Category: Consumerism

Loyal readers (both of you?) may remember how upset I have been that the U.S. has filled up with flat-screen TVs and most of them sit dark and ugly most of the time. One dream that I’ve had for a long time is turning them into digital photo frames when not in use, but the crummy software on these TVs has so far made that impossible (I have yet to find a TV that can be programmed to turn itself on at 8:00 am every day, show slides, and turn itself off at 10 pm (functioning as a TV, of course, at some point in the middle if someone wants to watch something)).

Enter the Geochron Atlas 4K. For $450, it paints a flat-screen TV to look like the 1970s Masters of the Universe dream mechanical Geochron (still available for about $3,000). This is a great Christmas gift for the brother/sister/binary resister who has everything. The 4K Geochron (which I verified does work on our old Panasonic 1080p plasma TV). has a bunch of data overlays, e.g., weather and satellite tracks, that you would never be able to get on a mechanical Geochron.

The Atlas 4K is about the size of a stack of 5 iPhones (imagine the delight!). It has an RJ45 jack on one side for wired Internet and an HDMI male plug on the other for the image output. Power is via USB.

The remote control seems to be RF-based (at least I was able to control it through a closet door and around a corner). It would be a lot nicer if one could connect to this from a smartphone on the same WiFi network, but there is no app or provision for this. Configuration via the remote control is the most tedious part and the little remote can always be lost, run out of battery power, etc.

The company seems to be keeping up with current American obsessions. For example, the July 21, 2020 software (automatically downloaded via WiFi; see changelog) will optionally show a COVID-19 plague status overlay. (We should ask for a virtue layer, in which countries with maximum mask compliance and shutdown are highlighted in green while Sweden and South Dakota are bright red for heresy.)

Our kids went nuts for this and asked a lot of questions, so we’ve already gotten $400+ in value out of it. (It is actually $399 through December 17 with “HOL2020” according to a marketing email that I recently received.)

The world is a detailed place. If this is mounted somewhere that people can walk up to it, might we have found a great use case for an 8K tv (now only about $2,400 for 65″)?

Related:

• setup tutorial

From a recent Costco excursion, a 29-hour 28-CD audiobook by Barack Obama:

It is impossible to imagine a better Christmas gift for your friends, who can wrap themselves in 29 hours of bliss and comfort every time something upsetting is said by Donald Trump or those Republicans who remain unkilled by COVID-19.

(What if you have neglected to defriend all Republicans? This is an even better gift for a Deplorable because Deplorables need to hear these healing messages more than the righteous.)

Separately, in terms of page count, this is the same length as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Homer’s epics were almost the sole basis for education for centuries. Perhaps we could design a public school curriculum where A Promised Land was the only book studied from K through 12?

An Amazon review:

Obama’s autobiography is very wordy, slow and much of it boring. And I like the guy and loved his first book. There is no real news in this autobiography which is mostly about politics and how moderate he was as president. Too long, too. Too much about his time in the Illinois legislature and the U.S Senate. The book should have been edited down. Volume One is 752 pages and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Volume Two likely will be equally long.

Hallelujah! There will be four Iliads worth of content soon enough.

Related:

• Folks in Israel may not be devoting a week of their lives to the listen: “Obama on Israel: Broken Promise, Full of Falsehoods” (New York Sun)

After an agonizing two-day post-order wait, an iPhone 12 Pro Max has arrived from Verizon. My main interest in this new phone is the purportedly improved camera (the super wide “0.5x” camera on the iPhone 11 Pro Max was especially bad, with terrible corner and edge sharpness).

Do any of the early adopters have a case recommendation? I’m interested in (a) protecting the camera lenses from being scratched while in my pocket, and (b) making it more secure to grip the camera (a slightly soft silicone case would therefore be good).

Finally, what is MagSafe useful for? It is supposedly a “wireless charging” system that requires connecting the phone to a wire? This could be considered an innovation in the English language, but how is it a useful innovation technologically? If I have to attach a wire with a magnetic connector to the back of the phone, can’t I just as easily attach a Lightning cable to what we would have called the “female” connector in the phone back in the pre-LGBTQIA+ days?

(I don’t have Apple DouchePods nor an Apple Watch, which I understand both interact somehow with MagSafe.)

From Union Square, last week, a toilet for the homeless with a billboard for the new $1,000+ phones in the background. Social Justice, California-style:

From 2016: High-end KitchenAid range with burner stuck on.

It happened again! The burner controls fail such that the gas is stuck on. Fortunately the burner happened to be lit so the house didn’t fill up with unburned gas and explode. It is a challenge pulling the range away from the wall while the burner burns and then turning the shutoff valve. An elderly, frail, or small person would never be able to do this.

