Saturday lunchtime, I needed to get out of the house for a bit, so we went to The Farmer's Cart. It's a farm-shop not far from home and we go there reasonably often to get fresh veg and organic meats. They have a small café and we thought it would be nice for lunch.
Posted by admin on 27 Apr 2006 in Technology
I have a lot of things to do with my hobby IT, and we've got to figure out the right order to do things, and how future-proof our decisions seem to be.
Posted by admin on 26 Mar 2006 in Technology
I managed to get a look at an LG running with the same analogue feed as the other TVs in the store, and I have to say that it blew me away. Obviously you need to look at an LCD TV at the kind of distance that you intend viewing it from, but since I sometimes use our TV for console gaming, that distance can vary quite a bit. Even right up close the LG picture was sharp, bright and clear. There was very little bleeding and most impressive there was almost none of the "sparkle" that usually pervades LCD analogue images.
I'll go back and have another look sometime, but from the first viewing, it stood head and shoulders above any other LCD that I've looked at.
Posted by admin on 23 Mar 2006 in Technology
Our main domestic TV is on the fritz. To be completely honest, this is not new, it always had a habit of turning itself off if a taxi drove past, and the OSD had a way of moving around the screen every six months as though it got bored of the view and wanted to try something different. At the moment it's halfway off the screen to the left. There is a way of getting to a secret engineer's menu and adjusting it, but I've forgotten how and I can't be bothered to go and root out the instruction manual.
The big problem now with the telly is that it has trouble maintaining the vertical field. After a few minutes of use, the picture starts to collapse in on itself, eventually it forms a single bright line across the centre of the screen and if we're lucky it turns itself off.
We bought a new shiny Philips LCD a couple of weeks ago, but it was supposed to come with an digital tuner and it didn't so we sent it back. Now we've been putting off getting a new one because it's that time of year when everyone brings out their new models. If we wait a few more weeks, we might be able to get one of last year's models reduced to clear.
The LG's look gorgeous, but I think that might be because they all seem to be on a special LG display stand and they're running from High Definition Video Feeds. Everything else on the shop is showing some rubbish DVD from a massive splitter somewhere in the store-room. It's hardly a fair comparison and although I think the LG is probably pretty darned good, I don't want to be taken by surprise.
Posted by admin on 23 Mar 2006 in Life
It's been such a long time, and at least someone pretends to read this because they told me to update it.
I'm still here, still struggling to get round to doing stuff on the website.
The truth is that I have been doing other fun stuff, but not a lot of webby stuff. I have written a console game and it should get published some time this year. I'll update as soon as it does. (I promise)
I'm part way through writing a nice tutorial and when that's done I'll try and update the whole tutorial thing on here. Many of the tutorials are a little bit broken and they all need a good airing.