Tag Archives: technology

Yesterday afternoon Channel 7 gave me the bird!

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Worse, they unceremoniously dumped me!

Meet my lovely old TV set

As TV’s go it is probably in TV years an octogenarian like me!

No, that’s not it — though something similar served us Class of 1959 members in our leisure hours! Black and white, too. And no remote!

My faithful telly!

I remember the day the Palsonic and I became besties!

Thanks, Sirdan!

Posted on  by Neil

Yes, yesterday I took delivery of a state of the art LED HDTV set. Only a small one…

tftv492led

It also receives digital radio!

And LED?

LED technology is the latest emerging technology in flat screen TVS. LED TVs are known as a much more energy efficient and compact option than LCD TVs, offering screens only 1 inch thick. In fact, LED TVs are composed of a hybrid of LCD technology, with LED backlighting instead of fluorescent backlighting, bringing brighter contrast, more powerful colours and deeper blacks. LED TV technology is also incredibly energy efficient, currently using 40% less energy than many LCD models…

While LCD screens have made leaps and bounds with this problem, their darkest blacks do not hold up when looking at your picture from the side, or off axis. However, the technology used in LED TVs means that even the improved LCD colour is enhanced, meaning a much bigger gamut of colours and blacks in every image.

LCD and LED screens hold up in terms of glare on the screen, whereas Plasma TVs can face problems with it. However, some Plasmas are being produced with anti-glare glass installed to reduce this. Plasma screens also face a problem of image burn – if you leave a bright image paused on your monitor for a long period of time, that image will be imprinted on your TV. Though this fades with time, LCD and LED TVs face no such problem…

A good innings!

And now I am — except for bits like this on YouTube — deprived of Channel 7!

I did see that one!

Checking the JB HiFi catalogue this morning

This looks promising.

I don’t need big, and I can easily afford this one.

RoboBot, and Thursday adventures

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Yes, this morning TWO of my FB shares were high-handedly shut down!

Artificial “Intelligence” in practice!

And just minutes later on our ABC!

Earlier this morning we were told the press conference would be starting at 7:30am AEST, but that start time has been pushed back a couple of times.

Next we were looking at a start time of approximately 8:15am AEST, but it seems that will now likely be closer to 9:00am.

It could be delayed again, but we’ll keep you updated.

ABC News will livestream the press conference on YouTube and we’ll share that stream right here in our blog.

And shortly after that:

8.30 am AEDT: “Live updates: Joe Biden calls Volodymyr Zelenskyy ‘President Putin’ at NATO summit ahead of solo press conference.”

On which I commented:

This is bloody risible, ridiculous and personally offensive! As if I am hunting for “likes” in a profile closed to all but friends and relations. The Robobot obviously has an overdeveloped trigger which NEVER looks at context, intention or actual content because not being human it SIMPLY CANNOT!

One issue (to be fair) is that FB and similar are just too big for real intelligence as distinct from the much-vaunted artificial kind which so far really is not fit for this purpose, impressive as it no doubt is for the sheer volume of choices it can make….

Go to my Mastodon to see today’s Loon Pond.

Given the behaviour of RoboBot so far this morning, all my shares from WordPress Reader today will be on my Mastodon only.

Addendum

Omitted this graphic! Adds a bit to the story.

Thursday I went downtown

I had intended to go on Wednesday, for which see the previous post! Yesterday the weather was fine.

The Library was my first stop, nothing heavy this time. I have long wanted to get a Richard Osman novel, and the other is already proving to be fun.

At City Diggers I scored my free birthday Shiraz, then settled down to lunch, choosing the roast of the day over barramundi. The beef was overcooked I’m afraid, if flavourful, but the roast pumpkin and potato were perfect!

After a birthday gift (thanks, Rosemary!) awaited me at BWS Burelli Street, and I lashed out $20 (reduced price) on a worthy companion.

Patch Tuesday fun on Wednesday

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Not that I am ungrateful, mind you. Little Junior HP is now all up to date. But oh my, the process was painful, both for Junior HP whose meagre resources were stretched, and for me as it led to my postponing my birthday trip to the Club, not to mention the pharmacy and library. And of course BWS where a giftie awaits me according to an SMS received on Monday! I suspect it may look like this.

That was last year…. This year I know it is not a scam.

In fact, I am chuffed by all the birthday greetings and comments I received in the past couple of days, many attached to this:

On FB I wrote: This is nice, even if it was auto-generated! And I appreciate all the other messages I have been getting, reminding me in the nicest way that I am now firmly in the one foot in the grave category. But I guess if I were American I could still consider running for President! Seems to be the main qualification these days….

Planned to go to town today

Weather being kind too… But I forgot about PATCH TUESDAY — and not just any Patch Tuesday. Of course here in Oz they come on a Wednesday, we being ahead of the USA in several respects including not least our being a parliamentary democracy and also a constitutional monarchy (Charles !!!), which means, as former PM John Howard, with whom I rarely agree, correctly pointed out on Sky Oz, which I never watch, that because of those things Donald Trump would never have been elected under our system! He simply could not have been.

“If the Americans had a parliamentary system, Trump would not have gotten to the top of the republican party, no chance and therefore would not have been president way back a few years ago.” — John Howard.

But back to Patch Tuesday. I checked several expert sites and this is what I found:

“Microsoft has released the KB5040427 cumulative update for Windows 10 21H2 and Windows 10 22H2 with 13 changes, including Microsoft Copilot now behaving like an app, providing more flexibility on how it is displayed.

“The Windows 10 KB5040427 update is mandatory as it contains Microsoft’s July 2024 Patch Tuesday security updates, which fix 142 vulnerabilities.”

The process began around 8am when Junior HP alerted me that it needed a restart. The thingie that checks for malicious software ran then, but the main game failed. So try again. And with the speed of grass growing the rest of the patches ground their way through the tubes and into Junior HP’s private parts where they slowly and lovingly inserted themselves.

Eventually….

You see the time… Had I gone to town I would have been on the 10.20 bus…

Of course you do know that there is always junk left behind after one of these updates, but Microsoft does have a utility for that.

I do not have a lot of free space, you see. But how much junk was there? Well, look what appeared afterwards — just before I began this post! (It is now 11.20am.)

Now that is a lot of junk cleaned up! Do you clean up after installing those Wndows updates? I suggest you should…. If you want to, you can go even further. I did this a while back.