Philips TV tinkering

Posted on 2016-10-10 by admin

Well, – I have always found it funny and rewarding to tinker with new gadgets etc. So when I stumbled upon the ‘secret’ factory menu (for another Philips TV model), I naturally needed to see if it was working on my 5501. It did:

phillips_tv4

Since the TV is still covered by the guarantee (I prefer to keep it that way , since the Philips firmware upgrades seems *ahem* somewhat lacking in terms of quality),  I turned of the TV and will return to this menu in a couple of years.

Oh, and if you wonder how to access the menu ( AND REMEMBER YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK ),  the following buttons entered on the remote should do the trick:

062596INFO

 

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First impressions on the 40PFT5501/12 Philips 5500 series TV

Posted on 2016-10-08 by admin

So long story short – I needed a new TV and I had to factor in the Wife acceptance factor while still getting a TV that could handle my Super Nintendo from the last century. While that sounds like at pretty easy task, it isn’t (I will probably make another post about this process later on). So I bought the 40PFT5501/12 Philips 5500 series TV.

After a while there was a new software update ready, so naturally I updated the TV. This was the result:

phillips_tv2

Where about to toss the TV back into the car to return this bloody mess, when I noticed I had a spare TV cable lying in my old tech-junk pool. I connected this cable, and since there is no antenna in the end, I pinced the “nail” in the end plug, thereby using myself as a bad antenna – sorry no pictures ;-).

The TV found some channels, and I saved them. Afterwards, everything was now working again. ( the only difference is that I now also have some TV channels installed, that I can’t watch since I don’t have a decent antenna setup – but who cares, I can use my console again.

The faulty firmware version:

phillips_tv1The Philips guys fixed the issue in a later update, – but it really bothers me that a large company as Philips, can be so bad at testing their software updates, that they let something that bad slip through to their customers. I’m not impressed.

 

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Red Hat Forum Denmark 2016

Posted on 2016-10-08 by admin

Went to the Red Hat Forum Denmark 2016. It was a great experience, and especially the speaker from Volvo Cars, Robert Forsström gave a great talk about using Docker and Openshift to automate the build and deploy process of their JavaEE setup. As a result of this Volvo is avoiding the process of “big bang upgrades”, labelled in the presentation as “panic”.

Another thing that surprised me was that, when talking in one of the breaks, we were greeted by a representative from Microsoft, that were handing out small cards with a link to “Try Red Hat on Azure”. Microsoft surely made a positive impression by taking the high road and being a team player.

MicrosoftRedhat

 

 

 

 

 

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