week to get the Chief back box inset enough to flush the TV into the granite properly.

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The Electronic House Home of the Year Awards never fail to impress. Year after year so many amazing projects are submitted, not just the ones declared winners.

So we’ve rounded up all the entries submitted for Best Home Theater (Over $150K) from the 2011 Home of the Year Awards. What a shame it would be to see all this great work you guys put in go unnoticed.

So, get ready to be wowed. You will see a Casablanca-themed theater, a theater with a massive 15-foot 3D screen, a palace-style theater in the basement of a sprawling Canadian residence, and a 3D theater destined for Super Bowl parties.

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What began as a show home for the 2010 Parade of Homes in Colorado Springs, Co., quickly became the crown jewel of this abode. As is often the case with show homes, the builder was the one who invited electronic systems contractor Colorado Media Systems to the party, and the homeowner had little direct involvement. The company’s main goal was to install a jaw-dropping residential fun room that would put even the plushest of sports bars to shame.

Aside from the sporty ambience, the main attraction here is the five-display video wall. President Glenn Montjoy and his team at Colorado Media Systems installed four 46-inch Samsung LCD TVs to flank a 55-inch Samsung LCD on a motorized mount.

These TVs are fed by five high-def Comcast cable boxes via a Video Storm component video A/V matrix. “This is a sports fan’s dream,” says Montjoy. “It’s the perfect environment and a wonderful setup for watching multiple sporting events.”

A Control4 system manages the video wall, allowing the homeowner to watch all five TVs at once, with room-wide audio corresponding to the main, 55-inch TV. Creating a video wall can be a complex undertaking for even the most skilled contractors, but Montjoy swears by creative programming.

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