Category: Uncategorized

Last year around September, Universal Studios released several box sets of 10 movies by some of their production companies. There were 10 movies by Illumination who make animated movies like Despicable Me, The Grinch, Secret Life of Pets, and Sing. I already had a lot of those. Another 10-pack of animated movies was by Dreamworks, including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon. I had even more of these. They also released a horror 10-pack by Blumhouse, which specializes in making cheap horror movies. I actually had 2 of these, having bought Get Out and being given a digital copy of Split, but for the most part wouldn’t touch those (not a fan of horror and there are some bad movies, more on that later). The box set that really caught my eye was from Focus Features with artier movies that get a lot of acclaim and Oscar nominations. Somehow I only had two of these as well, Burn After Reading, which I had gotten For $1 at Dollar Tree and paid $2 for a digital copy, and Moonrise Kingdom for which I paid a lot for the Criterion edition and no digital copy. Each box set was now on sale for $39.99 on blu-ray plus a digital copy. $4 per movie is pretty good if there are things you want and you don’t already have many of them. The Focus set, for instance had Brokeback Mountain, which has a lot of acclaim, but I never wanted to see and I didn’t buy it when it was $2 at Fry’s (and maybe $1 at Dollar Tree even, though it seems like that would be hard to pass up). So I tried to do the math and the purchase was kind of marginal, but definitely some good titles plus digital copies. So I ordered it from Amazon and it came yesterday. It isn’t just 10 stand alone blu-ray movies, but an extra thick blu-ray case with 10 discs inside. There was also a sheet of paper with one code you could redeem for all ten movies. When I redeemed it, instead of getting all these great movies, I suddenly had a bunch of movies I didn’t want, the Blumhouse titles! Reading the reviews of the Blumhouse box set, a lot of people said they had gotten the wrong digital movies, so there must have been some mix-up at the factory. I wrote to Universal and hopefully they will send me a new code for the Focus titles. If I had looked closer, the piece of paper actually said Blumhouse of Horrors 10-movie collection on it.
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The Fall stayed warm for quite a while, so it wasn’t until December that the house was reliably staying below 70 degrees, which is where I want it to be for making beer. I found some cheap dried malt extract on Amazon that I could add to my two remaining batches of Mr. Beer Classic American Lite that I had bought in May 2019 (expires in September this year), but after I ordered Amazon cancelled the order saying it was a pricing error. I didn’t want to pay a lot for extra malt and hops since it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. But I didn’t want weak beer either, which Mr. Beer usually is by itself. With limited time left until warmer weather, I thought maybe I could just use both cans in one batch, which is sometimes done by people to get a stronger, more flavorful beer. Then I decided that since these came with booster (sugar that adds alcohol, but not taste) I would just make a regular batch. By doing only 2 weeks of fermenting instead of 3 or 4, I should be able to get the second batch in. I think the main reason to ferment in the barrel is to let all the carbon dioxide escape and let the trub settle out. But the activity drops off so quickly, that I don’t think those are big problems after two weeks. The beer will continue to ferment and age in the bottle for another couple of weeks. So I just made a regular batch and it seemed to go pretty smoothly, but this morning there wasn’t much activity. I put the yeast packet in the refrigerator for the last 18 months, but it is pretty old. Maybe it will just take a little while to get going.

I used iTunes Match to create high quality compressed versions of my newly ripped lossless files for all of my CDs, but I also have a bunch of individual songs I have downloaded or bought over the years, mostly from iTunes, but some from Amazon and some from other sources. iTunes likes to store those songs by Artist and Album, but I like to stick all my singles together with the artist tagged as “Single,” the Album left blank, and the song titles something like “Eagles – Desperado”, then all my singles are in one folder and one place when browsing, without the list of artists being cluttered by all of the different singles artists in addition to the artists whose CDs I own, not to mention all of the albums that show in the list with only one song on them. Instead all the listed albums are full. One thing I didn’t realize at first was I had never “authorized” my computer to play and burn my purchased files, which may have prevented some of the m4p files from being ported to m4a automatically (though I think it has more to do with tags and whether Apple can give you an unprotected version of that song).
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When the iTunes music store first opened, the big revolution was you could buy digital music for reasonable prices. If you didn’t want to buy a whole album, you could get the song you wanted for 99 cents (now $1.29 seems like the usual price). I own most of the albums I want on CD, though I would pick stuff up by downloading things from various not entirely legal sources, but with a reasonable legal option I wound up buying hundreds of songs from iTunes. The problem was they were in a secured format that only my copy of iTunes and my Apple devices could play (they have the file extension .m4p). One way to get around that was iTunes would let you burn a CD (not just a data CD, but a real CD that you could play in any CD player) with whatever songs you wanted, so I could put 10-15 songs on a CD and then make unprotected MP3’s from that CD. I had about 12 iTunes CD’s of songs. Amazon got into the game years later and would let you download unsecured MP3 files, which was nice and I started buying songs from them for the most part. But Apple worked it out with the music companies to also allow unprotected downloads, but instead of MP3, Apple had to use a different format, AAC (file extension .m4a), which naturally they said was better, except harder to deal with if you wanted to rewrite the information tags in the song or something. I think they also generally let you convert your m4a files to mp3 files if you wanted from within iTunes. In iTunes you could rip CDs into mp3 or m4a format, but I tended to use my own ripping tools, though those seem to have been disappearing. I ripped all of my CDs to a mp3 data rate (quality) of 160 kbps, compressing the size of a song by 90% compared to the data on the CD (at the time 128 kbps was sort of the default standard and 256 kbps was the maximum, and I didn’t want giant files either, so I picked something in between). I resisted variable bit rate encoding thinking it was more complicated, but that is probably the way to go. Not too long after ripping all of my CD’s, I realized my computer would insert stutter at the end of the song, so I had to re-rip all of my CDs, but it seems like some of those old stuttering songs are still around. And that worked for many, many years, through Archos, iPods, Palms, laptops, and android phones. When I got my Mazda3 with a 6 CD changer that could play mp3s, I filled up 6 CD-R discs with 10 to 15 albums each and could take most of my albums with me. I never changed those CDs and sold the car 12 years later with the CDs still in there.
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Just over a year ago I replaced my Moto G4 with a Moto Z3 Play. Motorola (really Lenovo) makes pretty good budget phones and one of the nice things about them is you can afford to replace them more often and not worry about throwing away a lot of money. Or if you break them, or don’t like the phone, or it breaks on its own, it’s not like you’ve invested a ton of money. I wasn’t crazy about the Z3. It did away with a headphone jack, and I had to use an adapter to connect headphones to the USB-C port. I don’t really use the headphones now that I’m not taking the train into work, but I didn’t like that. It had a protruding camera on the back and because when it is lying down it is bearing on the camera, the glass cover over the camera broke pretty early on. Then it got a line on the screen and I had to return it under warranty. And now lately it won’t charge, or won’t charge easily because the USB-C connector won’t stay in the port. I tried cleaning the port out, but it is still pretty loose. I can get it to charge, but it isn’t reliable, so I looked for new phones and found the Moto G7 Plus for only $120. It is cheap because it was released in 2019 and has been replaced by the G8. I usually shop at bhphoto.com for cheap unlocked phones, but was surprised that Best Buy had the same price on the phone, which let me use $20 in rewards credits and earn $5 in new credits for the purchase. It should arrive today.

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