New purchases
I think I said a few weeks ago that I was looking to buy a new TV. After some delays waiting for the one I wanted to come back into stock, I had it delivered yesterday. It's a 32" Toshiba HD LCD, which is significantly larger than the 24" Sanyo CRT TV I'd been using for the last 10 years. The increase in size is very noticeable, oddly it seems more noticeable in a way when it is switched off, since there's now a large black rectangle dominating the corner of the room, exacerbated by the TV frame also being the same shade of black. The picture quality of the new TV seems good - although I can't say how well is displays High Definition pictures, since I don't have anything capable of supplying HD pictures since I'm not able to get either cable or satellite TV. Sometime next year I think they're meant to start broadcasting on Freeview in HD, but until then the only way I'd be able to watch anything in HD is to buy a Blu-Ray player, which I might do sometime but don't have any immediate intention to start shopping for one. The non-high definition can still look pretty good, I watched last year's Star Trek film on DVD last evening and the special effects were displayed very well. It's the first time I've seen the film since I saw it at the cinema, and I was reminded how silly much of the plot is and there is a bit of possibly unintentionally amusing dialogue, but it is still a very entertaining film.
Since I was going to have to wait in for a delivery, I ordered a new printer the same day. It has some useful features compare to my previous printer, in particular if you try printing out black text then it will actually print something out whereas the old printer had started to just produce blank pages if asked to print in black. I must have installed about a dozen printers over the years on various computers, and they never seem to install smoothly. This one was no different, after about 20 minutes of it claiming to be "installing software" and making no apparent progress I got a bit suspicious. Eventually, I discovered there was a dialog box explaining that Flash had failed to install properly, which was helpfully being displayed behind the "installing software" window so that it was completely invisible until I tried alt-tabbing through all the open windows. Once I'd clicked 'OK' on that notification everything else did install successfully and it all seemed to work fine despite the report Flash installation problem.
Went to see "The A-Team" at the cinema today. I really enjoyed the show as a child (although I suspect it wouldn't hold up very well to rewatching) and I thought the film did do a surprisingly good job of capturing the same spirit of slightly ludicrous fun. It was extremely silly at times, particularly the "I think they're trying to fly the tank" scene, but also very entertaining. I thought the post-End Credits cameos by Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz was also a nice touch.
Since I was going to have to wait in for a delivery, I ordered a new printer the same day. It has some useful features compare to my previous printer, in particular if you try printing out black text then it will actually print something out whereas the old printer had started to just produce blank pages if asked to print in black. I must have installed about a dozen printers over the years on various computers, and they never seem to install smoothly. This one was no different, after about 20 minutes of it claiming to be "installing software" and making no apparent progress I got a bit suspicious. Eventually, I discovered there was a dialog box explaining that Flash had failed to install properly, which was helpfully being displayed behind the "installing software" window so that it was completely invisible until I tried alt-tabbing through all the open windows. Once I'd clicked 'OK' on that notification everything else did install successfully and it all seemed to work fine despite the report Flash installation problem.
Went to see "The A-Team" at the cinema today. I really enjoyed the show as a child (although I suspect it wouldn't hold up very well to rewatching) and I thought the film did do a surprisingly good job of capturing the same spirit of slightly ludicrous fun. It was extremely silly at times, particularly the "I think they're trying to fly the tank" scene, but also very entertaining. I thought the post-End Credits cameos by Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz was also a nice touch.