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Idea vs. Ego
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This often happens to me - I'm watching TV just surfing, flipping from one channel to the next till I find something that momentarily engages my attention. No sooner do I find said attraction, however, than *pop* it's time for the ad break (commercial break for our American cousins).
Since I'm quite
sensibly averse to watching ads, I take this as my cue to resume flipping, the idea being to pass the time of the break by checking out the other channels.
The trouble is, above a certain number of channels, it doesn't take me long to forget what channel I was interested in. So I end up going round and round, or get into something else, or come back to it too late.
What I need is an 'ad break' button on the remote control. Say I'm watching 'Planet Earth' on channel 205 and totally getting into the whole nature thing, but then *ding* ad-break ! No problem - I hit the button and it simply remembers what channel I'm on. I then go surfing the other channels; but the clever television will wait a set number of minutes (the average duration of an ad-break) and then remind me what channel I was watching.
I can then decide whether I want to go back to the enchanting Mr. Attenborough, or whether the all-night infomercial on channel 475 about the exercise machine that "goes side-to-side as well as up and down!" is just too enthralling for me to miss.
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Some cable boxes have 2 tuners so you can set one on one channel and then surf with the other and go back to the other tunner. I don't know if this is what you mean or not though. |
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I believe this is why PIP was invented. The problem can also be solved less expensively using a notepad and an egg timer. |
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Switch it off and come back to the 'bakery. |
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PIP is the perfect solution for this, which is, sadly, baked already. In case you're not familiar with PIP, it creates a small window in a corner of the screen (about the size of a dialogue box on your computer screen) and on some you can even move it around to whatever part of the screen you don't mind being blocked by it. Inside the little window it's just like watching the channel, only micro-sized. That's better than simply saving the number because you can monitor the window and see exactly when the ad break is over and the show starts. |
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(note: PIP = Picture-In-Picture) |
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