I’ve already talked here about the pros and cons of the switchover to DTV. Here’s another aspect of it I wasn’t fully aware of: Royalties are adding about $30 to the cost of your Digital-ready TV.
I won’t belabor the point here. Just click on the logo above to read all about it.
Well, it’s spring and a young man’s thoughts turn to…
building a PC, of course. Well, I’m not that young, but since I bought a new LCD TV and mounted it on my living room wall, it was the next logical step.
I’ve had a sound system tied into my TV watching since before “Home Theater” was a common term. My first DVR came in 1999, when I got a ReplayTV 2000. I only retired it a year ago when it’s power supply failed. I still have it, in case I want to repair it, but about that time, I got a satellite dish and got the DVR option along with that.
But, I haven’t been totally happy with that, plus with the switchover to DTV, and no way to record over-the-air, I’ve been seriously looking at HTPCs. Home Theater PCs are a computer with a tuner card to collect video and then display it, in real-time, or later via recording, on your TV. It’s a different breed of PC in some ways, with some special needs in the areas of cooling, sound levels and I/O devices. Continue Reading…
Actually said by a weatherman tonight on a local TV station:
If you are going to be out driving tonight, be careful because we haven’t seen rain like this in a couple of days and it could get slick.
Wait a minute. We should be extra careful because of the possibility of RAIN?!?! Because we haven’t seen rain in the looooong time of a couple days? How condescending and patronizing can the TV talking heads get? They must think we are like stupid Turkeys, standing in our front yards, looking upwards at this strange phenomenon, rain. We must have forgotten all about it because our short attention spans don’t go back a mere couple of days. They must warn us to close our mouths so that we don’t drown!
I don’t really think it’s a matter of some contempt for their viewers IQ. I think mostly, when you’re getting paid to fill time talking about something, sometimes they say anything as long as it sounds sort of related to the topic at hand.
I mean, come on, this is Western New York. We drive through blizzards before breakfast here. (And weathermen have a canary about it.) A little rain shouldn’t even be worth mentioning.