Be Excellent To Each Other

Smelly.

All food disposed of, fridge freezer cleaned out and slightly repopulated, doors firmly closed on freezer for tomorrow's Jazzy to worry about and Chinese ordered.

Oh no! Do you know why it went off? Do you have that covered with freezer insurance or similar? I hope it’s not ruined any flooring, etc or created any smells. Sorry to hear that

Please get some rest, use the excuse to enjoy your favourite takeaways and re-stock with your favourite foods.

Haha, you were literally answering all the questions and suggestions I was typing at the same time as you were

Haha! We don't know why it tripped, but it must have been a while ago as everything was defrosted while still in the freezers and our cordless phones had lost their charge.

We do have insurance, but it's not really worth the hassle of claiming on it this time. We had been trying to wind the contents down for moving anyway. It's more the inconvenience as we had bread in there and some batch cooking that Joan's had done for when we got home.

Never mind though, we have had a lovely holiday, cereal bars for lunch and are in a position when we can just pick up our phones and have food brought to us. It's just an annoyance when you are so tired anyway and want to feed others.

You can tell the cat has been on holiday, he's put some weight on and come back with a new toy!

I found out today that I've been paying 40p more for parking than I should be, because I left a couple of boxes about receiving notifications by text message ticked each time I used that particular app. 40p! That's a pint every ten days.

Not having a smartphone sucks.

Get a smartphone.

Get an Xbox.

Think you can get compensated for that from the electricity company?

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consu ... power-cut/

My daughter’s had a Samsung TV for about 18 years and decided she’d like a smart TV for Christmas. She doesn’t have an aerial connection in her bedroom so gets almost all her TV content via a Virgin TiVo or BluRay player. She went with my wife and bought a Samsung 40” 4K TV yesterday and I set it up today. She immediately said that the picture quality was worse than her old HD ready 37” TV. The assistant in Curry’s/PC World tried to sell her a fifty quid HDMI cable, telling her that she wouldn’t get the full benefit without it, but most places I’ve looked for cable reviews say that you’re being ripped off if you’re paying that much, and that as long as you get an HDMI 2 cable, it’ll be fine. We noticed that standard definition broadcasts could be a bit blurry when there was a lot of movement, and HD channels were noticebly better, but not nearly as crisp as the Samsung TV+ transmissions or stuff from her BluRay player. I buggered about with the settings but in the end the content is only going to be as good as the quality of the source signal, so she’d probalby have neen better just going for a smart HD TV. Trouble is that Currys returns policy only applies if you haven’t opened the box so she may be stuck with a good TV that she doesn’t really like.

Modern technology’s a minefield, innit.

Meant to say thank you for this. But I'm pretty sure it's something in house that has tripped it.

Burnt my tongue on the mince pie I heated up to taste test for Mimi. Must have been the caramel inside it.




I still ate the cold one afterwards though.

To cool it back down?

Best have some ice cream to be sure.

(And oops, sorry!!! Xx)

Mince pies can be dangerous. Mrs. H heated one up in the microwave a couple of years ago and the damn thing exploded and pebble dashed its interior.

Heh, not your fault, totally my own.

No ice-cream, got thrown out last week. Only replacing essentials (yes I know) until the house move.

Does not compute.

Does not compute.

Ask Grim... He's the expert on this topic.

Everyone’s an expert in this topic, Shirley. At least, everyone appears to have an opinion, it seems.

Don't buy expensive HDMI cables - unless you'd also buy an expensive network cable to get the data from one PC to another in better quality.

There is a 2.1 standard incoming, but not out yet.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-H ... s=hdmi+2.0

6ft cable - £5.99

I bought an HDMI cable from poundland for a temporary solution for something and it worked absolutely fine... In fact, I think I'm still using it somewhere.

When i’m Really bored I wander into high end hi-fi shops and have amusing arguments disabusing their pseudo science

Not all heroes wear capes.

(You don't wear a cape, do you?)

Doesn't Cavey have an audiophile system which he uses to incorrectly rank Iron Maiden songs on?

