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A few weeks ago Best Buy announced it would stop selling selling DVD’s and Blu-rays in 2024. They, as well as Walmart and Target, have been shrinking their media section for years, so it makes sense those other two may stop selling movies soon as well. I’ve been writing about Black Fridays for years and what movies I picked up, but this might be the last time that happens. Like last year, there aren’t really any ads anymore featuring all of the movies that will be on sale on Black Friday. And without those ads things are chaotic. Like in past years, Black Friday isn’t really one day so much as the whole month of November, though maybe not as spread out as during Covid when they were trying to keep crowds down.

Best Buy started things off with its first Black Friday sale on October 27-29, but only for paying members of Best Buy Plus or Total Tech. For “everyone else” the sale was to start October 30. They did have some good deals for members in that first round with a number of 4k blu-ray movies priced around $9.99. Plus I had saved up $40 worth of Best Buy rewards from points earned on my Best Buy credit card that would lower the price even further. But when the sale for everyone else came along on October 30, the deals were off. A few days later a couple of arty movies came out at only $6.99 on blu-ray (no 4k available) including The Menu, Banshees of Inisherin, and Empire of Light. I didn’t like Banshees, hadn’t seen Menu, and Light didn’t get good reviews, so I used a $5 certificate to get The Menu¹ for $1.99. Those went out of stock fairly quickly, but kept coming back sporadically and Amazon would match the price while they were available.
Continue reading “The Last Black Friday?”

A few years ago I bought a new hose that I could use with my new pressure washer. I don’t want anything expensive, but my old hose lasted a pretty long time and really the only thing wrong with it was the outlet end threads were worn down since I never screw anything onto the end (and I had replaced the gasket at the spigot end a few times, but it still leaks). I got the new hose at Walmart, something in the middle range, and not too long since those always seem to get tangled worse. I didn’t realize it, but the metal fittings on each end were not the usual brass, but aluminum with a coating to make them look like they are brass. I keep that hose hooked up to a spigot on the back patio so I can use it to clean off Buddy Baer’s feet when he get them caked in dirt digging holes (at least once a day).

As I was moving the hose to sweep underneath it the crappy aluminum gave way and tore halfway loose from where it attaches to the spigot. So now I needed either a new hose or a kit where you cut the end off and put a new one on. I found a set of 3 (so I could fix my other hose) at Amazon for $11, but I don’t get free shipping. I found something that looks very similar at eBay. These were both also aluminum. The brass ones tend to be a lot more expensive ($64 for 3 at Home Depot!). Some of the identical looking ones on eBay claimed to be brass and almost certainly were not. I went ahead and ordered a set of 3 from eBay, arriving next week.

I tried unscrewing the old hose, but it was on there pretty tight for some reason. After using pliers, a wrench, a pipe wrench, vise grip pliers, and finally applying some oil and a heat gun, I was able to get it off with a basin wrench. What had happened was the aluminum had corroded onto the brass of the spigot. These two are pretty distant on the cathode chart and actually make a decent battery. Why anyone would sell something that will definitely corrode to go on brass in a wet environment is beyond me. Maybe new houses have plastic spigots? It is like when they used to use galvanized pipes for water lines instead of copper and they would corrode on the inside until the water couldn’t run through them anymore.

I tried to cancel my order for the aluminum repair kits, but it was too late. I found some at Amazon that seem to be confirmed brass by a few users, but will wait. The other thing I thought I could do is attach a plastic quick release attachment in between the hose and spigot. This would keep the two dissimilar metals out of contact, but the plastic ones aren’t that cheap and will probably last about as long as it takes for aluminum to corrode. Once I get something else to order so I can get free shipping I will just order the brass repair kit from Amazon and in the meantime will use the aluminum ones from eBay.

Star Trek came out in 1966, so not only were special effects pretty primitive, but so was our knowledge of space. It really wasn’t until the Apollo 17 astronauts went to the moon in 1972 and took a picture of Earth from a distance that we started thinking of Earth as a big blue marble. So maybe it is forgivable that Earth from space was usually represented as we would have known it, a globe: no clouds, no atmosphere. We would watch Star Trek in college and I would always say “Clear day on Earth!” when they would orbit Earth, which wasn’t that often I guess.

Yesterday I won a $25 iTunes gift card and I was looking for movies I could get. iTunes usually has the best deals on 4k movies and I did see a few things I might like to get including 4k upgrades of The Princess Bride and Alien. But I took it as a message from Star Fleet when I noticed I could get all three seasons of Star Trek in HD for $24.99.

In 2006, Star Trek, now called Star Trek: The Original Series, was remastered from the original film to show on high definition TV’s. While they were at it, they re-did a lot of the special effects, including most of the shots of the Enterprise and shots of planets. Usually it is a stand alone shot, but sometimes they will show something on screen of the bridge, so they updated that too. They weren’t overly ambitious: the Enterprise still looks like a plastic model, just a little better.

