Posts
Home Entertainment Essentials From Best Buy {Plus $100 Giveaway!}
Last week I shared some home entertainment system tips that were provided to me by a Best Buy blue shirt associate. Today I’m going one step further by recommending specific products that caught my eye while also sending one of you off to Best Buy with a $100 gift card burning a hole in your pocket! Let’s get started then, shall we? Here is my list of Best Gifts from Best Buy!
Toshiba 55″ 4K UHD LED TV
It all starts with the TV and after having used the 49″ version of this TV for the past week, I can say that I am extremely impressed. My family’s favourite feature so far is the ability to stream our YouTube and Facebook videos directly to the TV with the push of a button.
Check out all the features here!
************************************************************************************************************
Sonos PLAY:5 Wireless Speaker
Having great sound is what will set you apart from the rest of your friends when it come to home entertainment systems. The thing that caught my eye about the Sonos sound system was not only the ability to buy separate pieces as you can afford them but also the fact that you can connect your devices to this system via wifi.
You can learn more about Sonos here!
************************************************************************************************************
Bose SoundTouch 120 Home Theatre System
Looking for the ultimate home theatre experience? Let me introduce you to the Bose SoundTouch 120 Home Theatre System. This system almost blew me out of my local Best Buy and in the best way possible.
Check out the specs here but bring a paper towel for your drool!
*************************************************************************************************************
PlayStation 4 500 GB NHL 17 Bundle
For the gamer in your life, which in my house happens to be me, the Playstation 4 NHL bundle has served me well for months now and I highly recommend you give it a try. Guys, you may want to check with your wife before hooking this up to your main system but that’s where it belongs!
Check out the PS4 Bundles Here!
*************************************************************************************************************
PlayStation VR Launch Bundle
If you’re going to get a PS4 anyway, you may as well look into grabbing the #1 item on my Christmas list year in the PlayStation VR headset! I’ve seen enough videos on YouTube to know that this device will provide hours of fun on your big screen TV.
Here are all the details on the PS4 VR Headset
*************************************************************************************************************
Google Chromecast Ultra
Let’s say you went against my recommendation and bought a TV without Chromecast built in, the Google Chromecast Ultra is a simple way to use your mobile device to stream your favourite TV shows, movies and more to the TV. And while streaming, you can still text or call without interrupting what’s playing or draining your battery.
Check out what else the Chromecast Ultra can do!
*************************************************************************************************************
Now, I believe I mentioned something about a giveaway, didn’t I?? To get you started on your way to a new home entertainment system from Best Buy, I am giving one lucky reader a $100 Best Buy gift card! All you have to do to enter in fill out the Rafflecopter form below and cross your fingers! Happy Shopping!!!
Disclosure: I was compensated for my participation in this program, which involved playing with all sorts of cool electronics!
How To Create The Ultimate Home Theatre Experience
One of the top items on our holiday list this year was a new TV for our living room as our current model is about 6 years old and the advancements in home entertainment in that time have been beyond anything I could have imagined. Not wanting to make the wrong decision, we worked with Best Buy to set up an appointment with one of their Blue Shirt associates and home entertainment experts, Ryan, and he helped us throughout the process.
I wanted to share some of his tips with you because it was all new to me so I figured there were more of us, less technology savvy, people out there… Honestly, had I not asked for Ryan’s help, we would have walked out of Best Buy with a mishmash of things that don’t belong together. That said, here are some of his top tips for outfitting your home entertainment system!
Good Sound Is Key!
As great as TV technology is these days, if you want a true home theatre experience, you need to up the ante when it comes to sound. I always used to walk right by the sound aisle because I knew I’d be spotted for the fraud I was while pretending to look impressed by it all. Ryan taught me all about the differences and importance of the various components of sound, pointing out that the sound bar was where the magic happens, while the sub woofer played in important role in the projection of bass. I admitted to him that I had received a surround sound set a few years earlier and had no idea what the sub woofer did, so I just left it unplugged next to the TV… Shame.
Obviously, the sound set from Bose was incredible but it was the Sonos system that caught my eye. I liked the ability to purchase pieces as I had money for them as opposed to having to shell out all the money at once. I also liked that you could connect your mobile devices to any of the pieces through wifi so you could play your music from anywhere in the house.
To Make It Great, You Must Calibrate!
