29 August 2023

Was Wide-Screen Just a Fad?


Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 at CNN 

Why does it seem like wide-screen video has become passé? The latest and greatest Samsung phone, when fully opened, is square!

After I started watching some old TV shows on my phone, and my wife and I were seriously considering going to streaming apps only for the first time, I started noticing something. At first, it was only the STARZ channels, but now it seems to have spread to HBO/max and Showtime. They'll show a movie in wide-screen format, but it will be letterboxed with black bars at top and bottom within a 4:3 picture—which is then surrounded by black bars on the left and right on my wide-screen TV!

Now, when I start the cable company's app on my Apple TV device, and tune it to the same channel, the same movie takes up the full width of my TV screen. It isn't contained in a 4:3 picture.

Maybe the networks are trying to get people to drop their cable providers and use their streaming apps only? That's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. If it isn't that, then the cable company is just doing something stupid—oh, wait, that kind of makes sense, too.

By the way, as for those old TV shows like Columbo and Babylon 5, at first I thought it was kind of quaint the way they only took up the middle 1/3 or so of my phone screen. Now, I've gotten used to it and don't really think about it, except when I think that a wide-screen TV picture will take up the full width of my phone, too, but not my TV.

As for the folding phone, I guess being able to fold a screen like that is novel, and that may attract some, but I have never liked the idea of a phone that opens, even when flip-phones were all the rage back in the '90s. More moving parts means more things that can break, and I'm already a klutz.

08 June 2023

Where do you do your best thinking?

 


Because I can't stand to use the Twitter app on my iDevice, I haven't had any place to post the random thoughts and observations that occur to me from time to time. So, after a 7-year hiatus, I've returned to this space.

Today's random thought is: feces. When I was in my twenties, a study was released whose conclusion was that one's stool should float in the toilet. The reasoning was that people should eat lots of fiber, and the more fiber present in feces, the more buoyant it is.

Some years (decades) later, a study was released whose conclusion was that one's stool should sink in the toilet. According to it, high fat content also makes feces float, and it could be caused by any number of unhealthy conditions.

What would they say if one's bowel movement half sinks, and half floats?

On a related topic, at one time I had this blog set up to flush its content onto Twitter. I don't know if that still works, but if you leave a comment please include your Twitter handle, if it isn't evident from your reader ID, and let me know you saw it post there. Thanks!