As I’ve mentioned earlier, my apartment building is soon making the move from analogue to digital TV. Through the same fiber optic cable the we’ll also get IP telephony and a lightning fast internet connection. All good, but as of now nothing has really happened. If I remember correctly, everything is supposed to be ready in September, but we’re already half way through August and the fiber cable is nowhere to be seen. Not that I expect it to be visible, but I know that they have to dig up the lawn to install the cable I have not seen any caterpillars yet.
Still it’s important to prepare for the new, digital world and find a replacement for my old Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, the new digital system will be closed, meaning that it will not possible to buy a digital tuner and a conditional access card reader and just continue to use the Media Center; I have to use the provided set top box. I can probably live with that, considering I don’t really watch much TV anyway these days and two of the channels I watch the most won’t be available on the new setup, at least not initially. I’ve got most of my music on the Media Center box, tough, and I’d like to be able to play music in the living room. But I don’t want to keep the Media Center just to play music, it’s a huge box and because it’s running Vista the startup time is too long when all I want to do is to jump around to a couple of tunes. Continue reading "Audio."
Of course I’m not staring at the sun, that’s dangerous and could damage your eye sight. Now I’ve said it, but there is no need for the stupid amongst you to go outside and see if it’s actually true. My own eyes are bad enough as it is, mainly because I was born with sub par eye sight, but I guess years if staring at computer screens has also taken its toll.
Then why am I’m referring to the sun? The reason why I’m rambling on about the sun is that yesterday we saw the first real hot summer day here in Oslo - at least the first one I’ve noticed. Despite being a nerd, I like the sun - since it’s one of the main reason we’re able to stay alive and stuff - so I took the opportunity to take a walk downtown to buy something we all need from time to time: New socks. Exciting!
But I also spent a little money on a little something I’ve been meaning to get for a long, long time. Over the three last years, I’ve been slowly buying speakers for my 5.1 surround system. First two great Dali Blue 5005 front speakers, then two budget Proson rear speakers, a Dali Concept Center and now my surround system is finally complete with a marvelous Dali Concept Sub. It’s really a great piece of Danish engineering - you can’t really tell it’s there until you turn it off and a lot of the dynamics in the sound suddenly disappears. It’s present in the audio without dominating it, but it’s still able to deliver that extra “omph” when necessary.
No, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I like to pretend I do.
A couple of years ago I heard a song of a band called Switchfoot. Excellent stuff, great guitars, great drums, some awesome bass playing - definitely worth the buy. Some of the lyrics were perhaps a bit cheesy for my taste, but I can handle the odd love song.
After a while, though, I realized that most of the song I had thought were love songs were not. As it turned out, Switchfoot was a Christian band - that I found all their guitar tabs at the Christian Guitar site sort of gave them away. I’m very skeptical about all things religion and although the discovery didn’t ruin the music it certainly made me read the lyrics differently.
I usually don’t buy movies because of a good soundtrack, but there is a first time for everything. When I flew to Australia, one of the in-flight movies was Sunshine, a nice science fiction movie with a spectacular soundtrack and some marvelous video photography even on the crappy LCD screen in the back of the seat in front of me. For some time I’ve been looking for the movie OST, but a little digging around in the interweb has revealed that the soundtrack was never released and probably never will. You can find an unofficial version floating around on the web, but it’s only a rip of the music straight off the DVD.
When I was grocery shopping today, I noticed that they had the Sunshine DVD for sale (grocery shops sell all kinds of stuff these days) and decided to go for it. If it was a good movie on the plane, it’s very likely that it’s a good movie in our living room as well.
