Welcome to the new Radio and Telly forum

[Radio&Telly]

After weeks of the old forum no longer being available, we’re back with an all few forum!

[denismartindale]

New forum, so I registered and got the forum emails and checked if I could change my password as well. That worked and I updated my forum profile, too. Some of our RT topics may be answered if we visit the quora-dot-com website and register there as well.

Here in the UK, we get useful info thanks to the main TV websites such as sky-dot-com and virginmedia-dot-com as well as freeview-dot-co-dot-uk and freesat-dot-co-dot-uk and their Help sections and blogs.

We can check TV prices thanks to ebay and amazon as well as get their latest discount deals and discount codes.

The TV makers have their websites which a Google search can lead us to so we ought to include our TV model numbers and screen sizes as well.

We may have a Smart 4K TV with additional apps already installed. These apps can offer us access to YouTube tech tutorials that include Android Internet devices and the latest updates to the Firestick and ROKU set-top boxes.

For those trying to find where a film or TV series gets shown, there is the app called JUSTWATCH. It helps us find out if we can see these free. We may get free trials offered now and then. I recently accessed Paramount + as well as Amazon Prime.

Some don’t like the long contracts of Sky so they have now switched to the NOW TV or NOWTV website for their package bundles such as Entertainment and Cinema and Sport. Some customers will sign up with different email accounts hoping to receive emailed discount deals.

As for Sky, I have a Sky+ HD set-top box with scart connections so I can enjoy those free channels without a subscription.

There are Freeview and Freesat set-top boxes. The best ones include the HD channels and some boxes have internal hard drives to record shows for us. Even the Smart TVs may allow us to record to 32GB USB drives thanks to the USB connectors.

I have upgraded from a small computer monitor screen to a 27″ wide-angle screen so it’s like a TV screen and helps me record Internet files and images, too. Some modern monitors have the HDMI input so these are even more helpful…

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

http://www.sky.com

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.virginmedia.com

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.freeview.co.uk

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.freesat.co.uk

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.nowtv.com

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.ebay.co.uk

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.amazon.co.uk

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.quora.com

[denismartindale]

As this is a new forum, I selected all the text and used Ctrl and C to copy it for safety sake, then I was able to click the Submit option.

I didn’t get the LINK action to work, so here are the links as basic text instead.

http://www.google.com

[denismartindale]

TV Buyers must shop around!

Over the last few weeks with the old RT forum regarded as unavailable, I’ve gained a few discounts that will help offset the cost of my TV Licence Tax. Regardless of these discounts, I was told by one bookseller that they can get items even cheaper than I could with all my discounts and loyalty points. Even when I buy in bulk, I can’t improve on what the traders can save. I’ve seen many price increases recently and I’ve had to shop around for better prices. If such price increases apply to TVs then maybe there are better prices on 2023 TVs than on the 2024 TVs. Even so, I’ve previously recommended the Richer Sounds websites and local stores for these purchases as they offer a 6-year warranty coverage. The alternative is just buy as cheap as chips without any extended coverage and maybe we get to be lucky that way. We may see ebay offering us 20% off discount codes on selected sellers’ items and get a brand new large screen TV well below what Richer Sounds would offer. Richer Sounds can sell refurbished TVs but these have a short coverage instead. So why not buy brand new on eBay and look for TVs with a coverage for 2 years?

richersounds-dot-com and ebay-dot-co-dot-uk and ebay-dot-ie

http://www.richersounds.com

[denismartindale]

My TV preference is a Smart TV with 4K quality and a few HDMI cables, plus the Internet ethernet input and the satellite connector so I can use a Sky dish to get satellite channels that way. So I use these keywords to find what the TV websites are selling and what’s on offer on ebay and amazon. Google search may help find great UK results worth checking. The thing is, we need to check the back panel and side panel images to confirm what connections there are. Some modern TVs don’t provide SCART cable connections so we need to use the AV input or customise what the HDMI connectors can help us to see. Otherwise, we can try various Internet set-top boxes and so on as these have HDMI as well as USB options…

[denismartindale]

When I visit YouTube, I see several tutorials for TV and Internet devices. There are default settings on TVs that may need to get customised using various Menus and Submenus. The video tutorials can be user-friendly so they are worth checking if we see these appear in various results dealing with consumer electrics. The Internet devices are a different matter as some have been updating their services to exclude other Internet workarounds such as the Downloader app has become famous for. There are some gurus who are abandoning the firestick because of upgrades and changes in what’s permitted to access. The ROKU has changed and so have the Android TVs and set-top boxes. That’s why there are a few different Internet devices being recommended. BUT there are concerns that some devices are being sold despite having in-built malware.

