Star Trek Remastered

Star Trek came out in 1966, so not only were special effects pretty primitive, but so was our knowledge of space. It really wasn’t until the Apollo 17 astronauts went to the moon in 1972 and took a picture of Earth from a distance that we started thinking of Earth as a big blue marble. So maybe it is forgivable that Earth from space was usually represented as we would have known it, a globe: no clouds, no atmosphere. We would watch Star Trek in college and I would always say “Clear day on Earth!” when they would orbit Earth, which wasn’t that often I guess.

Yesterday I won a $25 iTunes gift card and I was looking for movies I could get. iTunes usually has the best deals on 4k movies and I did see a few things I might like to get including 4k upgrades of The Princess Bride and Alien. But I took it as a message from Star Fleet when I noticed I could get all three seasons of Star Trek in HD for $24.99.

In 2006, Star Trek, now called Star Trek: The Original Series, was remastered from the original film to show on high definition TV’s. While they were at it, they re-did a lot of the special effects, including most of the shots of the Enterprise and shots of planets. Usually it is a stand alone shot, but sometimes they will show something on screen of the bridge, so they updated that too. They weren’t overly ambitious: the Enterprise still looks like a plastic model, just a little better.

I read about the restoration and was hoping that version was what iTunes was selling, but wasn’t sure at first. Eventually I confirmed that it was the newer version, which made me want to check it out and I went ahead and purchased it. I already had all of the Star Trek movies on iTunes as well as the complete series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I have never watched, but thought I might if I bought it. There are a ton of Star Trek series now, which I have no intention of buying or watching until I can knock out TNG. Looking at early episodes, I wanted to pick out an episode with Earth and found “Miri,” an episode where the crew finds a planet exactly like Earth, but inhabited only by children and zombies. It did show the planet from space, which makes for a good comparison.

I got these screen captures from a website that judges the restoration of every episode, which of course happened a long time ago now, but it was new to me. They always need to be careful how they change original works, but it seems like most people (including me) feel like these changes were done well.

New Coffee Grinder

I drink more coffee than ever now, but it is still just two cups a day (up from one day a week). I was doing one cup a day for a while, but decided I would be better off drinking one less can of soda and replacing it with another coffee. I think that has worked okay, but I still drink at least one soda a day. Any coffee person will say that to get the best coffee taste you need to grind your own beans. Back in 2015 I found a cheap (about $15) manual grinder on Amazon, which uses a ceramic burr grinder, preferred over the little electric blade grinders. Eventually it broke, but I was able to get some spare parts for $5 and have been using it ever since. The part that broke was a plastic spacer that holds the axle of the crank. It is not a great design that a tiny plastic part is the weak link. But it was also a bad design because the axle was too loose, allowing the burr to be off center, meaning you would get some finely ground coffee and some coarser coffee. I grind the coffee while the water is heating up in the microwave and it takes about a minute to grind enough beans for one cup of coffee. Sometimes more than a minute. I would adjust for a coarser grind to stay around a minute so the water wouldn’t sit too long.

Grinder profiles: old on the left, new on the right

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Hard Drive Upgrade

When I bought my Acer Aspire last November, it had two main weaknesses: only 8 GB of RAM and only a 256 GB hard drive. I upgraded the RAM to 12 GB almost right away and I added a 500 GB disk drive to an empty bay inside the computer. When I got a $50 gift certificate from Best Buy for using their credit card, I bought a well regarded Western Digital Black SN770 1 GB SSD drive to install. SSD hard drives used to be the same size as disk drives, 2.5″, and used a SATA interface, but for the last few years at least NVMe hard drives attaching to a PCIe port have been the standard. It would have been nice if they could have given it a snazzy name, but instead you are stuck with all these not particularly descriptive names. They are also called M.2 which is the type of connection (I think). NVMe is nonvolatile memory *express*, but any memory that doesn’t erase, including SD cards, is nonvolatile. These hard drives have no moving parts and are just chips attached to a card about the size of a stick of gum. They are usually 80 mm long, but can be as short as 20 mm.

