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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”

Stone Mountain has two smaller siblings, Panola Mountain and Arabia Mountain, all granite outcroppings called monadnocks. I’ve been to Panola a few times, including my most recent trip last year. To get to hike on the mountain itself, you must have a guide. While Panola is nowhere near as large or high as Stone Mountain, the flatter dome and lower traffic mean it is more natural with more solution pits growing blankets of small red flowers called diamorpha. Arabia Mountain, which I visited a few years ago, is smaller still with very little elevation, but less protected than Panola. However the area around Arabia Mountain has grown into an interesting collection of parks with paved bike trails running through it built by PATH. When I got the day off for Veterans Day this year, it was fairly warm, so I thought I would take Bella for a hike. Sweetwater and the Chattahoochee areas are pretty far away, so I thought we could go out to Arabia which also has miles of foot trails. We went to the Davidson Arabia Mountain Nature Center. There were a few cars parked there and we saw a few people on the trail. Part of the trail is over exposed granite where they used to quarry granite (hard to tell; there aren’t giant quarry pits like you would expect), and part was along a bike path, and part on a path along a creek and lake. It made for an interesting 3-mile hike and Bella enjoyed getting to stand in the creek. One offshoot trail was to a gravesite of some former residents of the area.

Yesterday was another decent day, so we drove out to a different spot, the Evans Mill Trailhead, and did a little bit longer hike from there, mostly through the woods, but some along the bike trail, and some through an old farm that I guess is abandoned though there is definitely stuff going on. Even though it was a Saturday and I was expecting it to be more crowded than the trip the previous Friday, we saw no one else on any of the trails until the very end as I was leaving and some people came out with their dogs. We also saw a deer cross the bike trail (Bella really like that but it was pretty far away) and I realized the bike trail is better for spotting wildlife in some ways because you can see a long way up and down the straight and cleared path and also you make a lot less noise walking than in the leaves on the footpaths.

Now that I have an Android phone taking the place of my iPod, I wanted to move all of my songs over to it. My CD’s are all ripped to MP3 already, so those came over pretty easily and an MP3 app called Phonograph seemed to handle them pretty well except for some of the double albums for which I needed to edit the tags for the disk number to play songs in the right order instead of playing Track 1 and the other Track 1. Not all players read the Disk tag, but Phonograph seems to. I was able to import a lot of the cover art either through Phonograph or another app that brought in the ones Phonograph didn’t catch.

I also have a lot of singles that I’ve downloaded. Some came from iTunes early on and then I switched to Amazon as much as possible since they let you download MP3’s instead of Apple’s proprietary protected format (.m4p). Eventually Apple switched to a new format (.m4a) which was maybe a little more open. I found out that with any of the m4a files I could convert them to mp3 in iTunes. So that was easy for a few songs I had bought lately including a bunch of songs by Postmodern Jukebox. When I first started buying iTunes, I would put them into a playlist and burn them to CD. I had 8 or so disks of songs. Once the songs were on CD, I could rip them to mp3 format. So most of the early songs I got from iTunes I had already ripped to MP3 and had wisely stored those in a folder of converted iTunes songs.
Continue reading “Getting Out of iTunes”

Ever since I had a Palm, I would write stuff down in notes, which Palm called Memos. Memos were very simple, but you could categorize a memo and filter the list of memos by category. No formatting, just a title and the content and a category. I think they were actual txt files, but maybe it was a database. Every time you would sync the Palm, the notes were backed up on your computer. In Palm Desktop you could edit a note and sync it back to the Palm. I ended up with something like 500 notes.

Then the Palms went away and I got an iPod Touch. After much searching (here, here, and here), I found NoteMaster. You couldn’t sync with iTunes because iTunes doesn’t work that way, but notes could sync with Google Drive or DropBox. Also you could password protect a category, so I had a secure category for things like web passwords. Notemaster allowed some very basic formatting which made for nicer looking notes.

Now I am on Android and there is no Notemaster app. So I’m back to looking at dozens of apps and trying to figure out which one can do the pretty basic things I want. It is complicated because some people want To Do lists, some want to scribble a note with their finger, some want to make audio notes, or picture notes. Some people want sticky notes for their desktop. I don’t want any of that.

Continue reading “Notes for Android”

I decided to upgrade my flip phone to a smart phone after many years and went looking for a plan that was cheap, which was the reason I never got a smart phone. There were a few, including some plans for just phone calls and texts, but for a little more I could get a data plan as well. I wound up with a service called Mint SIM. You pay for 3, 6, or 12 months in advance, so it is a prepaid plan, but calls and texts are unlimited and you get 2 GB of data (later bumped to 3 GB). The price can be as low as $15 per month. For $20 a month you can get a plan with 5 GB of data. 2 GB may be tough to meet, but 5 GB should be more than enough. So we’ll see how it goes and I can upgrade at any time.

Once you sign up, they mail you a SIM card that you put in your phone. They can give you a new phone number or you can port your old number over. Their service runs on the T Mobile network which is actually pretty good in Atlanta, but doesn’t have as much rural coverage as Verizon.

After 3 years of service (as of 2020) I highly recommend Mint Mobile. If you want to sign up, go to this referral link.

Continue reading “Mint Mobile”