If we were to sell off our Internet devices then we get warned to do a factory reset to clear our our customised settings and our personal details and so on. If not, then such devices could end up with ebay customers and that is a serious concern. With access to our emails the next owner can get alot of situations activated and delivery addresses changed. It’s even more dangerous when credit cards offer us a credit limit of hundreds of pounds and so can some websites, too.

Another concern is that password manager websites and apps could lead to leaks and security breaches and then chaos will surely follow for thousands and millions of customers across the world. So it’s like everybody has to buy all kinds of antivirus software and extra services just to use the Internet. These problems will increase rather than decrease as data gets sold on the most advanced levels to anybody willing to pay for such a deal.

Perhaps it’s safer to have several credit cards rather than just one or two just to split up our funds but then there’s that extra credit these companies allow that can be accessed and abused by others. So that’s why the credit companies offer us emails with security precaution tricks and tips. So don’t ignore these emails or the advice given on such websites.

[denismartindale]

YouTube offers us lots of celebrity info and details of new TV series as well as films. It was just this week I learned of Doctor Who and Superman and Lois TV series were back on the BBC iPlayer. The Boys will be back on Amazon Prime in June 2024 as well. Sometimes a few TV adverts notify us upcoming shows even if they’re just repeats of series from years ago. If we’ve got Sky subscriptions we get to download lots of series and shows as well as films. The Sky Catch-up section leads to the main streaming services so we can download from these to our Sky+ Planners. The Sky VIP customers may get a Sky film now and then as an extra freebie. If so, download it, watch it and then delete it to get back storage space.

I recently got an Amazon Prime video freebie to view Fast X thanks to a £5 discount. That was amazing when viewed on a 4K TV. We check our accounts and the Amazon Home page to see the latest offers and not just our emails. The more email accounts we register the more offers will follow.

[denismartindale]

Test for adding an image:

[denismartindale]

The poe-dot-com service offers the Photo_CreateE option for the text to image option and poe-dot-com service is used by the quora website so we get to add images to our posts there. I save an image and use it on the poemhunter website and then copy the image URL for other websites to load and display. Here is where I’ve used the usual img src code and the URL.

[denismartindale]

I use a free photo supplied from websites such as unsplash-dot-com and pixabay-dot-com and can edit these to suit what the poemhunter website can display.

[denismartindale]

That is the same image but I added the dimension width=”100″

[denismartindale]

TERRIFYING TV PRICES COULD LEAD TO TERRIFYING RISKS…

I had another email update from Richer Sounds and noticed a 55″ Hisense 4K TV at about £600. My first thought was that my Hisense 55″ cost me £410 some time ago, as it was reduced from £499. Then I reconsidered how COVID and Russia and Energy prices have combined to change how we get paid by employers as well as the UK Government allowances. If we consider £500 increasing to £600 then it means an increase of 20% in the last few years. If thinking that the TVs are basically about the same, then 20% seems way too much and is well over the increases we can get from employers and the UK Government.

We’re told that inflation is going down and that energy prices have been reduced since April 2024. Even so, some sellers will offer prices for a while just to get them made known at those prices before reducing them later to make things look like we’re saving money. So maybe Richer Sounds and other companies will reduce their prices and announce these as FLASH EVENT Discounts. Perhaps these will start a few weeks before the next Amazon Prime Day event.
:
Some of us with credit cards get allowed a credit limit and even Amazon allows us to order top-ups to our Amazon accounts using such credit cards. Or we can use Paypal Budget to pay in a few instalments on purchases over £100. As long as we pay up, we get the benefits of these accounts. To get a cost of £600 for a 55″ 4K TV seems strange to me because there are budget-priced TVs on sale at drastically cheaper prices. As I explained before, Richer Sounds offers us a 6-year warranty coverage. I regarded that as like including a charge of about £75 within the total price when compared with eBay and its 20% off discount codes for TVs with only 1 year coverage.

So if eBay has a seller offering us a similar TV for £600 less £75 that leads to a price of £525. If a 20% code applies then maybe the maximum discount we’re offered is £75 so the 1-year model would cost us £525 less £75 for £450 instead. So many customers would risk the long life of a new TV having no repairs needed for 6 years yet saving about £150 that way. That’s a lot of money to risk if something could go wrong later!

[denismartindale]

As a way to save money to be able to upgrade our sound and vision purchases, I share my shopping discounts. As a Morrisons groceries shop customer I receive their emailed discounts. So I ordered over £70 plus the £1.50 charge then applied the voucher code to get £12 off. By buying several bulk buys I had already saved £17 so almost £30 will be saved if the items get delivered from available in-store stocks.

