Category: Uncategorized

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.

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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.
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About two years ago I switched my web host to HostGator. HostGator is really cheap initially, so I got a 3-year intro deal that was pretty amazing for essentially unlimited shared web hosting. It was unlimited enough that even Jeb got in on it and we host under the same account now.

It had been over a year since I had last updated the Mediawiki software that runs the Flashlight Wiki and Mediawiki makes it a pain to do an update by having to manually copy files, updates extensions and skins, and maybe update the main configuration file (whereas with WordPress you just push a button in the dashboard). So I was running version 1.30 of Mediawiki and now they had released 1.34. I downloaded 1.34, figured out which extensions I needed that weren’t included in the standard installation, downloaded those, pared down the skins that didn’t seem to be supported anymore and then copied over my images and settings file. Tried it out and it said Mediawiki requires PHP version 7.2.9 and I was running 7.1. PHP is something installed by the webhost, not the end user, so that means HostGator. In my HostGator control panel, I can choose which version of PHP I want to run, but my only choices were the default of 5.6 or 7.0 or 7.1. Their technical support information said you should be able to choose 7.2, but I didn’t see that as a pick.
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