Don't confuse expensive digital gear with expensive analogue gear - wavy lines are a lot harder to transmit than ones and zeros.

Whilst true, there's plenty of snakeoil on the analogue side too. For analogue systems, you definitely want to stand your amplifier on wooden knobs and use £10k power cables.

You'll also need a £150 fuse for the power cable.

Oh, for sure. But the analogue bits are normally more variable in quality, which is why you spend money on speakers even with an otherwise digital system - even the cables.

Yes, there are cables that cost £1000, and yes, those are stupid. But there will be a difference between a £1 cable and a £50 one, especially if you're running high powered stuff.

Vanishingly tiny amounts of difference between cables once you get past something that's not just far too thin e.g. bell wire.

Obligatory link to Monster Cable vs coathangers double-blind ABX: https://consumerist.com/2008/03/03/do-c ... er-cables/

Indeed, but there is a difference, unlike with digital.

Also, I do kind of think that if you spend £10,000 on a power cable and you can hear £10,000 worth of difference, placebo (not the right word but anyway*) or not, then it's worth the money.

What shouldn't be allowed is people stood in the showroom saying that you simply have to have the expensive cables.

* Psychoacoustics, apparently. Cor.

I love the language of the cable sellers and proponents "It was as if the drums were carved from ice, such were their transient speed, power and impact."

Basically this woman right here;

I don’t.

Hello. Are you my brother?

This is pretty much what I'd been saying, bro.

Indeed. The inside joke is that the cables I'm currently using to watch my TV cost about £180.

At least they still work

Valid. And that's the one thing that is worth paying extra for perhaps, which is build quality - especially if you're going to be plugging the cable in and out a lot and shoving it in a bag (if you have them for a laptop, maybe).

But not £180.

What's the over/under on that being more than your TV is worth now?

Hmm, dunno. The TV is seven years old. I'll look it up.

Heh. This again, huh? I always remember Kalmar (what happened to him?) eternally berating me for having the temerity to like the sound of my beautiful old valve monoblocs, when apparently anything over a £50 all in one CD bedroom hifi from Dixons was a waste of money.

Grim... is absolutely correct: it’s about way, way more than the digital source, any old shite can read that data for you, it’s all about the analogue because you know, and surprising as this will seem to one or two here, we don’t hear things in 1s and 0s.

I’m about to fulfil a lifetime of passion for hifi, dating back to when I was building speakers from Cornflake packets, and get a pair of B&W 800 D3s, the best speaker in the world bar none. Mrs C’s soul will sound as never before, I can’t wait.

Kudos to Grim... re. ‘Psychoacoustics’. Awesome!

In this week's Exxxtreme Body Mods, a middle-aged man from Cheshire is fulfilling his life-long dream of implanting a pair of £20k speakers into the body of his wife.

"I know people will say it's mad", Cyril Cave said, not-at-all madly.

"But when you love someone. Like, when you really love someone, it's not enough to simply hear them tell you about their day, the new kitchen they have their eye on, what's for dinner. Sure, you hear that. You listen, you nod. But that's not enough. You've got to hear their soul. Every rumble, every gurgle, every frrrp. Now, with this extreme body mod, I can hear our love. And now she also looks like Krang's vessel in Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, which is totally a bonus."

*salutes*

Also, the best speaker in the world is a Cerwin Vega CVP 121, AS ANY FULE NO

The best speaker in the world is the one on the bottom of the Samsung mobile phone that plays shitty dance music tinnily on public transport.

The best speaker is the one you have with you

The best speaker? Betty Boothroyd

The only good reason to buy Monster cables is their lifetime guarantee. I know a couple of semi professional guitarists who play a lot of live shows that use Monster cables because guitar cables get trashed, and the Monster ones may cost 5 or 6 times the cost of the equivalent Fender or whatever, they last a bit longer, and when they break, you take them back and get a new one. (Pretty much no quibble, possibly apocryphal tales of guitarists cutting cables in half and getting them replaced are around)

That's a guitar cable, that gets trod on, caught under amp cabs, chucked into leaky vans, and generally abused. Stereo or TV cables that basically sit at the back of equipment forever? Nah.