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I had to buy a new TV last weekend.

Two and a half years ago I bought a 32″ Toshiba TV (32HL67) for over a $1000. It was a perfect size for my room and had decent connectivity options – enough ports to connect all devices I had and more. It had perfect reviews. It started breaking after a year and a half. The screen would go dark once a week but the sound was on. I could live with that. But after few months the screen would go dark immediately after turning the TV on. I would turn it off and on and all was fine. This worsened over in the last months so that I had to spend few minutes switching the TV off and on to get the backlight to light on. Some days it worked perfectly, but some other days it took 5 minutes. Recently I was trying for 30 minutes with no effect and that made me buy a new TV.

I searched online and found out that many owners had the same problem. It all happened after 1 year outside warranty coverage. Toshiba confirmed the problem, blamed it on a faulty board and wanted $400 for a repair. $400 now gets me a new 32″ TV.

I wanted to go with Samsung. I picked a model with great reviews and decent features. I search for problems people were having with it and I was shocked to read that the screen would go black after a year. I read a lot of reports that the TV would not last 2 years.

So I got a Sony KDL-32L504 – the newest model that came out for the black friday for less than $400. I probably shouldn’t have gotten the newest model but I did not see many reports of screen going blank with Sony TV units. I insured myself by getting a 2 year protection plan – just in case.

It took some tuning of colors for the Mac Mini. It’s connected over HDMI and set to 1380×768 – the native resolution. The colors looked washed out. When setting pure 720p resolution the colors were great but the screen area smaller than the screen. Setting overscan made the screen area go over the borders. Only 1380×768 fit the screen. I noticed that when switching resolutions the TV changed the picture settings so a correction was necessary.

Sony is also better as a TV. It found all free analog and digital HD channels from my cable connection. Toshiba would set almost all digital channels to program 0 – switching channels was only possible with + and – buttons. Sony does it better and all channels have a program number.

Let’s see how long will this on last.

Last night, around midnight, I logged on to my home FreeBSD server and wanted to bring up by screen session. Being lazy I pressed Control-R, typed -r and hit Enter (simply searched the history for the last screen -r). That was too lazy. The last command found in history was rm -rf * ……. I lost my home directory. Thankfully, all dot files are un-touched.