Tag: penguin

Posted on

Day Eight

I am currently starting day eight of my fourteen day self-isolation. My first day in this position, the very day after BJ announced these conditions, was my birthday. I had a new TV delivered. It didn’t seem so bad, I had time to sort out the entertainment room while also keeping in touch with my duties at work. The new TV was precisely the fault of me “popping” into Richer Sounds and seeing an advert for a Philips Ambilight television on one of their brochures. The price seemed good and I do have a Philips lighting system at home. Along with 4K [I’m skeptical] and HDR it didn’t take much for me to decide to get it delivered.

Blank Wall For TV
Blank Wall For TV

The TV was placed up and the 4K system tested. Now, it turns out the AV Amp and HDMI switch doesn’t pass through the 4K and HDR signal. This is a touch annoying. I devise a work around where HDMI cables go straight to the TV and then sound is returned to the Amp via ARC. That didn’t work, I couldn’t get the ARC signal to send. Not sure why but it was probably one of those tiny settings somewhere deep within the menu system. I must have looked through the TV menus over twenty times. It’s a terrible menu system by the way. So, next option was to use an optical cable to output 5.1 sound from the TV to the amp. I didn’t have a cable long enough so had to wait. For one evening I had to watch TV and have the sound come from the TV’s own speakers [horror].

Next day an optical cable was delivered and the sound signal was tested. Now I would have 5.1 sound output by the TV to the Amp. This seemed livable with. Except it wasn’t. My Amp is 7.2, the PS4 outputs 7.1 and two of my speakers would now be redundant. I tried. I honestly tried. The convincing factor that I wouldn’t cope with this was the sound delay needed adjusting for all inputs. This meant changing the AV-Sync settings whenever I switched TV source. There were too many little bits in between the sight and sound signals. What a disaster.

I went searching through all the instruction manuals [in PDF format on my computer] and sought a solution. I couldn’t find one. What I needed [ha, “needed”, what an interesting word] was an amplifier that would throughput 4K and HDR along with separating out the sound signals keeping my home system as it is. It didn’t take long to find what I wanted. So, I ordered the Sony STR-DN1080.

When it arrived I reckon it took two hours to unplug the entire old system and then wire up the new amplifier. I left the auto-calibration for another day when it wouldn’t be so un-neighbourly and just set up the basics. I checked the inputs worked, check the TV signal, checked the 4K throughput and HDR rendering. It worked and there was no sound delay, or if there was it was consistent between all modules to make the settings consistent.

Gran Turismo looks bloody gorgeous in HDR, can’t believe I’ve been missing this.

I Parish

The lounge is now fully equipped although no longer 3D compliant. The system works well and I have been really impressed with all aspects of it. The ambilight system is very impressive. I can even link the TV light system to existing coloured lights in the house and I did this with a LED strip I had. The strip is on the ceiling in the lounge and looks really nice. But, when connected to the ambilight on the TV it floods the whole room with changing light that is, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, too much. I disconnected that system. Maybe if my lounge was bigger than its current form it would be less overpowering. Can you believe I actually turned a TV feature off!

Entertainment Corner [asymmetric]
Entertainment Corner [asymmetric]

Above is nearly all of entertainment corner. There is a Sonos unit just hidden to the top right, it uses an optical cable to send signals to the amplifier, you can just see two wires top right, one is white [power] another is grey [optical]. So, here we have from the top; a BluRay player, PS4, Shield TV, Amplifier, PSVR unit. Yes, the cabling is a mess. No, I am not going to sort it out – I’m lucky enough that this all fits in this space. If I had rear access I might get in there and fiddle around. Yes, the USB Gran Turismo back up memory stick looks terrible. Yes, the USB hub needs sorting out, I have a plan. Yes, it is asymmetric, but I really like that so I don’t care. Yes, they are Lego bricks separating each unit for heat flow purposes and no, I won’t change that.

Entertainment Centre
Entertainment Centre

This is not a blank wall anymore. I’ve got quite a nice TV along with a decent sound system and games console. All I have to do now is avoid buying the PS Turbo or whatever it’s called. I think I can probably manage to do that.

I did have the issue of what to do with the old TV. I’m not really a TV in the bedroom kinda guy. Bedrooms are for few purposes and watching television is not one of those. I used to find it frustrating with an ex when she watched Tv in bed and all I wanted to do was sleep. The TV programmes were very poor too. I think that’s the first time I became aware of Gillian McKeith, she was presenting a TV show called “You Are What You Eat” which is true but not in the way she meant it. I remember her talking about eating raw seeds and how the whole plant’s energy entered you. It was a seed. Just a seed. Fucking dangerous bullshit.