The morrisons–com website has several offers and multi-buys but we must still shop around and stock up to get any benefits. This applies even more to the customers who live alone. It’s like they must order 2 weeks of shopping as a single order.

If an Amazon Prime new customer then the groceries department offers separate Morrisons discounts as well as the Co-Op discounts. So that’s useful if we sign up with a brand new email account. We may get even more Amazon discounts to follow.

[denismartindale]

Thanks to having an enforced BBC TV Licence Tax, I signed in to the BBC iPlayer to view the new series of Superman And Lois. I’ve seen the whole series as every episode from 1 to 13 is online. This time, it’s another roller-coaster of… Well, you can enjoy that without me saying any more.

I’ve also watched the latest series of Doctor Who and the first episodes were intriguing, at times baffling, but still tolerable if you can go along with all kinds of madness and mayhem that follow on from the recent Toymaker storyline and the fact that the Doctor and his companion almost killed in the first few minutes… Thankfully, I’ve paid my BBC TV Licence Tax so they get to live another day… My new annual bill for watching these shows and basically nothing else on the BBC will be about £170. Just like Doctor Who, this bill is beyond belief.

[denismartindale]

Doctor Who came on again and he had a lot on his mind this week. This time it was a war zone situation and that made me wonder why some think this is a TV series for kids. Even so, there were unusual circumstances at play and eventually these get explained so there’s light at the end of the tunnel, just not for everybody. A key factor is that the energy of a Time Lord regeneration could blow up a big chunk of the planet, so no pressure then.

[denismartindale]

Nowadays, we’ve got the main TV channels as well as Internet streamed channels. When we select a film or a show there may be some playback settings we can change. That may apply to the equipment or device or the video settings or the ability to edit the recordings even if using a DVD Recorder getting the playback itself. Sometimes we see a full screen and sometimes we see the black side panels that ruin the view. Many modern TVs are using the 16:9 or 16:10 widescreen format but the playback may not always allow us to adjust the view to that 16:9 view. If we explore other devices and apps and so on, we may find a widescreen playback and yet it may not be in high quality HD or 4K upscaled views or even true 4K views.

If we visit justwatch–com we may search for a film or TV show or series and find it’s available free or we can subscribe or even get a free home trial to test further. It’s available as an app as well. Even so, some films and TV shows may also be available on various golden oldie players and these apps may be showing a soft focus playback instead. So we still need to explore. Sometimes we compromise just because we get the high quality playback regardless of the black side bars.

These points don’t actually finish off the matter. You see, the TV itself may allow us to extend the width of the playback view from 4:3 to 16:9. Beyond this is the option to record the content and use computer video player programs to customise the viewing format beyond the 16:9 view. This stretching action takes the original recording to the point we can view the content at a customised full screen view even though it expands beyond it and we only see the central area itself.

So if we search Google Play Store for video players we may find these extra options or get even better quality upscaling done through these apps. There are computer programs that download from websites such as YouTube yet upscale these to 4K quality instead. So we can try these and then use the other players to see what results we get.

google–com for video downloaders and video players and the play store for Android apps, too.

[denismartindale]

This new forum has a few extra Internet ads which may be accessed and may also act as affiliation links that could benefit the forum financially. Ads by Google may allow us to get some ads shut down, such as with the reasons we’ve seen these or they were not appropriate or blocking the main web page content.

We can still shop around using google–com and other shopping reviews and comparison websites.

[denismartindale]

RADIO AND TELLY WEBSITE SEARCH TOPICS USING GOOGLE SITE SEARCH

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aradioandtelly.co.uk

Use additional keywords for extra ways to reduce the list of results to what you actually require to check.

When Google has a large number of results, click to view the LAST PAGE then select repeat the view with missing results.

[denismartindale]

RADIO AND TELLY OLD FORUM TOPICS USING GOOGLE SITE SEARCH

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aradioandtelly.co.uk%2Fcgi-bin%2Fforum%2FYaBB.pl

Use additional keywords for extra ways to reduce the list of results to what you actually require to check.

When Google has a large number of results, click to view the LAST PAGE then select repeat the view with missing results.

[denismartindale]

RADIO AND TELLY NEW FORUM TOPICS USING GOOGLE SITE SEARCH

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aradioandtelly.co.uk%2Fforums

Use additional keywords for extra ways to reduce the list of results to what you actually require to check.

When Google has a large number of results, click to view the LAST PAGE then select repeat the view with missing results.

