The "New Toys" Thread

[NooDle]

I'm another. i'm in the 20 down/2 up ballpark which is fine for me. It's quite cheap and extremely reliable so I'm happy with it so far.

As long as I can stream stuff in HD i'm good.

*Cue the entire internet telling me I medically need fibre because e-peen

 

[Adunaphel]

Apparently the stickyness is so strong you can pull the ball out of the socket if you try to unstick your phone

I wasn't talking about initial stickiness, I was more talking about its ability to retain its stickiness while at the same time not sticking to everything else in a 20m radius. Sticky things have a tendency to get really dirty and lose their stickiness real quick when that happens.

 

[NecroJoe]

Should just take a quick rinse with water, no?

 

[Eye-Q]

Yup, according to the info you just rinse with water and it should stick again. Additionally, you can put the protective film over it if you don't use it so it doesn't get dirty, but thanks for the heads-up.

 

[DanRoM]

Isp moved their dslam 2km closer, and gave me new modem for vdsl.

so update from 10/1Mbit to:

Dude, I thought you lived in Finnland?

You are one of the few Europeans that have worse internet than me. I get 60+ DL and 5 up.

I have 50/10, so I call it a draw...

 

[Galantti]

You are one of the few Europeans that have worse internet than me. I get 60+ DL and 5 up.

Perks of living in a building from late 80s, with copper wires, 4G is about 10x slower than the current line here

I'm another. i'm in the 20 down/2 up ballpark which is fine for me. It's quite cheap and extremely reliable so I'm happy with it so far.

As long as I can stream stuff in HD i'm good.

*Cue the entire internet telling me I medically need fibre because e-peen

technically this is fiber instalaltion (FTTC), but my epeen is now longer than before.

Dude, I thought you lived in Finnland?
......

Yeah, where 4G is more a thing nowdays D:
(there is nice selection of 10/10, 50/10, 100/10, 250/50 and 1000/100 lines available on the newer buildings thou)

 

[ZeDestructor]

Perks of living in a building from late 80s, with copper wires, 4G is about 10x slower than the current line here



technically this is fiber instalaltion (FTTC), but my epeen is now longer than before.



Yeah, where 4G is more a thing nowdays D:
(there is nice selection of 10/10, 50/10, 100/10, 250/50 and 1000/100 lines available on the newer buildings thou)

You need a newer building.

 

[Perc]

Dude, I thought you lived in Finnland?

Finland is covered in ADSL2+ which is shit by today's standards. For lots of people, 4G is the better option nowadays.

I happen to have 250/20 via cable modem, as do my parents out in the sticks, but it's far from the norm.

 

[93Flareside]

 

[Matt2000]

Just bought myself one of these things:

Varying audio levels have always bugged me, either between different videos or when listening to music. Seems like this should be a decent way to monitor the volume level before it gets to my amp and is affected by the volume controls. It's available as a DIY kit but you have to wait a month for it to arrive from China and then attach the surface mount components yourself, two things that I'm sadly nowhere near patient enough to do so I've paid over the odds to get it pre built from Amazon. Hopefully it'll be worth the money. Should arrive tomorrow.

Also arriving tomorrow is one of these for said video editing:

 

[ZeDestructor]

Just bought myself one of these things:

Varying audio levels have always bugged me, either between different videos or when listening to music. Seems like this should be a decent way to monitor the volume level before it gets to my amp and is affected by the volume controls. It's available as a DIY kit but you have to wait a month for it to arrive from China and then attach the surface mount components yourself, two things that I'm sadly nowhere near patient enough to do so I've paid over the odds to get it pre built from Amazon. Hopefully it'll be worth the money. Should arrive tomorrow.

Also arriving tomorrow is one of these for said video editing:

I use ReplayGain on my music to keep the variance in levels between albums basically non-existant (could also do per-track, but I listen to power metal and symphonic metal, so per-album with shuffle albums playback mode works better), games seem to all be mostly at the same level across the whole industry, and videos are also mostly at the same level. YouTube's allegedly universally applied "audio normalisation" on the other hand seems to not work at all, with some videos easily needing my volume knob turned up twice as far as for other stuff or my music.

