Not surprisingly, my interests tend towards geek than anything else. I am still fascinated by technology and love gadgets, watch copious amounts of anime, play games (when I have time), and like cars.

Technology

I grew up with technology and still love it. I have a two computers (I used to have a lot more, including a SPARCstation 5, but power and space issues forced me to consolidate), a home-built PC named nerine and a Macbook named primula.

Home Theater

My modest home theater system is comprised of a 46" Samsung A550 LCD TV, an Onkyo 5.1 speaker system, and a PS3. These are all protected by a Liebert GXT2-1500RT2, a true online UPS. I went a bit crazy with the TV and invested in a colorimeter and calibrated my TV. If you have the same TV, you can find my calibration settings at AVSforum in this post and this later post. They're considered the best settings for that model TV by many people on that board (who tend to be very picky).

TV Calibration

Calibrating your TV is important to ensure that the output of your TV matches the "standard" under which movies are made. You may have encountered what happens when devices aren't calibrated -- colors look different from your monitor to your printer, which is entirely different compared to someone else's monitor. This is especially apparent when your go to an electronics store where all the TVs have the same feed but have show different colors!

I calibrated my TV using an x-rite i1Display2 colorimeter, HCFR to perform the measurements, and the AVS HD 709 disc to generate test patterns. The procedure is fairly basic -- put the colorimeter on the TV, bring up a pattern, measure with HCFR, and repeat for all the test patterns. Typically, the first settings are the contrast, brightness, and backlight level, which are set so that the display has the largest dynamic range possible without clipping. The next settings correspond to grayscale and color temperature, followed by the primary and secondary colors. Many TVs do not offer settings in the user menu to allow for all these adjustments, and having gone through the process myself, I will make sure any future TV I buy has those settings. More information on DIY TV calibration can be found in the Grayscale and color calibration for dummies article.