Shifting the Scope, assuming I had one to begin with...

My wife, being the only person I know who reads this, suggested that I add a little more to my blog so that I can keep a more continuous stream of (BS) information pouring forth. Sounds good enough. Maybe I can use it to help her and other "resistant to change" types step into the ever-widening world of Gadgets & Technology Entertainment. I think I'll coin my own acronym here and call that GATE for short. Yeah! That's the ticket.


The first thing today will be RSS feeds. Many folks know all about them and can tell you their favorite feed-reader and why. RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication, and is a method of making information available to internet users who would like to read just the articles or headlines they want from a given website supporting RSS. You can get more information here.

I try not to use much more than a core of programs for most tasks on my computers, so I'm not very interested in feed-readers (or news aggregators as some call them) unless they plug into another program I already use. Being a heavy Firefox user, I tried a few readers that were set up as Firefox extensions a while back, then Firefox started supporting RSS somewhat natively. At that point, I quit using add-ins and only used Firefox. They way I do it is to make a folder in the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder called (pretend I'm being imaginitive here, okay?) "News Feeds". When you come across a website where Firefox is showing this symbol:

you can click on the symbol and Firefox will ask you whate folder you want to save you Live Bookmark in. I always select my (imaginitively named) "News Feeds" folder. Right now, I've got Live Bookmarks for my GMail account, Techbargains, Local TV headlines, The Inquirer, and my Lovely Wife's Blog.

In 1080p RPTV research news, I have found some good threads pertaining to the televisions in question at AVS Forum . I'm starting to get a better handle on some of the Audio pass-through capabilities of some of these sets. I'm still trying to gleen some of the useful information, but it is taking a long time because of the sheer number of posts involved. The good ones have over 600 posts! I still have a long way to go before there are more than a handful of people reporting their own experiences with the TVs. The big question is: Does any TV pass along anything more than stereo audio from an HDMI connected source? The HDMI spec says that it can carry as much as 7.1 channels, but I keep reading that the TVs only output 5.1 channel audio sourced from their own tuners, and not from HDMI. This is not what I wanted to hear. I guess I shouldn't be getting my hopes too high for this generation of sets, but I feel like I've waited long enough.