 

[Matt2000]

Yeah as soon as I plugged it in I could see that there's a big variation in the volume of YouTube videos, not sure how to fix that. Combined with the levels in Premiere it's really helping though.

 

[ZeDestructor]

Yeah as soon as I plugged it in I could see that there's a big variation in the volume of YouTube videos, not sure how to fix that. Combined with the levels in Premiere it's really helping though.

Bitch at yout.. owait, Google doesn't do feedback..

 

[Matt2000]

Last week I picked up a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter so I could use either my second monitor on an arm or my TV across the room as a second display for my PC, using an HDMI switch to allow multiple inputs to either and the a splitter to send it to both 1080p displays. However it turns out that there are a couple of problems with the splitter: It isn't HDCP compliant (the feed from my XBOne goes dead when playing Blu-rays) and it gets confused with audio. The TV has HDMI audio but the monitor doesn't, the PC can't handle this and gets very confused so the TV never shows up as an audio output in Windows.

Anyway, to get around this problem I got one of these:

I've never used one of these before, it's actually manually operated instead of all of these 'intelligent' auto-switching ones and works perfectly for my use, when the monitor is the active output the PC shows the TV audio as disconnected and when the TV is active it shows up. Perfect. I really should do a cabling diagram for the AV cables here, it's quite a spaghetti of everything connecting to everything else including a trio of 3 input - 1 output HDMI switches.

I also grabbed a Logitech K400+ the other week for controlling the PC from across the room (for things like WRC+ which doesn't have an app for my Roku or Fire TV or for Blu-rays), I've used one at work for years and it has been a very nice compact set up with a good touch pad. The price had also dropped by ?10.

I've installed the audio monitor shown at the top of the page too. I had to use an RCA splitter, joined to an RCA coupler, joined to an RCA-3.5mm cable, joined to a 3.5mm coupler finally joined to the 3.5mm audio input which combines with a mini-USB plug.

 

[93Flareside]

Have that keyboard as well, works good. I had the older model and for some reason last year, it just crapped out. Wasn't the batteries or unifying hiccup. I hope the new one doesn't have this issue.

 

[Eye-Q]

A 3000 mAh powerbank to power the actioncam for longer bike rides - the battery lasts not even an hour, with the powerbank it should be around four. Since the SDHC-card is just 32 GB the maximum of footage I can record is "just" 5 hours anyway, and I don't plan to drive longer than four hours on the bicycle anyway.

 

[IceBone]

I was thinking about that for the roadtrip, but since that would require drilling holes into the gopro waterproof housing (and I'm not using just the frame on the car), I've decided against it and just got 2 additional batteries and a dedicated charger for them. I'll just have to swap out every hour when we stop. I hope they last as long as the official ones.

 

[Eye-Q]

Yeah, since I'll cycle only in good weather that won't be an issue, and in the car I'll put the cam on the inside of the windscreen so I just need the open frame both for cycling and driving by car.

 

[prizrak]

New "smart" TV and a 5.1 sound bar.
The TV is a TCL 4K Roku TV, meaning that the Roku software is loaded onto the TV so no external boxes required, 4K upscaling for 1080 content (720 is also upscaled but obviously not as well). Being Roku it is 100% controllable from the phone app and of course it comes with built in Miracast and you can cast from any app that supports it (Plex, YouTube, Netflix, etc...) One cool/useful feature is that the app allows you to route audio through the app if you connect headphones, meaning that you dont have to worry about waking kids if you wanna watch something Also comes with a wired port, which surprised and delighted me as I prefer wiring static devices.

Sound bar is a Vizio SmartCast 40" 5.1, it supports HDMI ARC and uses a slim (goes under your couch) wireless subwoofer which is also a "receiver" for the rear speakers (they are wired into the woofer and powered by it), which is nice since I don't have to run wires all the way from the back wall to the TV. Sound quality is pretty good (better than my old Sony 5.1 system with a regular receiver and wired everything). Cool things about it, has built in Google cast so I can play things like Spotify to it from my other devices and is since it supports HDMI ARC the TV controls it directly so I don't need a universal remote to control both devices. Also it turns the bar on and off with the TV so that's a nice little feature.

 

[Cryptopygia]

So, I bought a second monitor. I was originally going to pick up the same model I'm currently using, but ended up grabbing an LG 29UM67-P.