After three calls and more than 2 hours on hold, I was able to reach someone at KitchenAid customer service. They would be able to come out and begin the diagnosis process… in 17 days. Would they pay for a new gas valve? “Your range was made in 2013. It’s out of warranty.” Did they think it might be worth looking at the engineering design of the gas valve, e.g., so that it would fail in the “gas off” position rather than the “gas on” position? Wouldn’t that make it less likely to burn houses down? “Did your house actually burn down, sir?”

(If they can’t engineer gas valves that don’t fail after 3-7 years in the ON position, they could put a consumer-accessible gas shutoff valve on the front, just before all of the valves. That would be a huge safety enhancement.)

The Samsung UN55ES8000 that was state of the art in November 2012 ($2500) has failed after perhaps 2 hours per month of use. When it can be turned on at all, the screen is filled with a random pattern. One thing that was awesome about this was the depth: just 1.2 inches. The TV is mounted in a fairly small room where one has to walk past it.

I assume that the $2500 TV is now 1080p junk and not worth repairing.

What’s a good 55-inch flat screen TV replacement? This won’t be hooked up to cable. It would be nice to have a TV with built-in Google Chromecast since that seems to be the most convenient way to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus (Hamilton every night 4-Ever!).

I am reluctant to spend big $$ again given that this thing failed after not too many hours of use.

(Should I perhaps also give a shout-out to Panasonic? A 50-inch plasma TV purchased 12 years ago and used far more than this dead Samsung is still working perfectly! It is rather thick and only 1080p resolution, but it shows no sign of flaking out. Panasonic quit the U.S. TV market in 2016.)

Given that the U.S. phone system has been taken over by spammers (unintended consequence of what we expected to be the boon of free unlimited calls), you’d think that the core feature of any landline cordless phone system would be intelligent call screening and call blocking.

Panasonic has always been my favorite brand of phone (e.g., this five-handset system), but their call blocking system seems to rely on ringing the phone, having the owner answer, and then having the user press the “Call Block” button (plus some additional keys, I think) to store the caller ID in a small local database. When spammers can generate any caller ID that they want (thank you, American phone system engineers for ignoring 40 years of public-key cryptography!), including the phone number for the local public school, what is the value in this?

Given the low cost of computing hardware, why wouldn’t cordless phones (a) connect to WiFi and then communicate amongst themselves a known list of spam caller IDs that don’t correspond to real numbers, (b) do a “hello, may I help you?” interaction with callers whose IDs are not in the contacts directory?

“AT&T” brand phones (are these actually from AT&T or is it like “GE Appliances” that are run by Haier in China?) seem to have a partial solution, which they call “Smart Call Blocking”. From the manual:

If the call is not in the directory, essentially, the caller is prompted to speak a name and type #. One issue with this is that automated calls from organizations that don’t use email, e.g., pharmacies and hospitals, won’t get through. But maybe the solution there is to always provide one’s mobile phone number to these enterprises.

Presumably it is necessary for sanity to purchase a “Connect to Cell” AT&T model so that the directory can be preloaded from one’s mobile phone instead of manually populated. Bizarrely, though, there seems to be only one AT&T model that has both the cell phone connection and the smart call blocker: DL72310 (the three-handset version).

Given that Americans have been going crazy for years being bothered by these calls, how is it possible that there are so few home defense solutions?

A friend here in Maskachusetts texted us regarding his latest trip to an essential business that remains legal to operate: “No employees in gun store wearing mask.” A bit later: “At another gun store. Also no masks. Cop in here also with no mask.”

An exchange ensued regarding why an excursion was worth the Covid-19 risk:

• Me: You’re in a gun store because you don’t already have enough guns? How many guns do you think you have at this point?
• Him: Over 400. My Glocks are getting out of date.
• Me: Are there actually significant improvements?
• Him: These are 1/4 inch slimmer.
• Second friend: Everyone is moving to red dot sights on pistols.
• Third friend: No, the pistols themselves are stagnant if not possibly retrograde, but the improvements have been in aiming them.
• Him: These are 3-4 oz lighter than the previous alternative. But [Third friend] is right in that a Glock from 1988 is 98 percent as good as new one.

Separately, what will happen to all of the guns that Americans bought during the BLM protests? There were a lot of first-time gun owners who aren’t committed to maintaining proficiency at the range, cleaning the weapons, etc. Will there be a public health emergency of misfires a few years from now as these guns sit?

Firearms advice from our next president (however briefly he may serve):

(my friends above beg to differ; “Best home defense is 6 inch 300 BLK SBR with 30 round mag with silencer and Aimpoint.” What about Biden’s idea of a double-barreled shotgun? “Those are for clay shooting. No one uses those for home defense. They are for shooting small birds so have 22-inch barrels. And if you saw it off, it is life in prison.”)