That’s right, I said calibration. Let’s just be honest here, I had no idea what this meant as Ryan talked about it until he showed me the difference. You see, when most people see a TV with bright, vibrant colours, they are immediately drawn to it. In most cases, however, you are not watching with the colours or clarity you were intended to see. Best Buy offers a service where the Geek Squad will come to your house, with all their fancy equipment, and calibrate your new TV for you in the room that you are going to place it in.
What this does is sets the colours and clarity around the specific natural lighting that your room contains. Oh, and don’t worry about losing the calibration due to power outages or other errors because the Geek Squad saves your settings and can easily re-calibrate for you!
Miscellaneous Odds & Ends
Here are a few other tidbits of information I got out of my visit to Best Buy!
1. Make sure you measure your living space before purchasing your TV and TV stand. You don’t want to have to worry about these details while you’re in the store and then pick the wrong sized things.
2. Grab a couple extra HDMI cables and a power bar. Do you know how annoying it is to excitedly set everything up only to realize that you need one more cable??? I do…
3. Don’t be afraid of buying open box items. Not only is this one of my secret strategies, but the store clerks also emphasized that open box does not mean faulty. It is almost always because someone returned it without even trying it and you could save major dollars by taking it off their hands!
That’s all for today’s lesson! I hope it proves helpful for you when you are ready to redesign your home entertainment space. Oh, I almost forgot, here is the TV we ended up with!
It’s the Toshiba 49” 4K UHD Smart TV and we can’t wait to get it fired up! I’ve been told that 4K is the wave of the future so I’m excited to see what it brings. I also love the fact that the TV has Google Cast built in to give us easy instant access to apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify!
I highly encourage those of you in the market for a new home entertainment setup to stop into your local Best Buy and ask for one of their experts to walk you through all the options. Thanks to Erin and the Best Buy team for making this such a great experience for us!
Disclosure: I was compensated for my participation in this program but my wife is loving watching The Bachelor on this giant new TV so I am definitely 100% satisfied with my experience!
No, YOU Are Hoarding Electronics!
We live in an interesting time right now. I can remember growing up in a house that a TV in the living room and that was it. Our phone hung from the wall with a long spindly cord attached to it and that was about the extent of the electronics in our possession.
Currently in my home I have 4 laptops, 5 TV’s, 3 iPhones, 2 VCR’s, 3 printers and a slew of other misfit electronics. Most of these items have been replaced but we’ve kept them lying around as if we are hosting a museum or hoping they will turn into a Transformer… I noticed the electronic heap while I was in my storage room, digging out the Christmas Halloween decorations, and decided to finally rid myself of the mess.
In the past I would have just thrown them all in the garbage but if blogging has taught me anything, it’s that someone has always come up with a creative way to deal with things. Sure enough, I found the Ontario Electronic Stewardship, who have developed a way for you to recycle your old electronics so that materials such as gold, copper and other rare metals can be reused and kept out of a landfill.
The cool part is that you can punch in your postal code on their Recycle Your Electronics page and it’ll give you a list of the registered drop off locations. Places like Best Buy, Staples and Future Shop are on board and have bins right inside their front doors to make the drop offs very easy.
I’m also going to use this as an opportunity to teach my kids more about recycling by having them search the house for more electronics and bringing them to the drop off with me to explain what it is that will happen to all our old devices. I think they’ll appreciate knowing that some of this stuff will be going to help families and kids who otherwise wouldn’t afford it. I’ll just have to explain why daddy is keeping the old looking original NES system.
Because I am curious, I’ll leave you with this question. How many unused electronics do you have hanging around in your house right now?
Here is a fun video from the Ontario Electronic Stewardship!
Disclosure: I was compensated for my participation in the #WhatsInYours campaign. The message is important and it actually got me off my butt and into action!
These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things: Impractical Jokers
It’s a strange occurrence when you stumble upon a TV show that you have never seen, nor heard about before, that makes you laugh so hard that you wake up your sleeping wife. Well, I was fortunate enough to have that happen to me the other day and I have been infecting others with it, ever since!
The show is called, “Impractical Jokers“, and follows four friends who compete against each other in a series of humiliating yet hilarious dare challenges. The one who backs out of the most dares, must perform a solo humiliation at the end of each episode and I’m not sure I have ever laughed so hard in my life.
