New Stuff | Hour 3

want to hear that. Now we're gonna switch from the very very serious implications industrial planetary implications of Superwood to something that's just fun and pleasant but no less technologically.

work everywhere as annuals. Annuals meaning you know, they have their growth season and then a good frost and a heavy winter is going to take them out, and so you replant them every year as an annual for spring and summer and into you know, early fall in almost every region everywhere here in southern California. A petunia, it could really be considered kind of what would we say,

a gentle a gentle perennial. In other words, if you live in an area where you don't get any frosts that hit petunias, will you know, hold on year round and they can really be a perennial that just stay there and keep on growing and keep on being a beautiful flower. There are great groundcover kind of colorful flower. They come in all different kinds of colors. They spread slowly,

but spread nonetheless. They only get about ten to twelve inches tall, generally speaking, but they spread very thickly and very beautifully. Now, all right, it's all well and good, and if you put a landscape light on them at night you can enjoy them with the rest of your landscape in the evening. Unless unless you have gone to light dot bio and ordered yourself a glow in the

dark petunia. Yeah bio. Luminescent petunias, Uh, they are called the firefly petunia, appropriately so because these petunias have been genetically engineered to glow in the dark, using the same essential bioluminescent molecule that fireflies use to glow in the dark. These petunias don't flash on and off. They don't flicker on and off. They just glow.

just got to check it out, all right. Light dot Bio is the website, and go check out the Firefly Petunia. It's getting near the end of their stocking season, by the way, so you can purchase it directly from them. And I think they're running some sales right now. Not that that means that they're cheap, but it's just one of those things you gotta check out new stuff in

the area of landscape beauty for your home. How about imagine the day when you know all of our homes have got the kinds of plants growing in them that are not only drought tolerant and that work well but beautifully, but also kind of like you know from James Cameron's avatar right Pandora, where the whole forest lights up at night because it is simultaneously beautiful in the daytime in bioluminescent plant life at night. Well, this is one step

in that direction, the Firefly Petunia. Find it at light dot Bio. Okay, I got more for you. Let's talk about cutting edge televisions. You know that's always an interesting subject. Is there such a thing anymore? Or have we just gone all the way. Now, there's a couple of interesting developments in TV technology that you need to hear about. We'll talk about it right after.

of stuff is coming. One of the biggest problems with living in the digital media world that we all live in it from a designer perspective, okay, is what we do with the big black mirror, that giant black mirror that's so huge and so beautiful and so fun to watch. But when we're not watching it, is that even a thing? Yes, it is, when we're not watching it. What do we do with that when it's just taking it, when it's dominating a right, we find a way to hide it.

We find a way to cover it up. Sometimes we turn to like the Samsung the Frame, which is a TV that mimics during the daytime, when it's not being watched, mimics a beautiful piece of artwork hanging on the wall. That's a totally effective way to do it. Or perhaps now we will have yet another option from LG which is a transparent TV. It's a transparent TV that stands on its own structure in a room, is completely viewable,

high depth, you know whatever. K I think it's four K at a considerably large size when it's being viewed day or night. But when you turn the thing off, it becomes a transparent piece of glass. It also has some really funky and cool video elements that can be added, and artifacts during the day that can be added that just kind of show up in the glass that you know as plants or this or that, some cool stuff. But it is, yes, you heard it, it's transparent, Okay.

So when it's off, it's a pane of glass set handsomely in kind of a contemporary you know book what looks like a bookshelf frame, free standing in the middle of a room, wireless to all of its speaker components. And yeah, and it has a limited application and a very very big price tag right now, Okay, limited application and big price tag.

share with you. Yep, even in the flat screen television market, even in a day and age when we are making television screens massive in size, wall size and proportions at times super bright, super super high death and you know, one inch thick or less these days, even in this world, there is room for it to go further. And uh, this gets like, you know, starts to go into like minority report area where the TV when it's not on is just a clear pane of glass that you can

see right through in the room. Yeah, it is weird and uh, and yet it's true. And so they've worked out the cabling and the and all the power supple to it in such a way that it's a beautiful thing. I got a contemporary application right now, But it's a beautiful thing, all right. One more along those lines is you know I talked about everything being super high deaf.

Here's a problem with super high deaf. Number one, most of you are using super high deaf the wrong way, which we found out with our friends when we were traveling to Santa Fe. We sat down and talked to them about why the movie that they were watching looked weird to them. Okay, so number one, most of you are using super high deaf in the wrong way. I'm going to tell you and solve that problem for you

when we come back. And secondly, one of the problems with super high deaf televisions are watching anything old on them, old movies, and by old, I mean you know anything that existed before the High Death four K eight. Hey world, Okay, they look weird.

welcome home. We are talking new stuff today on the program, and we've talked about everything from super wood that could radically change manufacturing, home building, home living home structures into the future, to glow in the Dark petunias, which could just it's going to change my garden apparently because Tina just announced to me that she boughts some off of the light Dot Bio website, so I guess that's the

thing that's happening soon. And also I talked to you about transparent televisions just before the break, and I still got some TV news for you. The thing, the side effect, the unexpected side effect, as everybody talks about, you know, higher and higher and higher resolution television sets, which, by the way, can I just say I get it? You know, we go from from four K to eight K. Now we're moving into eight K televisions. Uh, you know, it's

all well and good. It's all well and good. Uh. And and if you're just and I guess if you're a if you're a video nerd or a visual nerd, then you know you long for the day where there's sixteen K and thirty two K and sixty four k, uh and so on. Actually, several years ago, Apple introduced what they call the retina display, which I believe is five K. I could be wrong about that five K the retina. We got to find out what the retina

display is. But the point is this an Apple Retina display, which is somewhere in the lower ks, the lower thousands of resolution is actually and they were absolutely one hundred percent accurate about this indetectable pixelation with the human eye. So the point is, at some point you reach the threshold of what a human eye or an audio visual terms also audio terms of what the human ear can actually distinguish, and you know you're there. You're there at

the threshold. So if you keep doubling the resolution and tripling the audio quality, it all goes.

as yours does. I'm just saying because we've all gone beyond the threshold, and what's beyond the threshold of our visual acuity is simply that it's simply beyond the threshold. Okay, So you can't tell the difference between the two. So here's the thing, though, there are things in life that are that are sub four K and a K definitely technologies.

For instance, when most directors are setting up their motion pictures and their makeup effects and their special effects and their environmental effects and so on and so forth, they're thinking in terms of motion picture screen quality. They have a certain resolution quality that they're looking for, and a four K, even now a four K TV can go

way beyond that. That's why you watch certain films and maybe it's your thing to watch a film and see it differently than the way you would see it in the theater, But that's not my thing, you know, because as an artist, I want to see the art the way the artists intended. Okay, So we were with some friends this week and we were like, hey, do you guys keep your TV? Because the TV we were looking at was all set up weird at its highest possible resolution.

Do you guys keep your TV always cranked up? The jutter, the jutter on your TV always cranked up to the maximum. And they're like, we have no idea what you're talking about. We have a four K TV, so that's just the way things look. And I'm like, actually not so. In your video visual settings on your television, your display settings, right the video settings on your TV, there is a place where you can go to and it's usually under expert controls. Okay, don't let that cause you any fear.

Go to expert controls and you will find a setting for jutter, jutter, jutter. And if you have been sitting there watching TV and watching movies looking like they were filmed, like with video cameras for soap operas and not enjoying that experience, then you need to get into your jutter settings. Set it to manual on set it the jutter ju t ter down to zero. Okay, it does not change

the resolution of your TV. You haven't just reduced four K. You're still seeing everything in four K. What the jutter is, it's kind of a It's a setting that where the sampling rate on the television is such that it removes blur motion blur, and that's an unnatural thing because we see motion blur ourselves. And it also affects the way that everything is receiving light refraction off of the screen.

Suddenly a four K television with the jutter turned down to zippo or one, maybe suddenly the film the production looks the way that Hollywood intended it to look. Okay, and knowing that it's there now means you can change it whenever you want. So, if you're watching a nature documentary, crank that baby up, because the bald eagles are not wearing make and you will not be able to see

them look weird. But if you take your average movie star on screen and crank the jutter way up, you will actually see the mistakes that the makeup artists have made you will and you don't want to, so turn it down.

controls and you go to jutter jutter. Okay, there you go. Now in those in the spirit of that, there's always a problem with four K and higher resolutions. And you're watching something that was made in the eighties or the seventies or the sixties, or a classic film like Casablanca or something like that, you're watching these old lower resolution or you're watching like video from your camcorder from when you were a kid, or when your kids were.

exactly what. It's a family sitting there and mom and daughter look very similar, and you swear you're watching the daughter, the young daughter at her high school play or whatever, and you realize what you're watching is mom's video from when she was in elementary school during her play, an awful, low quality, degraded video that looks like they filmed it on their digital camera.

front of the line. And so that is my promise to you. Because I always want to hear everybody who really really wants to get on the air. We always find to make a way to make it happen because we like you, we really do. And that's more than just a mister Rogers sentiment around here, It's just the truth. You are the reason we are here. And let me remind you to follow us on social media Instagram, Facebook,

TikTok x, whatever all those things are these days. Teen is in charge of all that, by the way, and so home with Dean, same handle for them all. And don't forget that this very broadcast, this live broadcast, is also the house Whisper podcast. It's everywhere your favorite podcast are found, of course on the free iHeartRadio app, and also everywhere else Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever your favorite podcasts are, and you can subscribe so that every episode just boom

shows up ready for you to go. It's one hundred percent totally free. You can listen to it anytime, anywhere, as often as you want on demand. It is a home improvement reference library from you or from you from you for you, and also if your home is in

need of some personal house Whisper attention, don't forget. You can book an in home design consult with me and the t yes us in your house, staring at the problem together, giving you hopefully always I think, the game changing advice that will make all the difference of turning your ordinary house into an extraordinary home. All you have to do is go to house whisperer dot design. House Whisper dot design can check out the website and also you can on the design console request get all the

information you need there. All right, a couple of questions left over here from our stuff today, our new stuff list, specifically the TV tech stuff. Just to reiterate that AI upscaling, the new AI upscaling televisions. They use artificial intelligence to enhance the resolution of lower resolution content, making it appear

more detailed and sharper on the TV screen. So instead of just simply enlarging pixels, it analyzes the image, adds new details where needed, and creates a higher resolution image. And it's really a remarkable thing, not absolute perfection, but

such an improvement, such an improvement. And again to underscore you've got control of whether or not your television is giving you images the way that the producers of the content intended, which, in my opinion, is always the best way to see a piece of art, to see a piece of art the way the artist intended, as opposed to looking at it in in extreme conditions that are beyond And by controlling this, you are not reducing the four K or the eight K or the whatever K

of your resolution. You're not. You know a lot of people say, well, there's no need to do that, because then I might as well have just bought a you know, a seven eighty pixel television. That's not the case. That's not the case at all. The resolution of the TV has nothing to do with the jutter effect that I want you to get control over. So you go into

your control settings of your actual TV screen. You go to video and you will find the jutter controls that usually under expert controls, and there you can reduce it down. All right, one last thing I'm gonna throw at you, very very quickly. It's just it's interesting to UH to look at here, and that is UH one or more thing of How about an AI based smart health analysis toilet seat.

looking at the toilet bowl. But they have found ways of analyzing changes in stool and urine and that may indicate various health conditions, potentially aiding an early diagnosis, monitoring of gastro and testinal issues and other health problem I mean, yeah, I just thought i'd share with you at the end, because you know, it's a thing. Go take take a look at a toilet seat that you can add to

your existing toilet. That tells you way more than you want to know about what's coming out of that end of you the truelu dot com t r U E l o o dot com and the the Inventor is there and he has quite an interesting little video and a self confession about himself too. That's always that's always worth five minutes a fun All right.

here we go. Every time I gaze at something very big or very old or both, like the night sky, or here in southern California, the Pacific Ocean, or the Grand Canyon, which we were at a few weeks ago, or ancient cliff dwellings in Bandali, or New Mexico, which we had the privilege of seeing just a few days ago, or a grove of giant sequoias, or the countless peaks of the Eastern Sierras where I spent much of my childhood, or sometimes just an oak tree that may be growing

just down the street. If I gaze at something very big or very old, if I look long enough, long enough to measure my physical stature against it, or the length of my life against such a thing, it makes me feel very small, very small. It makes my whole life and existence feel small. It's at first a very uncomfortable and disruptive feeling, like I'm facing a truth that I don't normally see about myself. That I am, in truth, insignificant, unwanted,

or unnecessary. That's what it feels like at first. But then that changes a little bit. I never stop feeling small or insignificant, or at times unnecessary, but I do stop feeling unwanted. It's not that such great things are longing for me to be there with them, but I do realize they don't particularly have me in mind that I'm there, or that they mind at all that I'm there. Such things hold no bias against me, and I am welcome to be there and to be a participant, however

puny my role of whatever is happening there. That works out to be the case. So, in a word, it's humbling. It's not discouraging or depressing, just humbling, and over time I've grown to deeply appreciate that feeling what that does for me. I think of such experiences as a small

dose of what's known as the overview effect. The overview effect, if you've never heard of it, is what happens to astronauts who have had the awesome and terrifying privilege to be far enough away from home to see our entire planet as the fragile blue world, with its paper thin atmosphere under which all of human existence has ever taken place, every life, every death, every human thought and feeling, every everything floating on a tiny round wrath in the infinite

blackness of space. That has an effect on you seeing such things. Changes when entire cities are just specs of light, When you see that the world is so small, when you realize the lines between countries don't actually really exist, When you realize at that moment that there is no us and them, there is just we, and that we are all in this together. That is why the vast majority of those who have seen such things come back

preaching the same message. Lift up your eyes from your small life, see the world for what it is, See your life for what it is, and let's find a way to be here together. Because the truth is there is no us, there is no them, there is only we. But I have never been to space. I have no plans to go there. So for me, I make sure I regularly get myself to the things that are very big or very old or both. To see myself in that way. It's not hard to do, no matter where

you live. They're all around it. So why would I want to make my life seem so small? Because it's true, that's why. And it's humbling, and that's good, that's very very good. And you know what also gets smaller my problem. It's always a beneficial side effect of the humility, the humility of experiencing awe and wonder in my life. So

just a suggestion, that's all. It's not the worst thing to get a change in perspective and experience a little of your own overview effect the kind of thing that makes you make the most of what you have, what little we really have, And it's the kind of thing that gets you busy building yourself a beautiful So I'll leave you with that today. I hope you have a fantastic afternoon and enjoy the day, take it for all

that it is. Don't be afraid of feeling small, because you are, and make the most of the life is in your hands. And we'll see you right back here next weekend. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.