Category: Uncategorized

Several years ago now, Mom gave me a beer making kit called Mr. Beer. I wound up making some beer and then helping Mom and Jeb make beer with generally acceptable results. After a not so great batch I realized I would rather have someone else make the beer. I think you can get better results by going full home brew, but there is a fairly large initial investment involved (at least $500) and you make 5 gallons at a time which is probably more beer than I drink in a year. Plus if you screw up 5 gallons of beer, that’s a lot of money to throw away (about $50). Mr. Beer takes a major shortcut by providing the malt extract and hops so that all you have to do is heat it up and add water and yeast, which takes no technical proficiency.

Ultimately I was willing to leave beer making to the experts (though it was fun going on brewery tours where they often ask if anyone has made beer before and I would get to raise my hand) and enjoy the variety and quality that professional brewers provide. But Mr. Beer started sending me emails again recently and then they went and had a Buy One Get One free sale on beer mixes with free shipping on orders over $30. So I bought four cans of beer syrup, and therefore must make 4 2.5 gallon batches of beer.
Continue reading “More Beer”

Over the past few years I have been buying a lot of Blu-ray movies, really entirely too many. Sometimes they come with a digital copy that can be stored on a service like Vudu or Movies Anywhere, and sometimes they do not. Vudu has an interesting service called Disc to Digital that lets you buy a digital copy of a movie you already own on disc, but it only works on maybe a third of the titles I have that didn’t come with a digital copy already (depends a lot on the studio releasing the title with Fox and Sony often working, but most others not). To prove ownership, you can use the Vudu phone app to scan the Blu-ray case UPC barcode while you are at your house. Using the GPS coordinates of the phone and confirming the UPC tells them that you have the disk at your house (this is called Mobile Disc to Digital) instead of scanning them in a store. Another way to do it is to load the disk into your computer and a desktop Vudu app will read it to confirm you have the actual disk (called Disc to Digital Home). That’s great except none of my computers have a Blu-ray drive, only DVD. There are ways to cheat that system, but I don’t really want to cheat the system. Then you pay $2 to get a digital copy, which is a great deal since most digital movies cost $10-20 to buy and cost more than $2 just to rent. Most of the movies I have gotten for $1 at Dollar Tree have a replacement UPC code stuck very securely over the original UPC code and D2D won’t let you use those barcodes to buy a D2D movie (sometimes Dollar Tree will put the sticker on the clear plastic cover instead of the paper insert with the artwork and UPC code, so you can still scan the original code). I have tried peeling the sticker off, but this generally does not go well and there is still no guarantee the movie will be eligible for D2D. I wrote about a lot of this earlier, mostly in the replies to my post about Digital HD. Continue reading “Getting Paid to Watch Movies”

Many years ago I tried installing a MyBB bulletin board for an employee organization, then I did another as a community bulletin board that never really took off. I was looking into having a family bulletin board just to exchange information about the upcoming cruise and tried a Google Group, but the interface on that was surprisingly clunky. There are also bulletin board services you can use to easily set up a bulletin board, but I don’t know if they put ads all over, so I decided to do a phpBB installation, which is the most popular free bulletin board software.

My web host is HostGator and they have a “one-click” installer for a number of common web packages, including phpBB, so I did that. It wasn’t really one click, but it was pretty easy. I set up a subdomain first so that I would have a place to put it, then ran the installation and it emailed me the admin password. The only problem was it installed an older version (3.0.12) of the software and for some reason the home page didn’t work right away, but I think that’s because I didn’t wait for the email. So one of the first things to do was update the software to 3.2.5, which was probably just as hard or harder than installing it by myself without one-click. Whatever, at least HostGator was able to set up the database for me. It was a good exercise to see how updating the software works and it really isn’t that bad, though it’s not as easy as WordPress where you just push a button. Easier than updating my wikis.
Continue reading “phpBB Installation”

I have been using Tablo as a DVR for local broadcasts combined with Amazon Fire Sticks to run that app on my TVs for a year now. And I just renewed the Tablo program guide fee ($5/month) for another year and renewed my internet for another year ($30/month). The cord cutting has gone pretty well and I don’t really miss cable since I still have plenty to watch on TV between broadcast, Netflix and other streaming services, and my Blu-ray collection.

But one thing that has kind of bothered me with my setup on my main TV is the Fire Stick is only HD, not 4K. It doesn’t matter that much since broadcast and therefore Tablo is only HD anyway and I still get 4K Netflix via the TV’s own app plus a few of my Blu-rays are 4K via the 4K Blu-ray player (though only a handful since 4K Blu-rays are much more expensive than the discounted Blu-rays I usually buy). There are also online services like Vudu, Movies Anywhere, Amazon, and Google Play where I have a few additional movies, some of which are 4K. The Vudu app on my 4K TV and my 4K Blu-ray player are only HD, but the Roku will actually play the handful of 4K titles I have on Vudu in 4K (if the wifi signal is good enough anyway).
Continue reading “Roku”

My introductory year of AT&T U-verse fiber internet at $40 was over. The price would have gone up to $50 per month for 50 Mbps service, but I called them to see if they would keep my rate at $40. They said they don’t do any service for less than $50, but if I upgraded to 100 Mbps service I could get that for $50 for a year. I knew Comcast had plans for $40, so I said no thanks, please cancel my account when it expires. But they said I could only cancel at the end of a billing cycle which was April 8 (originally got service March 12, 2018) so I would need to pay them nearly a month at the new higher rate to avoid a cancellation fee. That really made me mad. There is no way in the world they can’t make plenty of money by leaving that wire hooked up to my house and having me pay them $40 every month, but whatever.

Since now I had nearly one extra month of service, I didn’t need to sign up with Comcast yet, but as it got within 10 days or so, I started shopping deals and found Comcast Xfinity for $30 per month for 25 Mbps service, which is the minimum for streaming 4K content (they also had 60 Mbps for $40). I think it may be better to start at the lower speed not only to save $10, but in a year it might allow me to get an upgrade for another year at $40. They don’t allow discounted downgrades. I already had a Comcast compatible cable modem from the last time I was with them, so I didn’t have to pay a fee for that and I think I had to agree to automatic payments and electronic billing (which I would do anyway). Since it was still over a week off, I was able to pick a weekend appointment for installation, so I wouldn’t have to miss work and use vacation time.

Continue reading “To Xfinity and Beyond”