Adding a new member to my home electronics: Modern Television

Over the Christmas break, I invited a new friend into my home electronics: a 32″, 1080p television set.

Now, most people would say “What? You’ve migrated most of your media consumption to your laptop anyway, why would you go back to having a functioning television?” And that’s a completely reasonable question. The primary reason is: for fun.

You see, I don’t want to have a television because I want to watch TV. In fact, the reason I set up the television is actually unrelated to media consumption at all — the reason I set up the TV is because I wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi, and the TV was the only display I had in the house (long story) which supports HDMI in. (I don’t even own a monitor with DVI in — only VGA — so I couldn’t even just buy a cheap adapter.)

This has resulted in me putting together a lot of little things that we’ve had floating around the house for a while, but never actually used — an Apple TV my wife bought back when we were watching TV more often (but which only supported HDMI, which our old TV didn’t have); a new Airport Extreme wireless base station — and buying some new, relatively inexpensive things as well — a broadcast television antenna, for example — and even a shift in my home internet provider.

I’m going to be trying to write a bit more about each of these things individually — why I ended up with them — but I wanted to start with the basics: The only reason I did any of this at all was basically because the only monitor I had for the $35, credit card sized computer that I had in the house was a $500 Phillips HD TV.

Somewhere in that picture, there is some irony. (Or maybe just a First World Problem.)

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