Zibblog

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I would carry around one of my watches that has a stopwatch function and keep track of the amount of time that I spend watching tv during a week. I know what many of you are thinking “Do you really want to be confronted with a number that large?” Something like that was actually JB’s comment, and my answer is that my tv watching was achieved a somewhat mythical status amongst my friends while I don’t believe that I watch that much tv anymore.

In the end, the number was about 9 hours, although I’ll admit that I forgot to turn the stopwatch on and off a few times. (A random fact is that about 90 minutes of this time was spent watching Fire Birds with Leslie.) I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if this is a lot of time or not as much as you thought.

A while back, I purchased an issue of Make magazine. What’s odd is that it is something by O’Reilly without an animal on the cover. However, what it lacks in cover animals, it makes up with general geekiness. Anyway, when I purchased a subscription online, I selected to receive the next issue rather than the current issue since I already owned it. However, the current issue proceeded to arrive on my doorstep. Being busy with more important things, I decided to simply give away the extra issue, which ended up in the hands of Charlie. Figuring I was just going live with not getting an issue of my subscription, I suddenly got the following email today.

Thank you for subscribing to MAKE. In reviewing our files we realized that we began your subscription with the current issue (VOL 3). You requested that we start it with VOL 4 (which mails in October 2005).

To make up for our error we have added an additional issue to the end of your current subscription. As far as the VOL 3 that you received, please keep it with our compliments.

Thank you again for your support. We appreciate your readership.

It isn’t often that one of these things works out without some sort of long phone conversation or email exchange.

For anyone reading this blog that doesn’t have one of the Panasonic commercial plasmas (for my blog readership, it is a surprisingly high percentage), those plasmas are built to accept either 2 or 3 (2 for TVs under 42 inches, 3 in TVs 42 inches and above) input modules that essentially convert from your display input of choice to something internal to the plasma. They come with modules for composite/s-video input and component input, giving you 2 independent inputs along with a 3rd vga input. For anyone interested, here’s an interesting article I found the other day explaining component video. Component is necessary if you want to receive HD signals from a cable box, computer, or satellite system. After being on backorder for over a month, I got my HDMI input box and installed it in my tv. Now, I can have my TiVo, cable box (for HD and on demand programming), and dvd player all hooked up at once.

For those wondering about HDMI, you might find the following interesting. At some point, DVI came along for digital video input (I feel like it was adopted for computers first, but I could be wrong), so you’ll find some dvd players, cable boxes, etc along with many computers that have DVI. However, it looks like the current push for home audio/video is HDMI, Home Digital Multimedia Interface. The nice thing about HDMI is that it is one cable for both audio and video, so I now have one wire running from my dvd player to my tv. The standard also talks about being able to send status information both ways along the cable. As I was looking into HDMI stuff the other day, I found a lot of HDMI to DVI converters (and the other way around), which made me wonder what the difference was. It turns out, HDMI is really just DVI video with some added features like the audio and status information. For any of you wondering whether or not HDMI/DVI is any better than component video, here is an interesting article, and for any of you wanting to wire up your entertainment center with DVI or HDMI, I recommend reading this.

I realized that my latest addiction was HDTV when it dawned on me that I was watching an equestrian sports show and about the only reason I could come up with in my head was “it looks nice in HD”. However, I will not apologize for watching a Chicago / Earth, Wind, and Fire concert on INHD. There is nothing wrong with a man liking Chicago as long as it is not late Chicago.

on the new plasma tv. 42 inches of HD goodness wrapped up in a nice little Panasonic bow. Based on the experiences of JB and Josh (thanks for the info), I decided to get the Panasonic TH-42PHD7UY. It has a built in “Video Wall Processor” so that you can hook them up in a 2×2, 3×3, or even 4×4 configuration. I was tempted, but I just bought one. Hopefully, it will be here in time for the move to reward those people kind enough to help out with some Halo 2.