Category: Uncategorized

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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Black Friday has been creeping earlier and earlier. Last year it worked itself to Thursday morning. This year, in an effort to reduce door busting crowds, they have spread things out. I am mostly shopping for blu-ray movies and the two best sources are Walmart and Best Buy, with Amazon usually price matching those two as long as the items are in stock at those stores. This year, Walmart released 3 different Black Friday ads. The first was effective November 4, the second November 11, and the last on the actual Black Friday (closed for Thanksgiving for a change). The only one of those with movie deals was the November 11 ad, but it was for in-store purchases only, which didn’t actually start until November 14, with stores opening at 5:30 AM. Normally they have a lot of cardboard bins of movies (shippers) lined up in the aisles that are unwrapped at door-busting time (Thursday night lately) and quickly picked clean within minutes, certainly within an hour, by the masses. But my trick was to go that morning when the prices were already active and get movies off the shelf instead of the wrapped up shippers and avoid the crowds. Last year I was able to pick up some leftovers that night though. But with the store opening at 5:30 AM, that strategy probably wouldn’t work.
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I’ve always had spotty wifi coverage in the house. I can put the router in the back of the house, in the den that was added on outside of the original brick walls, which makes the signal weaker in the rest of the house, or I can put it in the living room, which is in one corner of the house and the signal doesn’t reach well to everywhere. In March 2019 I got a 802.11ac router that seems to have helped and I moved the router to the living room where it can be connected directly to the TV and DVD player, giving me great coverage if I am in that room, but weaker coverage for the TV in the back of the house and my laptop. One feature of the TP Link AC1750 Archer A7 router is it can support range extenders that create a mesh. There are a few different ways range extenders can work. One way is they create a new wifi network that relays stuff back to original wifi network. But if they are meshed, there is just one wifi network all over. I have pretty low speed internet service at 30 Mbps, but the router can support much higher than that, supposedly up to 1750 Mbps. One problem with a range extender is that if you are downloading 25 Mbps (for streaming a 4k movie) from the extender, it has to get 25 Mbps from the original router and can fill up you bandwidth passing that along. So I have a lot of extra room in the local wifi signal.
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I have been insured by USAA for car and home insurance for decades. When I bought my house 23 years ago my real estate agent asked if I had insurance yet, and I said USAA, and he replied “Well, you can’t do any better than that.” Every now and then I might shop to see if I am doing okay and lately USAA has gone up. Five years ago the monthly premium was $125 and now it is $215, insuring a car that is five years older and a home that is exactly the same. USAA has always issued a yearly dividend, but it is rarely very much ($27 last year). Lately, with Covid, they have been issuing special dividends because people are driving less and getting in few accidents, and therefore USAA isn’t paying out as many claims. I don’t drive that many miles anyway and again, the dividends aren’t much (3 payments totaling $61).
Continue reading “GEICO”