Flogging English » TV

Ow. My face hurts… Plus, Hey! It’s that guy from Die Hard!

retsoced — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:48:24 +0000

The last week has been one of the craziest weeks of the year, culminating with a weekend of far more work than sleep. I've been doing a fair amount of freelance work of late so most of my actual down-time has been spent staring off into space, in the shower or asleep. I am really looking forward to a break over the next couple of weeks and having time off.

One of my more unproductive time slots recently was spent watching Chuck. If you haven't seen this show it's great – check it out. Anyway, this last episode was their holiday episode, and one of the first things they do is bring in the police, which is led by Sgt. Al Powell! You know, they guy from Die Hard to was lucky enough to have a German terrorist nosedive through the windshield of his patrol car. This was great, I thought for sure they were going have more Die Hard references throughout – but alas, no. This was the only one.

While the episode was still a good one, I was a little dissappointed it didn't turn out to be a little more spoofish. It was cool that they did that though, especially since Die Hard is one of my all-time favorite movies.

New Microsoft ads beat the Mac ads: because they are nicer….

retsoced — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:49:57 +0000

The two new Microsoft ads are engaging because of the strangely familiar interaction between Gates and Seinfeld, which really does read like an old Seinfeld episode (no real surprise there). They are also ambiguous enough to be entertaining rather than a Cricket Bat to the face. The first one slays me, but mainly because of the little butt-wiggle thing (no homo) that Gates does at the end. WTF? These guys are weird.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY

Number two doesn't make any farther out of the Twilight Zone either.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw

I like it when ad campaigns come out like this. These are very reminiscient of the Mac ads when they first hit the boob-tube. The biggest difference is that there isn't any cross-platform bashing going on here; and I'm fine with that. The tone of the Mac ads was fuinny early on, and they are still pretty clever to a point, but they are getting a bit old. Yeah we know everyone hates Vista, but mostly I think everyone hates Vista because it's cool to hate Vista. The whole Vista sucks scenario has been more than officially played out and I'm sorta getting tired of hearing about it; especially from Apple.

Besides Apple isn't all that and a bag o' chips either. I run both, and don't get me wrong I love my MacBook, but Apple's PC development sucks honkin' huge hwang. They need to figure out how to test their crap, because every time they have a major upgrade to iTunes it jacks my machine up. Safari for Windows is still a dog, and now with iTunes 8 installed Quicktime took a crap so I have to reinstall that again too.

blah blah blah……

Anyway, enjoy the ads, and I am left wondering what's next.

DIY TV Repair: Fixing screen flicker on a Sony HD WEGA

retsoced — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:19:19 +0000

The wife and I bought or swankin’ huge, beastly heavy TV about 7 or 8 years ago now and have really liked it. A Sony WEGA 32″ HD Flat Screen which costs us about $1,500 at the time and took me and my brother to move it – as it weighs in at almost 200 lbs. Like just about every other Sony product I have owned it is top notch and worked flawlessly until about a month ago when it started to randomly flicker a bit.

The timing of it aligned perfectly with the purchase of a new in-window AC unit, so we unplugged and viola! The flicker magically stopped; for a bit, although in a few days it started getting progressively worse and more annoying. After some digging, Litsa found some info about flickering Sony TVs on the web and it turned out to be spot on and fixed the issue.

There are a couple of knobs within the back of the set, both of them are at the base of a thick (8 gauge wire maybe) red lead, and on my unit one is on the left as you face the back, and the other is in the middle right behind the tube.

The one on the main base board is the focus knob, which I can only assume controls the focus of the tube. The one I am interested in is the screen knob, and it is near the top on a board behind the tube, the knob itself is on the side of the board, by a small grouping of wires. It was kinda hard to find with all the crap and dust stuck to everything, but after some judicious use of an air can I found it.

One small twist in a clockwise direction and all my flicker problems were solved. When I say small twist, I really mean too – I only twisted the knob like a 10th of a turn, plugged it back in, and poof – flicker be gone. Supposedly this knob will cause problems if you twist it too far, but fortunately you can just adjust it back if you go too far. Another thing to remember is that these TVs will auto-adjust the color every time you turn it on, so if you adjust with the power on (which I would highly discourage) and get a color shift – simply turn the set off and on again. As I said though, I would not recommend doing anything to the back when it is on.

Here are a few more pictures of the inside of the TV as well.

***All of the pictures are in a litebox gallery, so you can just cycle through and view them all large – just click on one to open it up and go from there.

If you’re looking for some more information on fixing your messed up set, check out the Plasma TV Repair Guide for more info.