So, the older television is now on the wall in the dining room. I’ve connected a Roku device to it so I can stream the audio-visual medium to the screen. I have plans to buy a Raspberry Pi and use that as a information screen type thing or possible to have live plane details on the screen. I’m not sure yet what to do with it. Putting this TV up did require some drilling etc but it was fun. When looking at the TV there is an issue where it doesn’t look horizontal but it is, the problem is the ceiling coving which isn’t level. If I had the uber-PS I could place the current PS4 with the dining room screen but I won’t be doing that.

Dining Room Black Mirror
Dining Room Black Mirror

My current project is to build a display onto the DR screen. My Shield TV already has Dakboard running as its screen saver and I quite like that but I don’t really want to pay for the full version so I am looking into using a Raspberry Pi and either a browser running on that in full screen with a self refresh timer or some software that will run a display board. I guess there are plenty out there. So, wait for the news on that.

Posted on

Keeping The Sanity

I’m not sure if this will help or not but if you need it then there’s plenty of internet radio to help you out. This is one of my favourites:

Posted on

Countryside Noise

I wrote a short while ago about the area in which I live and how I would consider it countryside but there’s also the machines of human activity nearby. In that communication I mentioned motorways, supermarkets, train tunnels and an airport. So, here is a map of Eccles’s surrounding area:

Eccles and environs
Eccles and environs

And here is a map with various things highlighted. The legend is below the picture.

Things Of Humanity
Things Of Humanity
  • Yellow: motorways
  • Green: airport
  • Blue: high speed train tunnel
  • Pink dots: Supermarkets I visit

Below is where I grew up, the village of Hatfield Heath in Essex, and I’ve marked similar things onto that map. Perhaps that is why I like my current village. I spent nineteen years on the Heath and had a very similar environment.

Posted on

It’ll Still Be Here

I do like living in the country away from things. Well, I’m not really that far away from things; there are two motorways within five minutes, all the supermarkets you could want and I live under the flight path for a small airport, which essentially means this is an almost perfect place to live. It’s generally quiet, even though I can hear the M20 and also the Eurostar as it blasts its way through a tunnel in the North Downs, there are aircraft [at the moment] flying overhead on their way to the money centres of the world and small planes circle around doing their thing at Rochester. So, it’s not quiet but it’s my kind of noise.

My recent angst at all things human society have been calmed by the idea that even if we fuck it all up this planet of life will continue and something will stay here, alive and well. It could take a long time but maybe this planet will once again be an amazing world of life and beauty [beauty being a human property because of the way our brains work]. So, here are some photographs of this wonderful place. It might turn out that everything becomes forested again at some point. Wouldn’t that be great.

Kentish Country
Kentish Country

The vineyard below won’t exist but something will be there.

Kentish Vineyards
Kentish Vineyards
Posted on

I Had A Moment

I wasn’t feeling great on Thursday and ws mostly convinced that “preppers” had got the right idea. I’ve been more chilled out since but I did order a battery operated radio just in case it all goes to shit. I can’t decide if it was paranoia or just plain silly but I did. This is a really strange time and I just don’t know what is going to happen.

Roberts Radio R9993 Portable LW/MW/FM Radio with Headphone Socket

I ordered this thing from Amazon. It’s a perfectly functional battery operated radio.

I keep going from wanting to not write anything about all this to wanting to write a lot about this whole thing. I feel it should be documented somehow for me to look back over one day.

Posted on

It’s Almost As If

Our society wasn’t set up to cope with a massive short term change to the way it operates. By short term I mean in the order of months. We aren’t even months in and it feels as though the world is ending. There’s panic in the supermarkets and many many businesses are going to go bust. People won’t get paid and it’s not going to be pleasant.

If only our society hadn’t been chronically underfunded over the last ten years. If only the “gig-economy” wasn’t a thing. If only companies weren’t driven by responsibilities to shareholders but rather to a social responsibility that means they would look after their employees and make sure everyone had a decent standard of living.

We SHOULD be paying for goods and expecting everyone involved in those process to make them to be paid a FAIR wage. It is utterly immoral that they don’t.

This was meant to be the start of something big but I think I’ll have to leave it for a while. I might keep my ramblings short while we go through this.

Posted on

Lights

Before all this madness I decided I would buy a new TV. I kinda figured that most screens are similar and so it was other features I wanted. I went for a 4K HDR screen [I’m not fussed about the sound, I have a separate system for that] and also Ambilight. Philips make TVs with the Ambilight system. There are LEDs around the back of the screen and they project colours onto the wall matching areas of the picture on the TV. This is what it looks like:

I do have some sound issues at the moment because my current amplifier won’t pass through 4K signals. I’m in the process of fixing that. But the screen and picture are great. The colours on the wall are pretty amazing. I did have the signal linked up to an LED strip but it was too overpowering! I had to turn that one off.

Posted on

Frustration

I love Gran Turismo. I have done since I lived in Chicago Avenue in Gillingham. My landlord borrowed a PlayStation from his brother and it had Gran Turismo. He and I would play this game and slowly over time I have gotten more and more into this particular game. I’ve owned every version.

