With my personal site done and my art table cleared to draw, I did like I usually do and popped on some background noise on YouTube. I Worked for a bit, stopped to stretch and watch some stuff from my list when the backlight in my TV died.

No warnings. No pops. No magic smoke.

It just went out. o.o

So there I was late Thursday night/early Friday morning with a semi-busted TV and the strong desire to punch something. The thing was barely four years old and I didn't run it any harder than my monitors - all of which are either used College surplus or used Business surplus - and they've lived way harder lives than this new one. If you caught a glimpse of my Twitter feed, you'd see that I did some digging to find a new one and it didn't end well. At all.

I guess the smallest common size these days for flat screens is 24". Not a bad size really... just too big for my small setup. The last screen was a 22" and it was pushing it dimension-wise. I did find a 19" that was something like $90 and a 24" with way more bells and whistles for $80. In fact... the larger the size I came across, the more reasonable the price paid. Reasonable if you don't consider good ol' fashioned computer monitors.

The thing that killed me was finding monitors with similar (if not better) loadouts as their TV counterparts for less. Only things missing on some of these were the built-in TV tuner and whatever flavor of "Smart" that company went with for their Smart TV setup. It was then that I remembered that I had a spare monitor that was the right fit for my needs. Not too big, not too terribly burned in and it was a Dell so it played nice with my little Dell speakers I used to replace the ones my TV had that shot Straight Down 'cause of poor design choices by TV makers these days. It was perfect... almost.

My current setup is that Dell monitor with the matching speakers. I ran the HDMI through a cheap HDMI to DVI adapter and I'm running the sound for my PS4 through the headphone jack on the controller until I can get an HDMI Audio Extractor to clean that situation up a bit. For the tuner, I'm going to use the TV Tuner I bought years ago through the VGA port when the time comes for TV, tapes and old gaming goodness. The next step will be to find a low/no power HDMI switch to run other devices through that.

Complicated? A little. For $60 (adding both the new stuff and the tuner I bought years ago), I have a new "TV" with a better picture than my last one and I got to put an old monitor to good use. Before now, it was just sitting in the way of things waiting to be used for something. If I wanted to go overboard and drop funds, I could've scooped a solid gaming monitor on the cheap with a couple of HDMI inputs installed. That'd drop $15 for the adapter but still cost around $100-$110 total.

Moral of this story: Think smart. You'd be surprised what you can do with a little hunting. And also invest in a cheap TV Tuner device if you use gear like old RF switches or run signals through coax. They're great for stuff like this or if you find yourself with a projector and you want to play River Raid on the side of a house for now reason. = )

Now it's back to inking. I'm two strips ahead of this one and I'd love to pull ahead more if I can swing it. Gotta' love that buffer.

'Till next time! = )