Category: Uncategorized

Back when Blockbuster was still around, you would rent a movie for 2 or 3 days for about $4. Then Redbox came along and you could get a movie for $1 per night. That was great. Once Blu-rays came out they charged $2 for those, but still pretty cheap and Blu-rays look so much better on a big TV. Still, I never used Redbox that much, but I think it’s a great service and almost always cheaper than renting a movie online, but you do have to drive twice, once to pick it up and once to drop it off.

On Blu-ray forum, people talked about being able to buy Blu-ray disks from Redbox, but I never paid much attention because I wouldn’t want one of their beat up disks anyway. Then I noticed someone post about buying codes for digital movies from Redbox. Sometimes when you buy a movie, it will include a code so you can have a digital copy from a service like iTunes, Vudu, or Movies Anywhere. You’re not supposed to sell the digital code, but people sell them all the time online, usually for $3 to $8. For the most part I try to buy Blu-ray movies around $5 to $6 that include a digital copy. I certainly don’t mind paying an extra dollar for a digital copy. Then Vudu has a service where you can buy digital copies of Blu-rays you own already for $2, but it only worked on about half of the Blu-rays I have that didn’t come with a digital copy. It is hard to know whether Vudu’s service will work on a disk before you buy it even though there are lists out there of movies and UPC’s that should be eligible.
Continue reading “Redbox Purchases”

When I write movie reviews, I generally assume people haven’t seen the movie yet and try to give away as little as possible of the plot. Way too many reviews give away major plot elements or make obvious hints about the movie (“the tragic ending”). Even if something is in the previews, I feel like the movie is better without knowing much going in. So I don’t include spoilers (well, sometimes with older movies because I feel like people already know), but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to discuss some aspect of a movie that ruined it for me. On the Blu-ray forum, they make it easy by letting you include a [spoiler] tag containing anything you want to hide behind a link that says “spoiler”. Some sites, will black out the spoiler text, which is kind of neat, but I like having the word there. I figured I could add a spoiler feature to my movie reviews, which are all in a Microsoft Access database that generates HTML for the whole site (should all be php, but that’s a big project). I could do the tags myself in the review, which I do for links, italics, and paragraphs, but it would be better to have a separate field for the spoiler that could be inserted into the review if there was a spoiler. I didn’t know how to actually make a spoiler appear and disappear and I wasn’t getting far on that, but adding a field to Access is easy. So I did that. Then I added that field to my form where I write the reviews. Continue reading “Spoilers”

I have gone on several hikes with Bella around Arabia Mountain. She loves the adventure and I liked getting some exercise and seeing new places around Atlanta. Yesterday was supposed to be reasonably warm whereas it would be in the 30’s most of the rest of the week, so I decided that was the best day for a hike. I have done two good 3 mile hikes at Arabia twice each, so I wanted to try something new. I looked up the trails at Sope Creek in Cobb County and found a good loop about 3 miles long, which seems like a good length for both of us.

Continue reading “Sope Creek”

Over Black Friday I was thinking about getting a TV for my back room. I don’t really watch TV there, but I have the elliptical back there and I haven’t been doing it for a while. One reason may be that I used to have my TV (an old 27″ tube TV) hooked up to my Dish DVR and I could watch recorded shows while I was exercising to keep my mind off of the misery of running in place. When I switched to Xfinity, I didn’t get a 2-TV installation, partly because the TV was so old already. I figured I could hook up a DVD player and play shows that I have bought seasons of over the years: Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Get Smart, and Everybody Loves Raymond. It would take me a long time to work through those and the nice thing is that each show, since it doesn’t have commercials, is only about 22 minutes, about the same length as my workout. The DVD kind of turned out to be a pain because it takes a while for it to boot and to get the show going. Not terrible, it just wasn’t that great.

Then I got the iPad and I thought maybe I could watch stuff on it, but that wasn’t that great either and there was no secure place to put it to keep it from falling off. And the sound from the iPad isn’t great over the noise of the elliptical. I have a bluetooth thing and hooked it up to a speaker so the iPad could broadcast to the speaker, but that was back to being a pain.

So then I thought I could get a new TV and watch stuff from my Vudu account or the recordings of all of my DVD’s from the PC. Really I only have movies on Vudu and I am not sure why I thought it would be easy for my TV to play files on my computer. My HiSense UHD TV is a smart TV and I don’t think it can do that, though I have a home theater receiver that might be able to. The smart TV only has apps and nobody makes money giving you an app to get free content from your own hard drive. Even with a wifi network and a shared hard drive on that network, it isn’t that easy.
Continue reading “Chromecast”

Last year after Thanksgiving, I did some door busting Black Friday shopping. Black Friday now seems to be mostly Thursday evening. I have been buying more Blu-rays lately and I seem to buy them faster than I can watch them. So I already had about 15 Blu-rays that I have bought and not watched yet. But I have gotten a lot of entertainment out of all of it too. Last year I bought the entire Sopranos box set and I have been watching episodes all year on my commute and just got to season 4 (out of 6 seasons, so about halfway). Also in the last year I upgraded my TV, Blu-ray player, and sound system to play Ultra High Definition disks and bought my first two of those a month or so ago (and watched both of them!).

Some of the stores release their Black Friday ads weeks in advance including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Best Buy had the best ad for Blu-ray and UHD disks including a great deal on the Wonder Woman UHD for only $10. I had seen the movie and liked it, but may not have bought it except the UHD’s I have bought so far are a little bit older and don’t benefit as much from UHD since they started out on film. Newer movies are more likely to have actually been recorded and edited in 4K (4K is for theaters while UHD is for home use, but they are basically the same thing).
Continue reading “Back in Black Friday”