New toy

About a week ago, I bought me a new toy. This being the result of me earning an extra euro pretending to be a holy man, and wanting to spend some of that money on something fun.

The speakers that come with the device aren't very good (they're way too small), but that's nothing that can't be fixed by (eventually) replacing them. Actually, I already did just that for the front-left and front-right ones -- I still had some old ones from my previous installation.

The silly bit about the whole thing, though, was that initially, I hadn't noticed that you need to configure most equipment to make it emit 5.1 sound, too; just selecting 5.1 sound in the DVD menu usually isn't enough. Thus, I had been enjoying the added range (what with the subwoofer), but it dawned on me eventually that the surround didn't seem to be working properly. Silly me.

Well, nothing that a simple reconfiguration couldn't fix. I've now been going to my (steadily growing) DVD collection to have a bit more fun and appreciation in listening to the same movie with a rather more full sound track. Quite nice.

Having said all that, there's still a few minor things about the installation that I dislike:

• It isn't just an amplifier; it's an amplifier with builtin FM radio. In itself, that's great; but for some reason, there's no button on the remote to immediately switch to the FM radio (there is one for each of the other inputs). Choosing the FM radio requires me to select it using the 'input select' button, which goes through all the inputs one by one. That's a bit cumbersome, compared to the other options.
• The device comes with a dock for an iPhone or an iPod. I don't own such a device (and I wouldn't want one, either), but I do own another device, made by samsung, with similar functionality to an iPod. Yet I can't connect that. Now that's just wrong.
• More importantly than the two above, samsung decided to predefine a set of groups of connections that go together. E.g., there's four HDMI connections, three optical ones, and a few analog connections as well. These have all been pre-assigned to a particular functionality, from which it is not possible to deviate. E.g., you can configure the device to have "BD/DVD" come from HDMI1, optical 2, or an analog input, but not from anything else. Similarly, you can configure the "satellite" input to come from HDMI2, optical 2, or analog, but not from anything else. I'd much rather have a setup where you can assign names to ports, and where you have the ability to disable ports that aren't in use, so that you could have, I dunno, a 'DVD1' and 'DVD2' (if you have two such devices), rather than having to remember that 'sat' is actually 'dvd2'.

Other than that, it's a pretty good thing.

On moving pianos

John Goerzen blogs about moving pianos complete with outdoors music. While I don't have a similar story, my dad does. It doesn't involve a pickup (what with that being the standard american car type) but instead a piano which—at an angle—is stuck through the roof of a 2CV. I wasn't there (my parents hadn't even met yet), but I'm told it was great fun.

In the not so distant future, however, I may have another story to tell about moving pianos. Currently, I live right above my office. Due mainly to bureaucratic reasons, this will change in the near future (it's a long story). Now when I moved into the apartment, moving the piano involved several people, a ladderlift, and some extra helping hands from another apartment a few blocks down the road where they just happened to be moving, too, just to lift it 10 cm up and over the window sill. Then, we just tried to avoid dropping it to the floor, about a meter down. Now if me, my three brothers, a friend, and an extra hand were only just enough to lift it for just 10 cm, I'm a bit worried as to how we'll be moving it out again, which would involve moving it up about a meter.

To be continued, I'm sure.

Wanted: a "DAS keyboard" with ISO mechanical layout

Some people claim that AZERTY is a crime against humanity. I claim that if you're going to point and laugh at one layout in defense of another, you should have that other be something actually better, like the dvorak or Turkish F layout, not QWERTY.

One additional reason: the mechanical layout of a US QWERTY keyboard (the ANSI layout) is inferior to the mechanical layout of the AZERTY keyboards. This is a mathematical fact—the ISO layout has 102 keys, the ANSI one has only 101 of them.

In that light, I find it highly disappointing that Thinkgeek.com's Das Keyboard uses the ANSI mechanical layout, and that there is no ISO version of the same thing. If there were, I'd have bought one years ago.

(Yes, that's meant as a hint, in case you didn't catch that)

Update: apparently it exists, it's just that ThinkGeek doesn't have it. For those who want one, it's available here, amongst others.