Week Forty-Seven: In Which My Teen Out-Techs Me!

You know, I adore doing what I do and I even like to think I am quite good at it. But every now and again, it is good to have your ego pricked and the hot air build up deflated. I think I’m so dead tech and yet the toys and machines we love so much are only as much use as our awareness of them.
I have a lovely 42 inch plasma Viera TV courtesy of Panasonic and it has every orifice stuffed up. HDMI and Scart, with an AVR, LaserDisc player, (yes, still!) CD, DVD, set-top box and even a VHS tape deck. Although the video has died and we don’t seem to care, despite all the tapes in the house. And my lad has a Nintendo Wii. He is an expert on the products and the games and wants to design game characters for a living. He has just got the latest Mario release and found that the old cathode ray tube TV his Wii is hooked up to (a big sexy Sony Trinitron we picked up for very little on Gumtree from a family in Basingstoke) was artifacting something chronic on the screen lots of dots of white and black like little firework explosions. He asked really nicely if he could possibly have the system on the big TV, as the artifacting was so bad he’d rather wait until we were not watching to play this one game.
So, I figured hey, if I cannot fix up some cables and stuff for my lad, it’d be a sorry state of affairs. So, I pulled out red/yellow/white RCA cables and Y leads and various adaptors like double-ended female RCA joiners that I call ‘˜Lesbians’ for childish reasons and figured out how to Y lead his AV feed to the Viera’s one remaining hole the AV3 input on the front of the set, meant for camcorder replay and camera use. At the same time, the Wii microphone and the doodah sensor bar, which normally sit on neat BluTack pads on the telly top are now fitted with tiny Neodymium magnets (that don’t interfere with the TV as their magnetic field, though strong, is tiny) saved from packaging and a brilliant magnetic ID badge used at the recent PURE DAB event in Covent Garden. I cut out the stuck-on steel bar from its backing and stuck that to the telly. Then I applied two tiny discs of Neodymium to the two that were in the active bit of the ID badge the part that goes inside your shirt to hold your badge. This assembly was stuck to the CRT TV and the back of the shirt-gripper had yet more superglue and the sensor bar went on the top of the lot. Once set, he had a Y lead AV feed and a magnetic quick-release system to move the sensor bar from one TV to the next.
When he saw the image on the 42 inch plassy, he was made up and for a brief moment, my teenager thought I was cool and I enjoyed it. Then, he said, ‘ooh look, iPlayer on the TV!’ As of course the Wii has this. At that point the cool feeling went away and I realised we could have had iPlayer on our main set, (Noggin sits on the floor to play Wii) like a smart TV, in advance of the others!
By two years.
So I felt a total tit. We had the parts and the know-how, we just didn’t use it. Like half the features on a smartphone. Anyone spare me some ‘˜Y’ leads and lesbian adapters?
And while I did get at the woofers last week as promised finally and will do some more this week (although my accounts are WAAAAY behind schedule and it’s now I must do some!) I am now playing with a mad headunit and am yet to get to grips with all it can do, like the Wii! It’s a Parrot Asteroid. So keep an eye out for the unboxing video, soon.
Adam Rayner Online Editor