Posted On: Saturday - September 21st 2019 9:43PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Artificial Stupidity
This is just another story of many Peak Stupidity has written (and will write) on different attempts to force people back onto that TV. "Hey, nobody's got a gun to your head, I'm tired of reading this stuff" you may retort. No, it's not come to that yet .. hey, you're still here .. great! You gotta live your life though, and it was time to get on the exercise machine at the hotel. We've discussed the mechanical and electronic stupidity built into the poorer of these machines before. I just ran into the TV force-feeding thing again the other day.
I hit the start button and got going. I'd seen this before and ignored it, but the otherwise informative display (speed, calories burned*, heart rate, etc.) had a damn faded out CNN channel on in the background. That's supposed to be cool I guess, and I can do the gay swiping thing to move the numbers out of the way or back in the foreground. Yeah, I knew I could change the channels, but I wanted OFF. Once into the routine, I really didn't want to try too many things on this touch screen, as I might be set back to square one in the workout.
The thing is, when the TV is on a separate screen, even if it's not easy to figure out, control-wise, there's always the plugs (signal or power) to shut it down. Hardware beats software every time! No, this TV display was visible behind the info. I did want to view.
With the workout done, I played around with this fancy display. It turns out, one can turn it off at the beginning, but the "OFF" screen-simulated-button goes away after something like 1/2 a second. What the...! It was time to play around with the simulated buttons to try to outsmart this smart machines ... oh, and remember WTF I did for the next time. It turned out to be kind of roundabout - put the TV in the foreground, bring up a menu to change channels, then ... crap, I will probably HAVE TO figure it out again, but you do see the "OFF" choice again, and with plenty of time to mash it.
I really think that Precor wants me to watch TV while working out. I understand having some choices of things to keep me entertained, if I desired that. The numbers are really just good for my taste, the more, the better. Then there are those visualized 1/4 mile tracks. Those are cool. Come to think of it, on the bike machines, the video taken from some dudes go-pro, riding around in the hills of France(?) (You'd think, right?) are a favorite thing to look at. However, I DON'T! WANT! TV!, and they oughta know that by now, with all the spyware and all. They make it especially hard to turn off, or at least to FIGURE OUT how to turn off. Why?
*Kinda bogus, as I discussed in that previous post, but at least one can set goals for repeated uses of the same machine.
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