Home entertainment a/v connectivity

Readers who visited us in Delaware, Ohio, may recall one wall of our drawing room featuring rather a lot of home entertainment hardware wired together on three sets of glass and steel shelving. Back when I was using PAL and NTSC flavors of both VHS and DVD players with a television standards converter then I had an alarmingly complicated setup with a matrix of settings for the various A/B switches that would adjust connections and directions so that the correct outputs would become connected to the corresponding inputs for whatever we now needed. It was accompanied by a careful drawing made in pencil. These days, life is simpler.

We recently obtained a UK Nintendo Wii on Amazon for £13 from Glasgow via eBay so for streaming video we can now use the Amazon app to connect to a UK Amazon account; on our American Wii it would connect to a US Amazon account only. The composite color encoding is wrong for our American television but using a component video cable fixes that, obtained for £3.49 again from eBay. I was again very thankful for the flexible connectivity afforded by our trusty old Toshiba REGZA LCD television, model 32CV510U.

I presently have cables into our television from two different computers, two different Wii's, the DVB-T2 box, the DVD player, and there are still connectors to spare. It offers a selection of multiple HDMI, composite video, component video, SVGA, etc. The only disappointment is that, with the regular HDTV modes rather than the PC video modes, for the most part it insists on 60Hz, though the manual is very informative in that regard. For when our cheap Chinese DVB-T2 box, also from eBay, forgets its settings and switches back to 50Hz then I have it connected also via composite video so I can see the menu well enough to correct it. The television also offers useful configuration like letting me provide the audio over RCA connectors for an HDMI input.

Someday our television will stop working and I shall have to replace it. I very much hope that at that time similarly flexible televisions are easy to obtain cheaply.

Buying store-brand groceries

mst3kmoxie had a Tesco voucher for coffee we like expiring today and the weather has been lovely this weekend so out we all went to Tesco. We cannot afford to shop there routinely but, not uniquely among grocery stores here, their own-brand merchandise is differentiated into three different classes or market segments: there is the regular stuff, there is the economy stuff that is routinely affordable and often quite adequate, then there is the fancy stuff for those who are not price-sensitive and wish they lived nearer Edinburgh so they could stop into Waitrose instead. I like to make a point of visiting the very-discounted shelves of groceries that expire today so must now be sold: quite often I thus end up getting to taste food from the fancy range, including today which included a nice fancy fishcake. Even the discount grocery chains such as Lidl at least have a fancy range, theirs being deluxe. Tesco's is finest and they now call their economy range everyday value.

I realize that I cannot recall these different levels of own-brand fanciness from my past shopping, either in the US or years ago in the UK. It is quite likely that I simply forget. Still, I wonder when they were introduced and where. It seems quite a good idea, effectively making the store three-in-one. The main social differentiation I recall in Ohio is that we were more likely to be offered free samples of food if we went to a store branch sited in an affluent white neighborhood, just like how one drives over to those neighborhoods on Hallowe'en for better candy.