Clare has headed off to Ireland for her cousin's wedding. She's accompanying her Dad, we would not normally have been invited to this I think. So boys weekend! Bad food and too much TV for the next three days!
Actually there is a lot to do and a lot of disruption. I'd normally be working from home today, though I've taken them to school and then headed in to try and pick up some more of the Sainsbury trading cards from someone. Then heading home mid afternoon to do a late lunch double pickup, as one has swimming with the school and one does not. Then tea, no idea what they'll today, then back to swimming with the other one, though of course both have to come with me. Tomorrow I'll work from home too, though normal pickups at the same time, so I do get a normal lunch. Then one of them has to miss gymnastics, as Jim normally does the early one, then we all have to go to later gymnastics when I finish work. No Inn Doors today, it's still closed for holidays, but no replacement pub action anyway.
Saturday also disrupted, no parkrun for me though we will all go out for some fun somewhere. The boys are both registered for parkrun now so we will try and get them on the next one.
I do have my new Sonos soundbar1 installed, and all the old surround system removed. Clare has not quite noticed it is different yet, though she will next time she tries to play a DVD... I have managed to remove a load of boxes and cabling from the lounge, but it was mostly hidden away anyway. Thoughts on it so far:
A speaker seemingly can't be in two groups. So where I had my two Symfonisk lamps as a group that I could play music on, now I've added them as surround speakers for the soundbar they are removed from the original group. It's fine though as now I can just play music on the soundbar-plus-surround-speakers for a full room of music.
Sonos beam1 has voice assistant built in, needs a bit of tweaking though I think as it is responding AND then the Google Home is responding too. And the speaker answers with "I'M NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET CHECK YOUR ROUTER!" really loudly right now, not sure why, need to check that. Yesterday while watching TV it was working fine to turn the volume up and down.
The sound is good and clear but I was expecting it to be a bit more imposing and intrusive and to have to turn it down. I guess it just set itself up correctly, it can do that. Apart from the voice assistant shouting at me, it's all a sensible volume.
Will I add a subwoofer to it as well? At some point I think I would like to but that is £7002 and it will not add £700 worth of value I think, so would have to wait until I really had a surfeit of cash. Unlikely.
Surround sound is quite subtle so far. There was only one point when there was a crash of thunder in an advert or something that made me jump, but apart from that we've only watched newsy-speaking type stuff. Looking forward to trying it with Avengers or something over the weekend.
Nintendo Switch is connected again, though not tried it yet. Now I only have two input sources they both connect direct to the TV instead of through that hdmi switch splitter thing3. This means one fewer thing to go wrong, and something else that no longer needs a power supply. I think me trying to power that from the USB of the DVD player was causing a problem anyway.
DVDs, hmm. I have Walking Dead to watch, I will of course have a binge on that over the weekend, and the boys want to watch Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. But how? Clare's old laptop has DVD, so for now I think unplug the games console temporarily and plug that in directly when we want it. Hope it works. Another option is to plug the hdmi switch3 back into the TV, power it of the TV, hang it off the back of the TV and then that should work without having to ever unplug anything. But then undoes my good work of having fewer boxes and cables and things.
Not sure how I'm going to even get my steps in today, definitely no time for a run. I think I will have to go on the treadmill much later. I still can't let this step count go.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town. Wed + father to two, I am a full stack web engineer, + I do js / Node, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, running, eating, home automation and other diy stuff, history, tree stuff, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.