The last few versions have had online gaming and I have a love hate relationship with the online version. Gran Turismo Sport has a vibrant online gaming community and I suspect there are people who race online all the time. I don’t get to see them often because my qualifying times aren’t that great.

Online racing is frustrating at times because I could get knocked off at a corner (or straight) and then I am pretty much in last place. The person who did the knocking will probably get a time penalty but my race is pretty much over. Also, there are times when I get knocked or hit into but then I receive the time penalty. This is what happened in the following clip. I was on the outside of the last corner of the Blue Moon Speedway when a black car rammed the car on the outside of him, then that second car rammed into me and I got a 1 second penalty. On a fast track like this 1s is a disaster and I can only pray for the whole front pack to take each other out to get any decent level of points.

In this clip my car is the dirty orange looking colour. I was racing closely with 9th place “YOUR-INFERIOR”, spelling please, I gave him room in the penultimate corner and then feathered the throttle going into the last corner. You will see 11th place “Golf_RalleyG60” come up the inside too fast and “lean” on “YOUR-INFERIOR” causing them to drift outwards and smack into me. In the second view you can see things from ” Golf_RalleyG60″‘s point of view with a reverse look to see me get my penalty.

Sometimes the racing is really good and there’s an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement as people race. Sometimes the race is full of assholes.

Posted on

P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has died. I don’t often write about particular deaths on here because when you read those pieces it’s more of a shout by the writer about themselves rather than the person. This is going to be like that. I pretend it’s about Genesis Breyer P-Orridge but in reality I write about me.

I first came across Throbbing Gristle in the early 2000s. A friend talked about them and I was curious. So, I have some of their music. I listened to it. It hurt. But I liked just how different it was. Then I heard about COUM Transmissions and the ICA installation called Prostitution. When I read descriptions of that show I was fascinated and amazed at the same time. The undercurrents of sedition were real and the establishment didn’t like any of it. I do believe we can thank those early artists who “rebelled” for our liberties today. They planted the seed. The mold breakers have been there in most ages and they push the boundaries allowing people to feel more normal.

The ninety eight percent of you out there who fit the norm of our current society never have anything to fear except your normality being threatened. What you don’t realise is that the other two percent don’t share your views and want to be different and want to feel comfortable in their own skin. Those people with different feelings and needs should be listened to. They should be allowed to exist and feel normal because that is a basic human right.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge kept pushing those boundaries to the end. I am sad they have died. I am also sad that as I grow older more of those who influenced me die. It’s inevitable and a reminder that one day I too will cease to exist.

Long live the boundary pushers, for the sake of all of us.

Posted on

More Than That

This headline from the BBC is amazing. I don’t even know what sort of spin they are trying to place on the news. I’ve been trying to spend less time BBC bashing when there is plenty more shit out there but this one needs a bit more explaining and it covers one of my favourite topics: the survival of the planet. It’s easy to go to the Daily Bullshit Mail and rip it apart. It’s easy to look at so many news articles and explain why they are wrong but it’s depressing when it’s the BBc that do it. As I’ve said many times within these communications the BBC is the best news gathering we have in this country and it’s going to be destroyed by the tories.

The use of quotations in headlines is terrible. It allows news organisations to drag you in with a juicy quote from a story without actually telling you anything about the story. Or, as in this case, it is misleading. The real news headline should have been:

Climate Change Report by Think Tank Released.

IP

What happened was a report was released. The headline the BBC used misses an important part of the report which said that the UK can’t go carbon neutral without changes to behaviour. That last bit swaps the whole style of the narrative around and makes the report more positive. It explains the headline. But most grumpy fuckers will read the headline, nod wisely as it agrees with their preconceptions, and then move on without actually learning anything. This headline gives the excuse that there’s no point changing behaviour because we can’t be carbon neutral by 2050. It’s an excuse to let people do what they are currently doing. It’s dangerous.

The UK cannot go climate neutral much before 2050 unless people stop flying and eating red meat almost completely, a report says. But it warns that the British public do not look ready to take such steps and substantially change their lifestyle.

From the BBC article

No one wants to change their behaviour because we don’t like change. But we MUST change and change soon. It is obvious we have destroyed this planet for the next ten generations and massive changes are required NOW to make sure that we minimise the terror. Currently we are breaking every possible system the planet has and we are going to make this place a horror movie in one hundred years or maybe even earlier. I guess we have to thank short-termism politics and the general selfishness of those who seek power and then want to maintain that power. It’s hard to imagine people who push their way to power actually wanting to help people. They do exist but are rare and seen as the odd ones.

I do sometimes think that maybe the best thing to happen to this planet is the extinction of our species. The planet will take a while to recover but it will eventually be a glorious place of life and death and the struggle to survive without our influence.

The weight of this world should be on all our shoulders. But I fear it is held by a few.

Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress