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All that balloon talks going on and I can only think about my odyssey on the weekend to find lumpy 10l of Helium.

We usually buy this in an industrial bottle because the one-time bottles you can get for birthday parties are… meh. In costs, litres and waste of the empty can (litre litter).

The 10l bottle is enough for years and several birthday parties and can be refilled.

So I was puzzled when I went for a refill on Saturday just to find out that my usual dealer doesn’t have any. I was told that their dealer holds deliveries back to provide hospitals first at the moment. This is also going on for ~1.5 years by now.

In the end I found another local dealer who had some in stock but to what cost! 10l for ~122 EUR!

I never bothered to check where Helium is coming from but it all makes sense. It’s basically natural gas and it’s coming from the same deposits that are all in bad supply due to various reasons and it’s used a lot as coolant e.g. for medical equipment.

I guess the next birthday parties will see way less balloons 🎈

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Trying to get (or even find) a cheap TV in 2022 is a horrible experience. Especially on Amazon, because there are no filter for this and the search function will simply not care and keep shoving all kinds of Smart TVs in the face. Various other websites designed to compare TVs also do not offer such a filter and I really wonder why, because there are very valid reasons to *not* want a Smart TV. Yes, I don’t even want the Telefunken ones that come at least with Linux!

For reference, our current is some very old Samsung with whopping 720p (including burnt in artefacts) and I’m out for replacing this for a while now.

I’m also not out for the greatest and widest since the TV may be part of our living room but that room is not designed around the TV. It’s more a corner thing. It should be a real upgrade for the 720p so “just HD” is out of the question. I kinda settled with the idea of something around 55″ and 4K – so not quite a computer monitor any more, due to it’s size, where I’d have way more choice. And cheap please. I really do not spend much time in front of the TV.

Apparently Sceptre is one of the few selling some non-Smart TVs but that seems to be US only (e.g. Walmart) so not an option for me.

I was already close to giving up when I randomly stumbled over the homeX U55NT1000. I’ve had no idea about this brand before, nor do I have an idea about the quality but they _advertise_ with the fact that this thing is “As smart as I want it to be” by connecting external devices of my choice: https://www.homex.eu/4k-uhd.html

Apparently it also comes with a Triple-Tuner that I don’t care about but it’s nice to have that option I guess. Also no idea about it’s audio connectivity. I’ve my own AV receiver for that anyway 😁

And it comes pretty cheap (roughly 300 EUR according to historical data on the net) ticking off all my boxes:

☑ ~~cheap~~ affordable
☑ 4k (UHD)
☑ ~~dumb~~ non-Smart
☑ HDMI
☑ 55″

So I ordered. I’m already very curious how this will play out and will update this once the TV arrives.