NOTE THAT THIS FORUM SEEMS TO ALLOW JUST ONE URL AT A TIME WHEN WE POST HERE…

[denismartindale]

Example of the new forum topics that include the keywords for virgin media

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:radioandtelly.co.uk/forums+++virgin+media

NB I edit out the extra characters that the Google web page adds after the main search URL part as shown above.

I view the complete URL then manually position the cursor then forward delete the unwanted characters then I copy the part I want to use. Now I can paste that here in a new post as long as it’s the ONLY URL as more URLs seem to block the post getting accepted and posted here.

[denismartindale]

Some search engine don’t provide any images for search results but here are some images using the Ecosia Search engine, for new searches access ecosia–com first of all.

https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=radio%20and%20telly%20uk

[denismartindale]

https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=radio%20and%20telly%20forum

This is another search option and it loads up images that may be helpful if we wait for these to keep loading them to display these for us, NB note the website sources will vary.

[denismartindale]

The poe–com website info:

The development of AI for answering questions has been made possible in this generation like never before. We can use various text-to-image website resources and compare free AI images as well as paid-for services.

So poe–com offers us an intro in the artful creator scenario and probably helps us create celebrity poses or scenery backgrounds for various genres.

The website has other bots or features such as Web-Search. We ask and we get. It’s not necessarily anything like what we were needing but we can continue with the same query or modify the query for other results.

Sometimes we become the editors of the questions just to get the answers summarised for us in return. The AI adds to its knowledge if we add to our questions with that knowledge. So it’s not just hit-and-miss but developing through our desire for more logical and truthful responses.

The perplexity–ai service follows in the same way as the poe–com Web-Search does. So we can’t expect every question can be answered as we would expect. We adapt as soon as we discover the results don’t result in much at first.

Still, it’s a way to create short summaries of the info and then build up to more and more soon after.

poe–com
perplexity–ai
google–com
bing–com

[denismartindale]

poe–com then select Web-Search.

I pasted a poem there. The response was that it was detected as too long a question. Then the whole poem was displayed in white text against a colour background. I learned to add 2 lines above and below to improve that display. I used Print Scrn next to F12 to copy the displayed area.

I edited using an image editor to crop to the colour background. I saved that so I could add this as an extra to one of my denismartindale–co–uk poems.

I wrote a new poem called Poe to explain what poe–com can do besides creating images we could use on the poemhunter–com website. Once uploaded, the image URl can be used on the quora–com website which has recently offered AI images being added to our posts there.

The poe–com website feedback I got was that we can use the AI images, within the standard guidelines.

poemhunter–com/poem/poe-1/

Poe

Because of the poet called Poe,
I found a resource I know,
Where I can create
New artworks so great,
They really put on quite a show.

There’s even a Web-Search as well,
With lots of good details to tell,
So as I sit still,
I study at will,
And all of my worries dispel.

That’s why I am thankful for Poe,
And also for Leonardo,
For what they could do
For me and for you,
For every day we seek to grow.

Denis Martindale, for the 13th of March 2024.

The Poe poem is about Internet resources.
This week, a Web-Search led to a photo I needed.

I hadn’t found that image in any Google search so I was happy to get something extra thanks to poe–com

As for the AI text-to-image results, I got a lot of hit-and-miss responses quite quickly yet these improved until I ran out of tests after about 80 images. Then I was told to try later.

These AI results remind me of what I tell others,

Good luck with that!

[denismartindale]

Regarding the Forum adverts again. If we send feedback, then say we’ve seen the advert before, the advert section closes to reveal just the Forum web page.

[denismartindale]

AMAZON FIRE STICK MANAGERS AND VIDEO PLAYERS

When we get to check the Apps we may see several File Managers and we can test these to find differing results. So it helps to see if we can copy and move files and view these with zoom-in click actions. Some images will be seen separately and offers may be a slideshow or a click to see the next image. Many images may need to get renamed and that can apply to the name or the extension.

Some apps can convert to the usual jpg format but webp and gif files may be animated playing files instead and then we need File Managers to test these, too. Or we view in our installed web browsers such as Silk, Phoenix, Amaze and others we can test such as TV Bro.

Some browsers let us save images or clean up the file storage. Various cache storage should be left intact to load the website pages faster.

Video Players have differing features so we need to find out what features help us. The Applications section helps us learn the app icons or logo images and these serve as reminders.

We are told to open Settings then My Fire Tv then About for various tests such as the latest Software update or just to manually test it again.

wyoutube–com to find the latest tricks and tips and serious Amazon changes that affect the Firesticks. NB the very latest Firesticks have switched to a different operating system so the Internet gurus are concerned about it and about sideloading apps, too.

[Author]

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