I got to be even older this week, and my mother very kindly sent me some money. For once I have not just put it into the “books & clothes” fund, I’ve gone out and bought something relatively pricey: a Blu-ray player.

Well, relatively pricey compared to a new book anyway. And PC World did have it almost half price, which helped a lot.

Being able to play Blu-ray discs is only part of the deal. The model I bought has what they call “DVD Upscaling”, which means you get better quality on our DVDs that you would from a normal DVD player. In addition the box can act as a DLNA server. What’s that mean? Well it means it is now hooked up to my home network. It can see all of my PCs, and it can see the network drives. That means it has access to my entire music collection. Right now it is happily blasting out David Bowie. This may just be my imagination, but the sound seems much better than it did when I was using an old PC as a music server (same speakers, but run through the Blu-ray box and TV rather than a PC).

Right now I need an HDMI switch box to make it easier to swap between the Blu-ray player and satellite TV, and eventually I’d like to run them both through a proper amp and hook up 5.1 speakers, but for now this is good.

And in a couple of months time I shall buy Cloud Atlas on Blu-Ray. In the meantime, I have DVDs I can use to try it out. After all, I haven’t watched Cowboy Bebop in ages.

I suspect that I’m still light years behind many of you when it comes to audio-visual technology, but I’m quite pleased with myself. All I have to do now is avoid becoming a couch potato.