Dolby 5.1 sound on Amazon prime video

I recently signed up for Amazon Prime. I no longer subscribe to cable or satellite TV, so I was primarily interested in the Amazon Prime Video service. I have a Sony NSZ-GS7 Google TV box and a Sony SMP-N100 streaming box which can play video from Amazon. Google TV box is what is connected to my main home theater. Sony SMP-N100 is used for casual watching in family room. I use a Marantz SR6007 receiver as pre-processor and THX Ultra certified Denon AVR-4800 as amplifier. I have a 7.1 setup with KEF speakers primarily, except for Polk Audio bipole/dipole for surround back and Klipsch subwoofer. The gist of it is sound quality is as important to me as the video quality.

I fired up Google TV and started playing the movie "Skyfall". I got 1080p picture which is great but the sound was plain stereo! I double checked all cables, connections and settings but no 5.1 sound. I get 5.1 sound from Netflix on the same google TV just fine. I called Amazon and Sony and they both pointed fingers at each other. Since I was getting nowhere, I decided to move the Sony SMP-N100 box to the home theater and simply swapped google TV with this box. I fired up the same movie "Skyfall" again and voila, there was 5.1 sound. Looks like the Amazon app for google TV is picking the wrong audio stream. I called Amazon again and their response was pretty much this is how it is. So the Amazon google TV app has been handicapped in audio department for no good reason. What gives????

My experiment to document vampire loss on Tesa Model S60

I recently went on a vacation for almost two weeks. Since I was going to leave my Model S60 in the garage, I decided to take advantage of this opportunity to document vampire loss while parked in unheated insulated garage. Here is what I did:

1. Charge to 90%.
2. Leave car plugged in and reduce charge limit to 70%. This way car would not do its normal topping off every 48 hours unless battery level drops below 70%.
3. Run a script every 12 hours to get the battery level, rated and ideal miles using REST API. This, of course, did cause the car to wake up twice a day.
4. I have CT sensor on the charging outlet and data from the sensor is recorded continuously, so I would know if car drew any power from the outlet.

Car was parked for 12 days and temperature in the garage was in lower 40s (deg F) the whole time. Data was collected roughly every 12 hours except initially when I was debugging the script and there were couple of times when script timed out before car woke up. Software version on my S60 is 5.8 (1.49.30). I plotted the data (click for interactive graph):

Battery charge level went down from 90% to 71% in 297 hours which translates to 1.5% per day. Range loss is less reliable data since it is subject to other variables besides just the battery charge level. Nevertheless rate of loss for rated range was 4.1 miles/day and for ideal miles was 4.6 miles/day. Over the entire 12 days car did not draw any power from the charging outlet.