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My desktop computer died a year ago and I have been getting by with my 8 year old Vostro notebook set up as a desktop with external keyboard, mouse, and extending the desktop to a second monitor. But the Dell is showing its age, still running Windows Vista, which is no longer supported by the Chrome browser. Even using Firefox, a lot of the security certificates don’t work. And it tends to run slowly at times, though I am using it right now and it is working just fine.

Still, I was having some serious issues today with internet speed, which may not have been the fault of the Vostro, but I started looking at new notebooks. I don’t want a desktop because they use too much electricity and laptops seem just as capable, but you can take them with you if you want. I have a Dell Inspiron 15 that I bought a couple of years ago to be my main laptop and it is pretty good, but has a few little things that are disappointing like the wi-fi cutting in and out and a bad trackpad and mouse buttons. It works fine, so I am not replacing it, but after buying 5 Dell computers over the years, I am looking at other brands too.
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I was researching Disney animated movies and thought it would be good to see how the movies ranked. Disney has released a lot of animated movies, but the lists I was looking at were limited to the canon of Disney Animation Studios, not Pixar, not Disney Toons (mostly straight to video), etc. These are fully animated (unlike Mary Poppins) and released in theaters, though some are compilations of shorts, particularly during the 1940’s when labor was short. The compilations were kind of a low point, as was a period in the 60’s to 80’s, and then another in the 2000’s.

At least in a few of these rankings, the writer actually sat down and watched all 55 movies before making the list, which is an impressive commitment. There are so many of these that I just don’t feel like I need to watch, though I guess if I had a lot of time I wouldn’t mind coming up with a list of my own. But instead I figured I would take an average of a number of lists on the internet to smooth out some of the personal opinions. There are some movies that tend to be polarizing. One is Fantasia, which some consider an early animation masterpiece and some will admit was kind of boring. In fact, all of the early movies tend to be polarizing with movies like Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Dumbo appearing at opposite ends of different reviewers’ scales. The exception is Pinocchio which was in every single Top 10 (Snow White had one outlier at #25, otherwise all Top 10). Another is The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which some throw in the bottom half and some include around number 5, feeling it is part of the 1990’s renaissance. Beauty and the Beast was also pretty consistent, though while a couple of reviewers insist it is the best Disney movie ever, nobody has it outside their Top 10.
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Recently I got some junk mail inviting me to join the Disney Movie Club, which has about the same business model as Columbia Record Club had for LP records. You get some free movies up front, have “opportunities” to buy movies every month (they ship and bill you for them unless you say no), and have to buy a few movies at full price later. The deal I got in the mail had you getting 5 movies up front and you had to buy 4 more, but if you bought one at half price now, you only had to buy 3 more at full price. I researched it and found a deal where I only had to buy 3 more, or 2 if you bought one now (the default deal if you visit the website is the worst: Get 4 now, buy 5 at full price later). For the most part the selections included whatever movies Disney currently has on disk (they intentionally take older classic titles out of production, putting them back “in the vault” so that people will snap them up when they re-release them later; also some titles are for members only and not available in the initial enrollment), plus Disney properties like Pixar, and including some live action movies like Marvel and some other ones. I have a lot of Disney and Pixar movies already, but it seemed like I could come up with 9 movies total that would cost $90 grand total. $10 each for Bluray movies is pretty good, and they often include a DVD copy and a digital download so you can add it to iTunes and play on your computer or other devices. So I decided to do that. And once you buy your movies at full price, you can cancel your membership and do it all over again if you want even more movies. If you are careful and buy two $25 commitments instead of $30 commitments it is only $80.

Edit: The Disney Movie Club is now closed.

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Most flashlights are made of aluminum, which is lightweight, strong, and pretty good at conducting heat. For LED flashlights it is important for heat to be carried away from the LED so that it doesn’t overheat and possibly burn. Copper is fantastic at conducting heat, twice as effective as aluminum. However, it also weighs about 3 times as much as aluminum, and is only about one third as strong. It is also typically more expensive.

LED’s are much more efficient than incandescent light bulbs, but still most of the energy they use goes towards heat instead of light. And as you drive the LED harder, it becomes less and less efficient, producing more and more heat. One of my first uses of copper was to wrap copper strips around a P60 drop-in in the head of flashlight, filling up an air gap (air transmits almost no heat) and allowing heat from the drop-in to sink into the head and body of the flashlight. I used aluminum strips at first, cutting 1″x3″ strips from aluminum cans, but eventually I bought some sheets of copper and cut that into strips. Here’s a picture of copper colored aluminum light with the drop-in wrapped in a copper strip.

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I keep a lot of music on my iPod and one thing I don’t like about Apple’s interface is scrolling through long lists of artists or songs. To minimize the number of artists that show up, I take singles that I have (as opposed to albums) and change the artist name to “Single” and then incorporate the artist name into the title of the song like “Michael Jackson – Billy Jean”. I also have to assign no album name or else everything will sort off of that. And I have to leave the year, track number, and composer blank too. Once I do that, everything falls into a list of single songs alphabetized by the artist’s name.

One of the neat things about Apple’s interface is how for each artist it goes and gets a picture of the artist (not just album artwork) and then sets a color theme based on that picture. The result turns out great for most of the bands on my iPod. But for some reason, “Unknown Album” by the artist “Single” comes up with the picture below, which I see anytime I want to play one of my hundreds of single songs: