Paid off Mortgage in September, Birthday was in October...

[Mat]

So I done bought myself LOTS of shiny toys!

First up, my Bravia's built in OS has been slowing down a lot recently, resulting in stuttering in Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Having been disappointed with the latest Google Streamer (so much so that I returned it after a day), I figured I'd dip my toe back into the Apple ecosystem for the first time in years and bought myself a brand new Apple TV. It took me a while to realise I had to enable "Enhanced" mode on my telly's HDMI ports in order to get HDR properly working with the Apple TV, but since sorting that out, I'd even go so far as to say that picture quality's improved above and beyond the built in OS.
I'm also enjoying a lot of the Apple TV content that I'd missed out on, the most pleasant surprise being "For All Mankind".

And as I'm now using an external TV box , I also decided to take the plunge on the (admittedly overpriced) updated Hue Sync Box as well as a Play Gradient Strip for the back of the telly, replacing my Govee set-up.

And so now, all of my living room lights are in sync with what's on the telly, which is ace.
While expensive, the Hue Sync Box and accompanying strip are a HUGE improvement over the Govee.

I also finally upgraded my original Pixel Watch, 41mm to a Pixel Watch 4, 45mm, and the larger face plus improved processor have finally made the watch live up to its promise, with lots of info clearly available, and quick and easy control of media, home devices and Fitbit info.
I've even started using the improved Gemini assistant and taking advantage of the watch's "Raise to talk" function, where raising the watch close to my mouth allows me to run a query through Gemini. So far, I've only used it to add emailed events to my calendar, but still, it's fast and nifty.

And finally, this weekend I bought something I've been lusting after for a while now.
When I last upgraded my PC, it was the first time ever I was able to buy matching monitors, a pair of NZXT 27" Canvas monitors at 2560x1440.
Sure, nice monitors, granted, but critically, IPS with a backlight.
And having gotten used to the colour range and true blacks of my Bravia OLED telly, I wanted the same on my PC when gaming, dagnabbit.
So I am now the proud owner of a really rather lovely Sony InZone M10S 27" OLED, with a stoopidly high refresh rate of 480Hz, and a response time of 0.03ms.
It put the remaining accompanying NZXT monitor to shame, with true blacks, crisp colours and insanely fluid movement. Yes, I was tempted to buy two of the Sonys, so that I'd have a matching pair, but then reason kicked in; why spend an extra grand for that matching pair when realistically, I was only ever going to game on one, while the second monitor acts as a browser / Youtube monitor?

Now, I primarily bought it for image quality, and it has certainly wowed me in that respect so far.
480Hz wasn't really a factor in me deciding to buy this monitor.
But now I have it, part of me is increasingly curious to see what I can run at that stupidly high framerate that won't break.
I reckon I'm going to install good old Quake 3 tonight to see just what goes wrong at that framerate, but I was curious if anyone here had any suggestions as to what might be fun to run at that speed.
I'm running an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D CPU and a RTX4090 GPU to give you some idea of horsepower.

[Misfit]

Well that's the way to do it!

I'd find it hard to live without Ambilight now, so when the playroom gets a makeover soon with some massive TV (I see the new 98" TCL is getting very good reviews, for relatively little money), I shall investigate the Hue options.

Good call on the Apple TV, it's always felt far superior to any in-built TV OS I've used so far.

[Mat]

Oh, you reminded me!
Philips have also introduced a new Hue Bridge, which has a really cool feature if you have enough lights.
If you have three or more Hue lights in a room, this new bridge can use obstruction of the zigbee signal to act as motion sensing, meaning that you can have motion sensing without the motion sensors!

[Misfit]

Oh, you reminded me!
Philips have also introduced a new Hue Bridge, which has a really cool feature if you have enough lights.
If you have three or more Hue lights in a room, this new bridge can use obstruction of the zigbee signal to act as motion sensing, meaning that you can have motion sensing without the motion sensors!

I really haven't got much past Alexa controlling a couple of lights so far!

I'm so lazy that one lamp is still called Tree, as when it was the first light we ever set up, it was to control the Christmas tree, since the plug had become inaccessible by it.