I read about the restoration and was hoping that version was what iTunes was selling, but wasn’t sure at first. Eventually I confirmed that it was the newer version, which made me want to check it out and I went ahead and purchased it. I already had all of the Star Trek movies on iTunes as well as the complete series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I have never watched, but thought I might if I bought it. There are a ton of Star Trek series now, which I have no intention of buying or watching until I can knock out TNG. Looking at early episodes, I wanted to pick out an episode with Earth and found “Miri,” an episode where the crew finds a planet exactly like Earth, but inhabited only by children and zombies. It did show the planet from space, which makes for a good comparison.

I got these screen captures from a website that judges the restoration of every episode, which of course happened a long time ago now, but it was new to me. They always need to be careful how they change original works, but it seems like most people (including me) feel like these changes were done well.

I drink more coffee than ever now, but it is still just two cups a day (up from one day a week). I was doing one cup a day for a while, but decided I would be better off drinking one less can of soda and replacing it with another coffee. I think that has worked okay, but I still drink at least one soda a day. Any coffee person will say that to get the best coffee taste you need to grind your own beans. Back in 2015 I found a cheap (about $15) manual grinder on Amazon, which uses a ceramic burr grinder, preferred over the little electric blade grinders. Eventually it broke, but I was able to get some spare parts for $5 and have been using it ever since. The part that broke was a plastic spacer that holds the axle of the crank. It is not a great design that a tiny plastic part is the weak link. But it was also a bad design because the axle was too loose, allowing the burr to be off center, meaning you would get some finely ground coffee and some coarser coffee. I grind the coffee while the water is heating up in the microwave and it takes about a minute to grind enough beans for one cup of coffee. Sometimes more than a minute. I would adjust for a coarser grind to stay around a minute so the water wouldn’t sit too long.

Continue reading “New Coffee Grinder”

When I bought my Acer Aspire last November, it had two main weaknesses: only 8 GB of RAM and only a 256 GB hard drive. I upgraded the RAM to 12 GB almost right away and I added a 500 GB disk drive to an empty bay inside the computer. When I got a $50 gift certificate from Best Buy for using their credit card, I bought a well regarded Western Digital Black SN770 1 GB SSD drive to install. SSD hard drives used to be the same size as disk drives, 2.5″, and used a SATA interface, but for the last few years at least NVMe hard drives attaching to a PCIe port have been the standard. It would have been nice if they could have given it a snazzy name, but instead you are stuck with all these not particularly descriptive names. They are also called M.2 which is the type of connection (I think). NVMe is nonvolatile memory *express*, but any memory that doesn’t erase, including SD cards, is nonvolatile. These hard drives have no moving parts and are just chips attached to a card about the size of a stick of gum. They are usually 80 mm long, but can be as short as 20 mm.

I watched a great video where a guy spends a couple of minutes upgrading an Acer computer’s memory and hard drive, including cloning the hard drive so you don’t even have to reinstall any new software. If you use a Western Digital hard drive, WD lets you download a nice piece of software called Arconis True Image that clones a drive. To use it you have to have both drives connected to your computer so for a laptop that means you need a USB adapter for the new NVMe drive and one of the drives has to be made by Western Digital for the software to work, which the software can tell by the electronic name of the hard drive I guess. I found an enclosure at Best Buy, made by their brand, Insignia. The guy used one that is $30 at Amazon, but Best Buy’s was $20. The ones on eBay by Orconis were $9-$15. Since I still had credits at Best Buy, I bought theirs. I got the adapter and hard drive today. Best Buy’s stupid adapter masks the true identity of the hard drive and makes it look like it is made by Best Buy. That means the Arconis software from WD won’t work. I thought maybe I could take the old hard drive and put it in the enclosure and boot up from USB and then use Arconis to clone the old drive from USB to the new internal drive, but the computer wouldn’t boot up from the the USB enclosure. There are other ways to clone drives using Linux boot drives, but it all sounded complicated, so I didn’t even bother. By the time I figured all of that out, I could probably just reinstall everything on the new hard drive, which is what I wound up doing. I used a recovery drive I made in December. I probably should have made a new one. When I ran that, it renamed the Western Digital hard drive back to the name of the original Kingston hard drive that came with the computer. But I do at least have a 1 TB hard drive now. And the WD SN770 is faster than the original drive too. I ran some software called Crystal Disk Mark which measured a maximum read speed of 2500 MB/s with the old drive and now 3500 MB/s with the new one. That’s 40% faster! I think it would have been even faster if my computer had a PCIe Gen 4 port instead of Gen 3. The computer boots up in just a few seconds. Both are really fast; I also tested out the disk drive I had put in the empty bay and it only managed 113 MB/s.