Playing around with television

We recently decided to replace the television in our bedroom and add VCR and DVD capability in the process. Last week we finally bought the equipment and today I finally set things up with Steve's help.

Buying a new television always seems weird, perhaps because we do it less often than we buy cars. In this particular case, the television was one we'd bought right after moving to California in December, 1987. A few years ago we replaced it as the primary TV and moved it to our bedroom. The picture has been going downhill for the last five years and it's relatively difficult to watch on a sunny day as the maximum brightness level has been way too low for some time. I honestly think Jon uses it more than either of us and occasionally Jon wants to watch DVDs or older VHS tapes, which hasn't been possible. Whenever we want to watch a movie I bring up the Powerbook, which is more than a little clumsy.

We ended up buying a flat screen television (not a flat panel, that would have seriously broken the spending limit) and a DVD/VCR combo. The whole deal cost only slightly more than buying a DVD all by itself in 1999. The installation went well except for one stage after putting in the DVD player where I had the video chain backwards and it still worked somehow (thanks for noticing Steve).

Somewhere in the middle of all this I needed to change the television controlled by our cable remote which we use for most purposes. I knew there was a way to change the TV (I've done it before) but I couldn't find the documentation and it's not at an intuitive process. Off to Adelphia where I found nothing of use which still bugs me. Do they want us to call them about stupid stuff like using a remote control when they must have hundreds of questions per week on the same subject?

The remote used with the General Instruments (now Motorola) settop box used here was made by a company called US Electronics (now a part of ICX Global?). After poking around in most of the manuals available on the support page, we have a UG3-DIGI remote and the process of reseting the TV or VCR is straight forward.

Press TV, Setup, three code digits and Setup again.

That's it.

And right after going through the whole discovery process Sarah walked in and handed me the little pamphlet that matches the documentation I found online. Naturally.