Category: Uncategorized

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.

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I have had my current flip phone since about 2007, 10 years. I got it used from Susan when she upgraded to a smart phone for work (I had helped her pick it out originally). It has been incredibly durable and reliable and has saved me a bunch of money by never having to upgrade the phone. Since that time I have been part of Jeb’s Verizon Wireless family plan and as phones in his house got broken and needed an emergency upgrade, he could use the free upgrade available for my phone to get a free upgrade on another phone on the plan. I had a Palm that I used as a smart phone (without the phone) until 2010 when I got an iPod Touch, which set off some upgrade issues as I had to abandon my favorite Palm apps to migrate to Apple’s iOS apps. For music I had originally bought the 20 GB Archos Jukebox in 2002, which was a great way to listen to music on the train on the way to and from work. In 2003, Susan gave me an iPod and I have had an iPod ever since. At first the iPod was just for music, but when I got the Touch in 2010 that served double duty as a PDA and a source of music. I had used my last Palm to watch TV shows and even movies ripped from DVD’s by loading them to the memory card and the Touch was even better for that. So for a while I had a phone and Palm (and iPod), then I had the phone and iPod Touch, up to this week.

Continue reading “New Phone”

In May my monthly mailing from Disney Movie Club included a gift: a packet of tiny flower seeds commemorating the re-release of Bambi on blu-ray and DVD. I’m not generally much into gardening, but I like free things and the seeds were worthless if I didn’t plant them in the ground. I pulled weeds from one spot in my front garden and planted some seeds there. I also planted some in two planters I had used last year for some petunias.

 

Continue reading “Gloriosa Daisy”

Since I got the new home theater set up, I’ve been struggling with the remote control situation. I have 4 devices: TV, cable box, AV receiver, and UHD Blu-ray player. The remote that came with the cable box was not adequate and did not have the 30-second skip, so I wound up getting a used remote for really cheap on Amazon. It controls 3 devices which is pretty good. And it is a JP1 remote like my old learning remotes were, but they don’t seem to make JP1 remotes anymore and most of mine don’t work, plus I don’t have a serial port on any of my computer to connect to the JP1 port. However, the Comcast remote doesn’t have nearly all the features of the JP1 remotes I had, but if you look hard enough it will still do a lot. But it won’t control 4 devices and it won’t learn commands from another remote.

I bought a neat wifi remote so I could use my old iPod as a remote. This thing has infra red emitters and learning, but it is controlled via the wifi network in the house. You use an app to control it and you can have it learn any signal from an existing remote and then create your own keypad on the screen of the iPod (or other device). So I played around with that, but the problem is you have to connect the wifi remote to power all the time and have a line of sight to the equipment it will control. Also there weren’t a lot of options that I could find on making your own remote. And it was a little clunky, sometimes not finding the emitter on the network.
Continue reading “Harmony 650 Remote”

Yesterday morning FedEx delivered the new surround receiver while I was walking the dogs. Even though I needed to be at a wedding in the early afternoon, I figured I had an hour or so to mess around with the new receiver and maybe get it set up. I took it out of the box first and it looked about the same size as my old Onkyo receiver. Also, I wouldn’t be needing my old Blu-ray player, so that left even a little more room on the shelf below the TV, which can’t hurt in something that gets pretty warm. So first I had to disconnect everything from the Onkyo receiver, which is a chore because everything connected into it including 8 speakers. Then I put the new receiver in place and started getting it hooked up.

One decision was whether to use the receiver as an input selector for the TV or as an optional sound source. With my old setup, it was optional and I could play any source through the TV without turning on the receiver. And my new UHD Blu-ray player has an audio output HDMI port that would let me run video and audio directly to the TV whether I was using the receiver or not, so I decided to try that. I still had to connect the cable box to the receiver and then to the TV since the cable box only has one HDMI output but the receiver would generally be left with cable selected which allows the pass through even if the receiver is off.
Continue reading “Denon AVR-X1300W setup”