My Stuff - Update
Mar. 31st, 2011 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkSometimes life becomes focused on simply trying to understand all the stuff we own. I seem to be in the midst of one of those times.
The coffee pot has finally recovered from the trauma of being cleaned and is now behaving normally again. It has given up trying to be an espresso pot and is back to brewing about a cup of coffee for every cup of water I pour into it.
The toaster was really and truly toast, but has now been replaced with a much more glamorous toaster that is a great improvement. I like the fact that despite having odd and glitzy features like "bagel mode," this toaster does NOT try to use exotic sensors to determine when the toast is done. I've had toasters that attempted to do that before, and have never seen it work well. This one has the old fashioned Light->Dark slider. Its best feature is pair of wire grabbers that fold out and stabilize the bread inside the oversized slots so the don't tip over and get wedged into the sidewalls. Perfectly simple 19th-century technology, but I've never had a toaster that did this before. Sweet.
The new Michelin tires do seem to work better than either of the old brands. Knowing what I do now, I wish I had not bought a car that required low-profile tires. But now that I know that all of the many shortcomings of this type of tire are supposedly worth it for the better handling - I guess it DOES corner well.
___________________
And then there's the Home Theater. Oh my. I now understand why people will pay to have someone else set this stuff up for them, even if all the components are the same brand and intended to work together. If your Home Theater is like mine, and has simply evolved unplanned out of the necessity to replace the old TV set - the possible interactions among the components will probably never be fully understood by anybody. Over the past 2 or 3 years I have acquired a Panasonic Plasma TV, a Phillips DVD/VCR combo and a Playstation3 (slim). This was all just a collection of mismatched electronics until the last purchase (Sony CT150-Soundbar), which accidentally turned it into a Home Theater. Among the 4 devices I now have the following sets of sub-components from which to choose: 2 tuners, 1 VCR player/recorder, 2 DVD players (one of which also plays BluRay), 1 DVD recorder, 2 sets of speakers, a gaming system, a music player, and an Internet connection that offers several options for streaming video. There are 5 unique remote controllers associated with all of this. Although there is some overlap in functionality among the controllers, it usually requires a minimum of two of them to do anything.
Adding to the excitement is this cool new protocol that runs over HDMI cables and lets the components of the system talk among themselves. Setting this up is unbelievably complicated because: 1) Every device needs to be set up individually to interact with every other device. 2) Setup can only be done using the remote control that came with the device to traverse wildly different and always confusing menu systems, 3) Each manufacturer uses a different terminology, 4) The user manuals are universally terrible, at least once you get past the default setup. Typically these manuals spend 3 pages telling you how to determine if you have correctly plugged the power cord into the receptacle and then skip blithely past questions like "What's the difference between LPCM audio output and bitstream?" and "What the heck is ARC? And does my TV have it?"
After several days of fiddling around with various settings, I have got it to the point where DVDs, streaming Netflix, PS3 games and broadcast TV can be played through the booming new speaker system without doing anything to the TV settings except turning on the TV. For the first week you had to manually change the "Viera Link" setting from "TV" to "Home Theater" every time you powered up, but I finally stumbled on the setting in the TV setup menu where I could change the default. So now through the magic of Viera Link (or, as Sony likes to call it, "Bravia") when I turn on the TV, the CT150 sound system automatically powers up too!
However, annoyingly, it comes up seemingly at random in any of 3 input modes: BD, DVD or TV. If you're planning to watch a DVD, BluRay or streaming video you want it in "BD" mode. If you're planning to watch broadcast TV, you want it in "DVD" mode. You don't ever want it in TV mode, because you won't get any sound through the speakers (because as it turns out, my TV does NOT have ARC). Sometimes you do have to change the input setting, but I would like it to either figure out from the state of the other components what I'm actually trying to do or, failing that, come up in a reliable default mode every time.
Then there's the VCR component, which is hopelessly 20th-century and can only be used with the crappy built-in TV speakers. At least so far. I have an idea that may solve that problem, assuming that the extra little black cable that came with the CT150 is the "optical audio cable" referred to obliquely in the TV user manual.
The coffee pot has finally recovered from the trauma of being cleaned and is now behaving normally again. It has given up trying to be an espresso pot and is back to brewing about a cup of coffee for every cup of water I pour into it.
The toaster was really and truly toast, but has now been replaced with a much more glamorous toaster that is a great improvement. I like the fact that despite having odd and glitzy features like "bagel mode," this toaster does NOT try to use exotic sensors to determine when the toast is done. I've had toasters that attempted to do that before, and have never seen it work well. This one has the old fashioned Light->Dark slider. Its best feature is pair of wire grabbers that fold out and stabilize the bread inside the oversized slots so the don't tip over and get wedged into the sidewalls. Perfectly simple 19th-century technology, but I've never had a toaster that did this before. Sweet.
The new Michelin tires do seem to work better than either of the old brands. Knowing what I do now, I wish I had not bought a car that required low-profile tires. But now that I know that all of the many shortcomings of this type of tire are supposedly worth it for the better handling - I guess it DOES corner well.
___________________
And then there's the Home Theater. Oh my. I now understand why people will pay to have someone else set this stuff up for them, even if all the components are the same brand and intended to work together. If your Home Theater is like mine, and has simply evolved unplanned out of the necessity to replace the old TV set - the possible interactions among the components will probably never be fully understood by anybody. Over the past 2 or 3 years I have acquired a Panasonic Plasma TV, a Phillips DVD/VCR combo and a Playstation3 (slim). This was all just a collection of mismatched electronics until the last purchase (Sony CT150-Soundbar), which accidentally turned it into a Home Theater. Among the 4 devices I now have the following sets of sub-components from which to choose: 2 tuners, 1 VCR player/recorder, 2 DVD players (one of which also plays BluRay), 1 DVD recorder, 2 sets of speakers, a gaming system, a music player, and an Internet connection that offers several options for streaming video. There are 5 unique remote controllers associated with all of this. Although there is some overlap in functionality among the controllers, it usually requires a minimum of two of them to do anything.
Adding to the excitement is this cool new protocol that runs over HDMI cables and lets the components of the system talk among themselves. Setting this up is unbelievably complicated because: 1) Every device needs to be set up individually to interact with every other device. 2) Setup can only be done using the remote control that came with the device to traverse wildly different and always confusing menu systems, 3) Each manufacturer uses a different terminology, 4) The user manuals are universally terrible, at least once you get past the default setup. Typically these manuals spend 3 pages telling you how to determine if you have correctly plugged the power cord into the receptacle and then skip blithely past questions like "What's the difference between LPCM audio output and bitstream?" and "What the heck is ARC? And does my TV have it?"
After several days of fiddling around with various settings, I have got it to the point where DVDs, streaming Netflix, PS3 games and broadcast TV can be played through the booming new speaker system without doing anything to the TV settings except turning on the TV. For the first week you had to manually change the "Viera Link" setting from "TV" to "Home Theater" every time you powered up, but I finally stumbled on the setting in the TV setup menu where I could change the default. So now through the magic of Viera Link (or, as Sony likes to call it, "Bravia") when I turn on the TV, the CT150 sound system automatically powers up too!
However, annoyingly, it comes up seemingly at random in any of 3 input modes: BD, DVD or TV. If you're planning to watch a DVD, BluRay or streaming video you want it in "BD" mode. If you're planning to watch broadcast TV, you want it in "DVD" mode. You don't ever want it in TV mode, because you won't get any sound through the speakers (because as it turns out, my TV does NOT have ARC). Sometimes you do have to change the input setting, but I would like it to either figure out from the state of the other components what I'm actually trying to do or, failing that, come up in a reliable default mode every time.
Then there's the VCR component, which is hopelessly 20th-century and can only be used with the crappy built-in TV speakers. At least so far. I have an idea that may solve that problem, assuming that the extra little black cable that came with the CT150 is the "optical audio cable" referred to obliquely in the TV user manual.
