Lists all of the journal entries for the day.

Sat, 4 Aug 2007

8:38 PM - HDTV + Wii + DVD

Caryn and I got a good deal on an open box HDTV this weekend.  Our old television was a 20 inch Magnavox that Caryn got when she entered college.  (prior to us getting married)  Half the features didn't even work on that TV and the power button was acting up. 

The new television is a 30 inch Samsung with 1080i, 2 hdmi, 2 composite, 1 svideo and 1 standard rca.  It has optical audio output. The only thing I don't like about it is that it is a CRT and weights 120 pounds.  We had a hell of a time getting it in the apartment. 

We also bought a composite cable for the DVD player which was $10 at meijers versus the $60 best buy wanted.  The Nintendo Wii is now hooked up with a composite cable which you have to buy special for $25.  That allows the Wii and DVD players to do 480p instead of 480i.  (interlaced vs progressive scan)  I watched Star Wars and it did look good.  As for the Wii, the widescreen made a bigger improvement than the 480i vs 480p aspect. 

I was shocked to see how many channels we get.  We do not have cable tv hooked up in the living room and with our existing rabbit ears, we can get channels 2, 4, 7, as well as stations in toledo, pbs and other local programming.  HD broadcasts include 2 channels per station.  So if you tune in to channel 7, you get 7 (over air regular broadcast), 7.1 (high def regular abc programming), and a weather only channel 7.2.  Before we could only get channel 7 and 2 good enough to watch.  I think I would have bought one sooner if I knew that you could actually pick up more content. 

Our bedroom television is only a 13 inch but it's about 3 years old.  We often watched television in there as we have cable and the picture was better than the living room.  I'm very surprised by the HD picture quality improvement.  I have a feeling the negative comments about Blueray and hd-dvd are wrong in terms of picture quality.  I can tell the difference between a 480i or 480p broadcast and higher settings. 

As I'll need to get a new car, any other purchases will be put off for some time.  I would love to get an Apple TV or PS3 (for blueray player) down the road. 

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8:49 PM - Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I got an opportunity to see 10.5 on Friday.  For a beta, it was shockingly fast and stable.  The UI improvements were not as impressive as the demo videos led one to believe.  The floor aspect of the dock is very lame.  The tabs and other enhancements to terminal are awesome.  I did not get a chance to play with time machine as we didn't have a drive to configure it with.  It was actually OS X server so there was a lot of other extras. 

I'm going to suggest the upgrade to others just because I think it is much more consistent than 10.4.10.  It's an odd release and we all know those are the stable ones. 

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