Mather

This week Nissa and I bought a 42" Philips HD plasma from Costco. Let me just say Wow. What a huge difference in picture quality.

Not a bad deal for a plasma with a built in tuner. I had my heart set on the Pioneer 50", but my wallet couldn't validate the excess 8 inches for twice the price. Little tip: never walk into Costco if you have even a smidge of desire to purchase an hdtv 'someday'.

We didn't even have a truck to carry it home. We were like Wal-Mart hill-billies unpacking the damn thing in the parking lot and sliding into the back seat.

And carrying that thing in the house by myself was an adventure. Let me just say I was sweatin' balls that something bad was going to happen before I could even fire up the dang thing.

- It's up and it is good! -

In Mather using the OTA - Over The Air powered antenna we are able to get:

KCRA - NBC 3.1
KCRA - WeatherPlus 3.2
KVIE - PBS 6.1
KVIE - PBS 6.2
KXTVDT - ABC 10.1
KOVRHD - CBS 13.1
KTXLDT - FOX 40.1
KQCADT - WB 58.1

The clarity is eye popping, I can't believe I am recieving this kind of signal from a pair of suped up rabbit ears. Nissa and I have the bad habit of watching both Apprentice shows and for the current season we have watched all the shows on our CRT recieving the analog signal through E*(Dish).

Just let me say that some of there are some people on both shows that really should not be shown close-up in HD. Facial-features, skin-traits, facial hair (especially for the ladies) are all unforgivably noticible in an HD closeup.

Could this be the death of reality TV?
If people see these jokers up close will they still have the stomach to watch? It will definately will take a intestinal fortitune to watch porn. "Cue the Soft-Focus before I barf!"

Here is a great site for finding what HDTV channels may be available in your area, along with listings.
TitanTV

When i got the HDTV I had dreamed of hooking the Cube up to it, for some HD-Surfing and blogging. Before I knew that the Cube was on it way to Mac heaven I ordered a DVI to ADC adapter so I could connect the Cube to the HDTV, my 42" Phillips has 2 HDMI connections in the back. When the Cube would no longer boot I thought I would never be able to play on a Mac in HD goodness because my ibook doesn't have a DVI out

One of the reasons why I bought the mini is this site that showed a mac-mini strapped to the back of a plasma although looked like they were using RGB to connect.

I saw that the mini came with DVI outs so I knew it should be possible even though most sites and forums that visited did not definitively say either way if it would work.

So I hooked up my HDTV to my mac-mini. At first I got nothing, no signal, just a black screen. So I started doing more research. I can't remember which forum I was reading but someone wrote how they had used Timbuk2 Pro to connect remotely and noticed when they hooked up their plasma screen that the mac would detect it at 1920x1080, but nothing would display and that when the resolution was dropped down to 1024x768@60Hz it worked.

Well instead of Timbuk2, I used VNC to remotely connect and long story short, I tried it and it worked. I'm bloggin on my plasma, and it's really sweet.

By the by, this is where a wireless keyboard comes in real handy...