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After getting a new Ultra High Definition TV and now a UHD Blu-ray player, the last component of the system that needs upgrading is the sound. After playing with the new UHD player, even with older Blu-ray disks, it will not output the sound correctly to the old receiver. My receiver doesn’t have HDMI inputs like the newer ones do. Instead you could either connect RCA cables for a 5.1 surround setup or a Toslink cable, a fiber optic cable that carries the music converted to a red light. That always seemed like the best, but actually Toslink can’t carry 8 individual channels of audio that a 7.1 system might require. With the old player Toslink worked fine with 7.1, but the two back speakers were the same channel. With the new player the best it seems I can do is the back speakers play out of the front, but the side speakers are okay (in the player settings I have to send a DTS bitstream, otherwise everything comes out the front). Continue reading “Shopping for a Surround System”

I recently got a new Ultra HD TV. Even though I don’t have any sources in UHD (or 4K, but 4K is actually a little wider than UHD; a UHD picture has 4 times as many pixels as HD), I am enjoying having a modern TV and the picture is really great. Of course there is always the desire to supply that UHD content that the TV is capable of. I can stream UHD content from YouTube, and Netflix offers some UHD content (though I’m not a member right now). Even the HD Blu-rays I have look great on the TV and the extra pixels of UHD are barely visible and maybe not visible. One problem with my current Blu-ray player is often the sound doesn’t sync correctly with the video. The only way to fix it seems to be to turn the Blu-ray player off and then on again and hope that it gets close enough this time (this is fairly time consuming to shut down the player, boot it up again, and then start the disk to get to the main menu). Also, Blu-ray players now can all connect to the internet though mine does not. That isn’t a big deal because my TV can connect to the internet too, but some Blu-ray disks have features that require internet access. So I’ve been thinking about getting a new Blu-ray player and for about $180 I could get a UHD Blu-ray player. UHD is still pretty new and they have tweaked it since it came out with HDR 10 which gives better backlight depth. Then Frys had a sale . . .
Continue reading “Ultra HD Blu-ray Player”

I have several plastic containers I use to hold flashlight parts. To keep the parts from rusting, I wanted to keep some silica gel in the containers to keep humidity down. At first I would get the ones included with shoes or pills, but then decided to just order some bigger 10 gram packages online. I numbered each of 10 pouches and put one in each of maybe 7 containers with a few left over. One of the leftover pouches I left out on my desk. The other two I kept in their original heavy duty ziplock envelope and put that in one of the plastic containers. I figured after a year, I could weigh the 10-gram pouches on my digital scale and see how well they were working, and maybe recharge them by baking them in an oven.

This weekend it had been a year. Most of the pouches now weighed about 13 grams, so they had absorbed about 30% of their weight in water. The ones in the envelope were around 12 grams, so they still picked up humidity. The one that was left out all year was also about 13 grams. So I think 30% is the maximum they can effectively absorb. I put the pouches in the oven for a couple of hours at 220 degrees and they all returned down to or just below their original weights, so the baking really worked and the pouches should be good as new (also they did not catch on fire or melt!). I probably need to weigh the pouches again every few months to see how long it takes them to get up to 13 grams when they essentially stop working. So I will use this entry to track results in the future.

After Austin died I knew I would get a new dog eventually. I feel like Rosa would be happier with another dog around, but we had a couple of weeks of great quality time. She hadn’t been going for walks as much and has slowed down some in the meantime. I figured I would start looking soon and Eric’s girlfriend even asked if she could tag along and help out when I visited shelters. Austin came from Paws, so I planned to go there first. I could also go to Lifeline here in Avondale which is where Rosa came from. Also, a person on Nextdoor posts about graduates of the Canine Cellmates program where prisoners work with dogs rescued from the pound before the dogs are made available for adoption. Adult dogs are a little harder to place, so that would be fine with me. Usually if they have lived at a shelter for any amount of time they are pretty much housebroken.

Continue reading “Bella”

I bought a high definition TV in 2003 and it has worked about the same ever since I got it. However the rest of the world has moved on. HDMI cables are now the standard way to connect cable boxes and DVD players to TVs, but mine had an earlier version called DVI. I was able to use cables with HDMI at one end for the DVD player and a DVI connector at the other end for the TV, but DVI doesn’t carry sound, so I had to carry the audio signal separately. Fortunately the TV had a ton of input jacks on the back. While I don’t think it matters much, the TV was only capable of a 1080i picture, but 1080p is now common, including from my Blu-ray player. Lately, the cost of Ultra High Definition TV’s has come down (way below what I got my TV for) and I started thinking about upgrading. In the end I decided that the technology was still developing and I should wait since my old TV was working fine. Until Sunday night.
Continue reading “New TV”