The show airs on TruTV but I have no idea what that is, probably because I’m Canadian, so I watch it on TVTropolis. I don’t really have much more to add, except to say that you should definitely be watching this show if you like to laugh until your sides ache. You can also find these guys on Twitter @TruTVJokers.
I’ve attached one of my favourite clips below and I hope you’ll come back and tell me what you thought.
Cheers!
NBC’s Guys With Kids: Swing And A Miss
I tried to like it, I really did. I stayed up late. I made my wife miss our nightly Young & The Restless tradition. I even taped it so I could watch it again just in case the kids woke up in between.
Unfortunately for me, NBC’s new show, “Guys With Kids”, was completely and utterly disappointing. I have to admit that I had a preconceived notion about what this show was going to be. My worry was that the Dads in show were going to continue the tradition of portraying fathers as bumbling doofuses who can’t do anything right.
THE ASSESSMENT
As it turns out, I was only half accurate in my premature assessment. I really wanted to laugh at this show and had even convinced myself that I could overlook a little bit of the “dumb dad” stigma in exchange for the serious amount of funny I figured Executive Producer Jimmy Fallon was going to bring to the table.
The only problem with that: It wasn’t funny! Not even a little bit.
I waited and waited for the big time jokes but all I got were recycled clichés and mediocre moments of funny, which were immediately ruined by the over the top laugh track. Seriously, I don’t like laugh tracks in general but this one was completely ridiculous, chiming in at awkward moments with uproarious laughter.
The other problem I had is that my earlier worry about the Dad’s being portrayed as imbeciles turned out to be completely true. The show opens with the three Dads hanging out in a bar with their babies strapped to the chests…This is not what Dads do and in fact, I’d be surprised if this has ever happened outside of the taping of this show.
- THE CHARACTERS
Chris (Jesse Bradford) – Chris is the divorced Dad, who seems normal enough until you find out that he is completely whipped by his ex-wife and mother of their child. He states that he loses every argument about the child to his ex because she ends them all with the line, “He Grew Inside Me”, as she rubs her belly. Not only is this unfunny and clichés but it once again paints the Dad in a weak light.
Gary (Anthony Anderson) – I thought for sure the Stay at Home Dad offered the show a chance at some great Dad moments, but they were lost in the fact that all he does is complain about how awful and time consuming it is to have 4 boys. To be fair in this assessment, his wife, played by Tempestt Bledsoe, seems to have the same attitude towards the children.
Nick (Zach Cregger) – I really have no idea what this character is all about and that is part of the problem. All I could gather is that he’s kind of dumb and will most likely be the “crazy do whatever you want with no regard for wives or kids” guy. Third Strike in the “Guys” Department.
The Kids – Almost non-existent. That’s how I would describe the role of the children in this show. This show could have simply been called, Guys, and it would have been able to keep the same premise. If the show continues, I hope there is a little more interaction between the fathers and the children.
The Wives – As mentioned earlier, Tempestt Bledsoe (Vanessa Huxtable) plays a mother of 4 kids and has some funny moments. Jamie-Lynn Sigler plays Nick’s wife and didn’t really play a major factor in the episode but there is room for funny between her and clueless Nick. Finally we have Erinn Hayes, who plays Chris’ ex-wife. I don’t know if it’s the writing, the acting or the fact that she is humiliating Bradford’s character the whole episode, but she is my least favourite character by far.
Finally, I will second the motion put forward by one of my Dad Blogging buddies in The Rock Father, when he described the random appearance of NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, saying “his appearance would’ve been far more relevant if it was 1980 and AIRPLANE! had just come out”. I agree sir, and I’ll add that having him fake “Dunking The Baby” was equally as tired.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS
I just read this whole thing back before signing off and while it may seem unreasonably harsh, I really did have high hopes for Guys With Kids and was left completely baffled and disappointed with how unsatisfying it was. I also understand the people who say, “Calm down Dad and learn how to take a joke”, I really do, but that would imply the jokes actually making me laugh, which they did not. When you add that to the fact that the Dads are also portrayed in the same bumbling way we always are, it raises my Dad-O-Meter to a high level of alert.
I really like Jimmy Fallon and think he is a comedic genius, which is the main reason why I was so upset with the finished product. It just missed the mark on too many levels for me, so I think it’s time to go back to the drawing board with this one. On second thought, let’s just sweep it under the mat instead and pretend it never happened… Sorry Jimmy, still friends?
Cheers!
**Photo is from Blogo Wogo**