Sideboard Cabinets – Some Assembly Still Required

Cabinets in Rustic Alder
Cabinets in Rustic Alder

The cabinets have arrived for the sideboard. I just need to assemble them. Bolt the cabinets together, install the Alder back splash, toe kick, and put the granite tops on top. Woops. The drawer fronts are wrong. I ordered “Five Panel” drawer fronts. They should look like the doors with stiles around the edges and panels in the center. Oh well, the right ones are on order. Continue reading “Sideboard Cabinets – Some Assembly Still Required”

UHD TVs Are Here – Where’s the Content?

UHD TVs are Affordable
UHD TVs are Affordable

UHD TVs, sometimes called 4K TVs are appearing for very affordable prices. With the demise of 3D – no manufacturers are shipping 3D TVs this year – the TV makers had to come up with something to get us to buy another TV.

I was recently shocked to see a 55″ LG UHD TV for $1798 at Walmart. The TV looks awesome. It’s IPS, which means better off-axis viewing. Right next to the LG model is a Samsung model, but it had no price attached. In contrast to the large LG display touting 4K and UHD, the Samsung display had in small letters – 2160p, 240Hz – which is clearly a UHD spec.

There are two remaining problems with UHD that don’t seem to be slowing down manufacturers at all, but should give you pause before you drop your money on these sets:

  • There is no content. Of course they will upscale your HD content of any kind. But except for a very few Netflix movies that will stream in UHD, provided you have a UHD Netflix receiver box, there is no content. The BluRay standards group is still arguing about a UHD standard. TechRadar has an interesting summary article.  No TV stations have said anything about upgrading. No really affordable UHD camcorders exist, although some video editors like Corel Video Studio Pro – Less than $100 per seat – will edit UHD content.
  • The UHD standard is not finalized. It sure would be nice if the standard would finalize before you bought that new TV. For a complete discussion of the entire problem of the UHD standard, watch this TWIT episode of Home Theater Geeks.

What is Available Now?

Continue reading “UHD TVs Are Here – Where’s the Content?”

QtSlidePlayer – Display Slides without Movies

QtSlidePlayer Shot Editor
QtSlidePlayer Shot Editor

I wanted to display images each with one or more pan / zoom shots. Both on Windows and Linux. I have a Zbox running Linux Mint that I use as a photo frame. As I looked around for programs, all of them created movies. I did a test with one of these programs and 5 slides took 2 minutes to render the 100MB video. This means that a slide show of 300 slides would take 5 hours to render a movie of 8GB. The images for this slide show are only about 200MB.

QtSlidePlayer allows building slide shows in a portable way and the program runs on either Windows or Linux. You can find the program at SourceForge.

Continue reading “QtSlidePlayer – Display Slides without Movies”

Kitchen Cabinets – Online Experience

As I did my kitchen counter tops, I purchased extra pieces of granite to make a sideboard. Now I’m shopping for the 2 base cabinets to make the sideboard.

Here’s what I need: 2 36″ wide base cabinets, Shaker style in a dark finish – Usually called Havana as it turns out. Each cabinet with drawer[s] above and two slide out shelves below behind double doors. This is a standard cabinet layout, and 36″ wide is a standard size. Continue reading “Kitchen Cabinets – Online Experience”