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Many years ago the guys on Car Talk compared lifetime car ownership costs depending on if you bought a new car every year, every 3 years, or bought used. I think used was cheapest except maybe they had one alternate called “heap” where you bought a 10 year old car and paid a lot in maintenance. I ran numbers of my own which showed you could buy a car and keep it for 10 years and it wasn’t that expensive, plus you get the joy of a new car every 10 years. 12 years ago I bought a Mazda 3 to replace my 10 year old Honda Civic. I was due to replace the Mazda in 2018, but I put unexpectedly low miles on the car, so it was only up to 50,000 or something like that and prices on new Mazda 3’s were a lot higher than when I bought mine ($22,000 instead of $18,000). If I was going to pay a bunch of money, then I had to look at more options. Plus with retirement a couple of years away, a small car might not be the best fit for me if I was going to travel a lot and/or have a second home somewhere.

If I am going to take long trips, then an electric car won’t work for me because at best they can only go a few hundred miles on a charge and the fastest chargers can do 80% full in 30 minutes. But now they are making plug-in hybrids with larger batteries that will let you run the car on battery power for 20-35 miles, which covers 95% of my trips. Essentially I could have an electric vehicle with a gas engine as backup. I found the Kia Niro, a small SUV (really more of a hatchback almost), which got amazing mileage of 50 mpg and had a new plug-in hybrid model available. I have to be careful with miles per gallon because I don’t put that many miles on a car. In fact, I have only spent $5300 on putting gas in the Mazda over 12 years and 56,000 miles. So better mileage would only reduce that number somewhat, not make it go to zero. If a hybrid could get twice the mileage of the Mazda, it might only save me $2650, so if the hybrid cost an extra $3000, I would lose money. Right now I only fill up about once a month in a car that gets 25 mpg. With a plug in hybrid, I would only need to fill up when I go out of town, which isn’t that often, maybe a few times per year.

Continue reading “Car Shopping 2020”

My Dell Dimension 15 is six years old and has been having a lot of trouble. It would become unusably slow and I am not sure why. I had reformatted and started over a few times, but learned never to let it sleep or it might not come back without forcing a restart which would just make things worse. I almost bought a new computer four months ago, but got it working again. Then this week it went back to super slow and I started shopping around. I have been able to find decent laptops for $300-$400. These have regular hard drives 15″ screen and probably an i3 or AMD Ryzen processor. But I found a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 for $430 that had some nice extras like a 512 GB solid state hard drive (most computers with solid state drives are 128 or 256 GB), a backlit keyboard, an i5 processor, and a fingerprint reader to allow logging in with a touch. It also has a higher resolution screen of 1920×1080 pixels versus the usual 1366×768 pixels of budget laptops. One worry was that would mean it just shrinks everything down, which would be hard to read.

I decided to spend the extra money and get it, but when I went to order it from Staples it was marked in-store only and not available at any stores within 100 miles. The next day I checked back again and it was available for shipping, so I went ahead and ordered it.
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Recently I bought a backlit movie poster frame, but it does not have a switch. Rather than having to plug it in and unplug it, I thought it would be good to get a remote switch. Years ago I bought a surge protector with a remote so that I could turn off my surround sound receiver which seemed like it used a lot of power regardless of whether it was on or off. The remote was just a battery powered switch, on or off, but it could be mounted to a wall. I mounted it under my coffee table in front of the TV so it would be invisible, but readily available. It didn’t work out that great (didn’t always make a connection and, mounted upside down it would sometimes fall to the floor when I tried to use it). They still make similar switches and a friend of mine just got one to remotely control a string of lights that plugs into a socket that is hard to reach. I was thinking about getting something like that, but looked for alternatives that didn’t use a special battery (this one uses an A23 battery that looks like a small AAA battery, but on the inside consists of 8 1.5V button cells stacked to give 12 volts) and would be more reliable.

Continue reading “Smart Plugs”

Maybe since Star Wars came out, I always thought it would be neat to have original movie posters, but I never got any. Posters are kind of hard to deal with: You can stick them to a wall like in high school or college, but better if they are framed. At the movie theaters, the posters are backlit which makes them look like they glow or are on a TV or movie screen. Some home theater people get these backlit boxes for movie posters. And Disney Movie Rewards used to let you buy original theatrical posters with DMR points, which a lot of people did, including me. I got Michael a Guardians of the Galaxy poster once and last year on a really good sale, I got a Toy Story 4 poster for only 225 points, worth about $2.25. A few years ago I was about to lose all of my Regal Theater points, so I used them to get a “free” Doctor Strange poster, but then had to pay $8.75 shipping. I saw on the internet that some people would build a backlit frame out of wood, fluorescent bulbs, frosted plexiglass and a picture frame to go on top of it. You could make one for about $100 in parts. Or you could buy one for about $300, which I was not going to do. If I could build my own it wouldn’t be so much like spending $100, but like saving $200. Sometimes you have to spend money to save money.

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In 2016, Disney released two feature length animated movies, Moana and Zootopia. Both were very good and both were nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, which Zootopia won. I gave Zootopia an A and Moana an A-, so I felt like the Academy made the right decision. But there is a lot of debate and as time goes on it seems like Zootopia has maybe started to take a backseat to Moana. Moana had some legitimately very good songs, not least of which was “How Far I’ll Go,” but also “Where You Are” and “You’re Welcome.” The first of that was nominated for an Oscar but lost to a song from La La Land, which was a tough break since most years I think “How Far I’ll Go” would win. Moana also had a great story about a girl (kind of a princess, she is the Chief’s daughter and heir apparent) finding her place and adding a bunch of nice cultural flourishes regarding Pacific islander culture, with some strong messages about family and determination, plus some comedy to keep things light.
Continue reading “Moana vs. Zootopia”