Two weeks ago we decided that we should look for a new television, besides looking for new houses. I did some research and found out that the Samsung UE32B7000 32″ LED LCD television seems to be what we needed. We didn’t want a 37 or 40 inch screen, because it’d be too much an eye-catcher in the living room. This television is only 3 cm. thin, not too power-hungry (I measured ~75 watts – see also this comparison of HD-TV’s) because it is illuminated by LED-lights instead of CCFL’s (TL-like tubes) and last but not least it has quite some nice technological features. You can use widgets – and even develop them, somehow Yahoo is involved in this technology. Some default installed widgets are from Flickr (photos from internet) and a weather-channel. There is even a Twitter-widget which you can use and there also seems to be a Youtube-widget, which I haven’t found yet.
The television has many, many inputs. One useful input is the network connection which we now have connected to our router, which itself is connected to our network attached storage (NAS) device. This is just a little box with harddisks in it and some mini-operating system running. The television supports DLNA, which means that it can stream video/audio/photos from that little NAS, which works flawlessly.
So we now have an up to date multimedia living room.
Today I came along the Home Project site, which is all about our world and the environmental impact we have on our world. Very nice sceneries and places on earth are shown, but also the negative impacts on the environment we have as human beings. It reminds me a bit of Al Gore’s film, be it that Al Gore shows a lot of statistical slides about environmental problems. For a lot of people that film was a good start to get some insight about things going on on our planet. Not all was true perhaps, but it was a good thing to start the discussion.
