Yikes! At the moment, the home team NE Patriots have fallen way behind the NY Giants, 28-16. Not good. The Pats are supposed to remain undefeated! But at least the game looks terrific in projected HDTV. Eric’s hand shows the size of the picture.
P.S. Whew! They did it. Tom Brady may be a jerk for not marrying the mother of his child, but he’s sure good at his job.
Happy post-Christmas letdown! Well, we took the big step at our house, and have gone Def. High Def. HDTV. A great deal of thought has gone into this over the past year, and it wouldn’t have happened this year if a particular product hadn’t made an appearance.
One of the blog posts that was lost in the great database debacle last spring told of my friend across the street getting a 50-inch Panasonic plasma TV. As impressed as I was by the picture, I decided it wouldn’t be big enough for what I wanted, and that was when I decided to go with front projection technology. There was also a nostalgic yearning to return to my glory days as an A/V boy in elementary school, during the time when I had my Kenner Super Show at home.
I set out to go HD in a big way — 65″ diagonal for 16:9 — on the cheap. I already had a tripod screen, obtained for free from work a few years ago, after ceiling-mounted, motorized screens were installed. The screen happened to be exactly the size that would fit in the TV room for a 65″ picture, and that saved me $100-$200.
I found a $40 TV shelf at Target that looked like it would work to mount a projector, but what about the projector itself? It had to be LCD, because I’m very susceptible to the rainbow effect caused by the spinning color wheel in single-chip DLP projectors, and to keep the price low I knew that 1080 was out of the question. I wanted to get something that was a clear stand-out for the money, but there wasn’t anything until the Panasonic PT-AX200U, a 720p projector, appeared a few months ago for $1299.
Projector People had the 200U for $50 off with free shipping. Projector People is very good to deal with, and if you’re buying a front projector I recommend them highly; however, I found 50-ft. HDMI and component video cables elsewhere for a lot less. Another Christmas addition to the house is an XBox 360 for Eric. Here’s how it looks with the lights on…
… and how it looks with the lights off.
The 200U uses Epson’s 3LCD engine. I won’t bore you with the details, but my 200U displays the usual 3LCD drawbacks, so the picture isn’t perfect. Nevertheless, it looks great! But let me qualify that by adding that HDTV on FiOS looks great — when it’s true HD — and well-made DVD’s look almost as good. Everything else looks big, but that’s all. Regular TV and good, ol’ Laserdiscs are only so-so at best on the 200U. My recommendation is, if you want to watch TV, watch TV.
As I said, I wanted to do home theater on the cheap, so besides the projector my only out-of-pocket expenses were a couple of long cables and the shelf. Not having a wall handy, I used cable ties to secure the bracket to a post in the finished basement, where I already had one of the surround sound speakers. Looks a bit funky, but it works.
Our nine-year-old TV is now on the porch, after my friend from the across the street helped me lug all 168 pounds of it upstairs. I helped carry his plasma out of the store and into his house last spring, but it weighed only half as much, so I owe him something for his trouble and effort.
I’m happily back where I began with the Kenner Super Show! Now if only FiOS would add more HD channels to their basic line-up, which they should do because they recently increased the monthly rate for the HDTV DVR. Meanwhile, I will continue to sit out the stupid format war between HD-DVD (my pick) and Blu-Ray.
P.S. I almost forgot! A while back I posted a picture of David Letterman and said I would have more to say about it. I didn’t get that photo off the Net, I took it during my first test of the projector.
If you click here, you can see a tiny bit of one of the days that was lost in the database mess that happened last spring, captured by Archive.org.
I know exactly how the database attack happened, and how I could have dealt with it better than I did, but so it goes. The page on Archive.org is unformatted, and there are no pictures, but if you’re lucky the audio players will work.
There’s a way of defining a link in a Web page that either replaces the window or tab you’re looking at, or opens up a new one. Whether it opens a whole new window or just a tab in your present window depends on how your browser is set.
To open up a new window in a link, the command target="_blank" is needed. The problem is, this tag is no longer considered to be valid in the strict rules and regulations of Web pages, and there’s no replacement for it. The assumption is supposed to be that links will replace the existing window or tab. Fortunately, newer browsers have a feature where you can right-click a link and select whether or not you want to open a new window or a new tab.
I have been selectively using the target="_blank" tag, usually for external links that aren’t on my own site. I have decided to end this practice. For one thing, it’s a pain to do because I work in the non-graphical WordPress editor, and I have to enter the tag manually. So from now on if you want a link to open up a new tab or window, you’ll have to remember to first right-click. Sorry for the inconvenience.
On another matter, today I had tons of fun replacing the Computer Associates security suite with Norton Protection Center. It’s what Verizon wanted me to do, and I’d been putting it off, but the software is part of my FiOS package so I had to go along with it. Norton is uniformly rated as more secure than CA, so I didn’t really mind, but I’ve had Norton in the past and had a lot of trouble with it.
After some futzing around I got the CA suite uninstalled and Norton installed, I ran a full system scan that found five pieces of malware, and I customized the firewall feature. The system seems stable and it’s not running slowly the way McAfee made it do when it was part of my old Comcast service.
One incentive I had for installing Norton was a problem I’m having with my Web service. FTP — File Transfer Protocol — isn’t working. And I can’t post a couple of videos without FTP working, so I had nothing better to do. Sorry for this very boring post, but when I can upload the videos there will be something more interesting here!
Science News is a consistently excellent weekly magazine for keeping up with what’s really happening in the various scientific disciplines. I enjoyed reading an article about the launching of Sputnik 50 years ago. Something I didn’t know is that the launch was no surprise to American scientists, who were looking forward to it. America’s first attempt at a satellite launch was spectacular, but not successful:
On Dec. 6, the press was invited to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to witness the U.S. response to Sputnik. Newsreel cameras rolled as a modified Navy Vanguard rocket carrying a small satellite lifted off the launch pad. It rose just 4 feet before erupting in a fireball, sending the grapefruit-size satellite in its nose cone hurtling across the sands. The next day’s headlines provided the postmortem: “Flopnik,” “Dudnik,” “Kaputnik.”
You can read the article by clicking here.
A recording of the song ‘Layla’ is on the audio player. It was taken from an FM tube radio.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/NOV07/nanoradio-layla.mp3]
Courtesy Zettl Research Group,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley
Bad reception? An old LP played with a broken needle? No! Quite the opposite. It’s from the most advanced, state-of-the-art FM radio ever devised. It’s not a tube radio, but a nano-tube radio! Edwin Armstrong would be pleased.
