Category: Uncategorized

At some point in my life I bought a coffee table, not to put my feet up on or to eat from while watching TV like everyone else does, but to hold my DVD player, VCR, and surround sound receiver, next to my floor-standing giant rear projection TV. When that TV died, I got a new flat screen TV and needed a place to put it. However, the legs of the TV were spaced so far apart that they would overhang the ends of the coffee table just a bit, inviting disaster if the TV shifted at all. So I got some boards from Home Depot and put those on top of the table to widen the top just enough to comfortably hold the TV. The lower shelf of the coffee table held the receiver and the center channel speaker of my surround sound system and there was just enough room under the TV to hold my UHD Blu-ray player. I put the left and right speakers of the surround system on top of the old left and right speakers from my previous surround system to get them up to the height of the TV screen and closer to ear height on either end of the coffee table. Great little system.

Continue reading “Carpentry”

Way back in 1999 I got my first surround sound system, a “home theater in a box” by Aiwa consisting of a receiver and 5 speakers, so that I could enjoy surround sound from my DVD’s. Surround sound isn’t mind blowing, but it is pretty neat, kind of underwhelming given all the hype, not that I was spending huge amounts of money. I’m not sure why I felt the need, but in 2007 I upgraded to an Onkyo system with 7 speakers and a subwoofer. Even today most Blu-ray movies don’t have 7.1 audio, but I felt like I would be missing out. And the subwoofer adds a lot of oomph to explosions while also filling in the low frequency sounds that small speakers have a hard time producing. It was a nice system and worked well in a pre-HDMI era where all of the sound was carried over RCA cables instead of HDMI cables (so many wires!), but when my old pre-HDMI TV died in 2017 it was time for another upgrade. Rather than spend twice as much for another home theater in a box, I just got a new Denon receiver and kept the Onkyo speakers and subwoofer. The Denon receiver was neat because it came with a microphone that you would put in different places in the room and the receiver would come up with the best settings. I’m not sure if it is just equalizing the speakers, syncing them up, or something more advanced, but it is a great idea.
Continue reading “Surround Sound Upgrade”

Many years ago at work I got a computer with two giant CRT monitors. I think they were 21 inches (always measured diagonally across the viewable area). I loved having the extra screen area so I could have two programs open and easily copy info or refer to info on one screen to write an email on the other. The next time I got a home computer I made sure it would support two monitors and it was just as great at home though my monitors weren’t as nice. I remember when they switched to LCD flat screens at work and the big 22 inch monitors were $1000 each so we put locks on them.

At home I decided to start using a laptop in addition to my desktop and eventually replaced the desktop with a laptop, so now I have two laptops, one being used as a desktop with external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. The problem with that is hardly any laptops support two monitors, but they can extend their desktop on to an external monitor and you can have a window open on the laptop and another on the external monitor. I have been using a 4:3 17 inch monitor (1280 x 1024 pixels) that came with my last desktop computer in 2005 as the second screen. This has worked fine for the last few years. What is really amazing is that the laptop, with a screen resolution of only 1366 pixels by 768 pixels, can support an external display of 3200 x 2000 pixels, 6 times as much working area (my newer laptop supports full 4k output).
Continue reading “New Monitor”

Several years ago now, Mom gave me a beer making kit called Mr. Beer. I wound up making some beer and then helping Mom and Jeb make beer with generally acceptable results. After a not so great batch I realized I would rather have someone else make the beer. I think you can get better results by going full home brew, but there is a fairly large initial investment involved (at least $500) and you make 5 gallons at a time which is probably more beer than I drink in a year. Plus if you screw up 5 gallons of beer, that’s a lot of money to throw away (about $50). Mr. Beer takes a major shortcut by providing the malt extract and hops so that all you have to do is heat it up and add water and yeast, which takes no technical proficiency.

Ultimately I was willing to leave beer making to the experts (though it was fun going on brewery tours where they often ask if anyone has made beer before and I would get to raise my hand) and enjoy the variety and quality that professional brewers provide. But Mr. Beer started sending me emails again recently and then they went and had a Buy One Get One free sale on beer mixes with free shipping on orders over $30. So I bought four cans of beer syrup, and therefore must make 4 2.5 gallon batches of beer.
Continue reading “More Beer”

Over the past few years I have been buying a lot of Blu-ray movies, really entirely too many. Sometimes they come with a digital copy that can be stored on a service like Vudu or Movies Anywhere, and sometimes they do not. Vudu has an interesting service called Disc to Digital that lets you buy a digital copy of a movie you already own on disc, but it only works on maybe a third of the titles I have that didn’t come with a digital copy already (depends a lot on the studio releasing the title with Fox and Sony often working, but most others not). To prove ownership, you can use the Vudu phone app to scan the Blu-ray case UPC barcode while you are at your house. Using the GPS coordinates of the phone and confirming the UPC tells them that you have the disk at your house (this is called Mobile Disc to Digital) instead of scanning them in a store. Another way to do it is to load the disk into your computer and a desktop Vudu app will read it to confirm you have the actual disk (called Disc to Digital Home). That’s great except none of my computers have a Blu-ray drive, only DVD. There are ways to cheat that system, but I don’t really want to cheat the system. Then you pay $2 to get a digital copy, which is a great deal since most digital movies cost $10-20 to buy and cost more than $2 just to rent. Most of the movies I have gotten for $1 at Dollar Tree have a replacement UPC code stuck very securely over the original UPC code and D2D won’t let you use those barcodes to buy a D2D movie (sometimes Dollar Tree will put the sticker on the clear plastic cover instead of the paper insert with the artwork and UPC code, so you can still scan the original code). I have tried peeling the sticker off, but this generally does not go well and there is still no guarantee the movie will be eligible for D2D. I wrote about a lot of this earlier, mostly in the replies to my post about Digital HD. Continue reading “Getting Paid to Watch Movies”