I watched a great video where a guy spends a couple of minutes upgrading an Acer computer’s memory and hard drive, including cloning the hard drive so you don’t even have to reinstall any new software. If you use a Western Digital hard drive, WD lets you download a nice piece of software called Arconis True Image that clones a drive. To use it you have to have both drives connected to your computer so for a laptop that means you need a USB adapter for the new NVMe drive and one of the drives has to be made by Western Digital for the software to work, which the software can tell by the electronic name of the hard drive I guess. I found an enclosure at Best Buy, made by their brand, Insignia. The guy used one that is $30 at Amazon, but Best Buy’s was $20. The ones on eBay by Orconis were $9-$15. Since I still had credits at Best Buy, I bought theirs. I got the adapter and hard drive today. Best Buy’s stupid adapter masks the true identity of the hard drive and makes it look like it is made by Best Buy. That means the Arconis software from WD won’t work. I thought maybe I could take the old hard drive and put it in the enclosure and boot up from USB and then use Arconis to clone the old drive from USB to the new internal drive, but the computer wouldn’t boot up from the the USB enclosure. There are other ways to clone drives using Linux boot drives, but it all sounded complicated, so I didn’t even bother. By the time I figured all of that out, I could probably just reinstall everything on the new hard drive, which is what I wound up doing. I used a recovery drive I made in December. I probably should have made a new one. When I ran that, it renamed the Western Digital hard drive back to the name of the original Kingston hard drive that came with the computer. But I do at least have a 1 TB hard drive now. And the WD SN770 is faster than the original drive too. I ran some software called Crystal Disk Mark which measured a maximum read speed of 2500 MB/s with the old drive and now 3500 MB/s with the new one. That’s 40% faster! I think it would have been even faster if my computer had a PCIe Gen 4 port instead of Gen 3. The computer boots up in just a few seconds. Both are really fast; I also tested out the disk drive I had put in the empty bay and it only managed 113 MB/s.

Results for the original Kingston NVMe drive
WD SN770 Results

Oscars 2023

I am writing up what I thought of the Oscars since that is something I do. To me it was another weak year of movies. A lot of what came out this year had to have been filmed during the Covid pandemic, or before (Maverick), and I think that was a tough challenge. I try to go see any good movies that come to my local AMC, which has a great discount, but I still only managed to see four of the ten Best Picture nominees, and I didn’t even make it all the way through Avatar before walking out. I am happy for Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO), but I only gave it a B+. I liked Maverick more, but it seemed unlikely that would ever win. I don’t know how they could limit it in some years and not others, but 10 nominees was just too many this year. I didn’t see it, but by all accounts, Triangle of Sadness had no business being nominated.

Despite articles predicting all kinds of things, the awards were pretty much by the numbers. The awards earlier in the season by the different guilds are very accurate predictors of Oscars, which is no surprise since it is a lot of the same voters. The producer, director, actor, and writer guilds delivered exactly the same winners as the Oscars would, including the landslide by EEAO. The technical awards may have been more of a tossup, and I was surprised All Quiet on the Western Front did so well.
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Compressing Movies

I have been buying a lot of blu-rays the last few years. Entirely too many actually. But it has been a great time to buy them because streaming is killing the physical media business meaning there are tons of overstocks and great prices. I have bought hundreds of movies from Dollar Tree for $1 each (now $1.25). Big Lots sometimes has great clearance prices on movies (often not) and I have bought a ton from Best Buy, often applying credit card rewards to bring the price down. And of course, I got a lot through the Disney Movie Club, but those average out to be $8-$10 each.

As the collection grew, I bought two bookshelf units that stacked. When those filled up, I made some extra shelves to squeeze in more movies. At some point Jeb gave me his family’s DVD’s. DVD’s are far inferior to blu-rays, but better to have a movie in lower resolution than not at all. With space at a premium, I put those DVD’s (and mine) on the shelf behind the blu-rays, using a 2×6 board running the full width of the shelf to get them up a little higher. One day I was walking the dogs and someone was throwing out a fairly nice bookshelf, so I got that, which helped me for a few more years. I moved all my DVD TV shows into a dresser I wasn’t using. I got a little more space by putting movies on top of the bookcases.


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