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.
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.
Results for the original Kingston NVMe driveWD SN770 Results
I am writing up what I thought of the Oscars since that is something I do. To me it was another weak year of movies. A lot of what came out this year had to have been filmed during the Covid pandemic, or before (Maverick), and I think that was a tough challenge. I try to go see any good movies that come to my local AMC, which has a great discount, but I still only managed to see four of the ten Best Picture nominees, and I didn’t even make it all the way through Avatar before walking out. I am happy for Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO), but I only gave it a B+. I liked Maverick more, but it seemed unlikely that would ever win. I don’t know how they could limit it in some years and not others, but 10 nominees was just too many this year. I didn’t see it, but by all accounts, Triangle of Sadness had no business being nominated.
Despite articles predicting all kinds of things, the awards were pretty much by the numbers. The awards earlier in the season by the different guilds are very accurate predictors of Oscars, which is no surprise since it is a lot of the same voters. The producer, director, actor, and writer guilds delivered exactly the same winners as the Oscars would, including the landslide by EEAO. The technical awards may have been more of a tossup, and I was surprised All Quiet on the Western Front did so well. Continue reading “Oscars 2023”
I have been buying a lot of blu-rays the last few years. Entirely too many actually. But it has been a great time to buy them because streaming is killing the physical media business meaning there are tons of overstocks and great prices. I have bought hundreds of movies from Dollar Tree for $1 each (now $1.25). Big Lots sometimes has great clearance prices on movies (often not) and I have bought a ton from Best Buy, often applying credit card rewards to bring the price down. And of course, I got a lot through the Disney Movie Club, but those average out to be $8-$10 each.
As the collection grew, I bought two bookshelf units that stacked. When those filled up, I made some extra shelves to squeeze in more movies. At some point Jeb gave me his family’s DVD’s. DVD’s are far inferior to blu-rays, but better to have a movie in lower resolution than not at all. With space at a premium, I put those DVD’s (and mine) on the shelf behind the blu-rays, using a 2×6 board running the full width of the shelf to get them up a little higher. One day I was walking the dogs and someone was throwing out a fairly nice bookshelf, so I got that, which helped me for a few more years. I moved all my DVD TV shows into a dresser I wasn’t using. I got a little more space by putting movies on top of the bookcases.
Today I was reading about Twitter and some people mentioned Mastodon as an alternative. It is an interesting idea, basically letting users start their own social network platforms and setting up their own moderation rules. Then the users (and mostly the owner I would guess) enforce those rules instead of Mastodon employees, of which there are very few since it is nonprofit. The Wikipedia article seemed to imply that you could run your own server, so I wondered if I could run my own installation of Mastodon similar to WordPress. I kind of don’t think so because the users all sign up centrally though if you wanted them to start a new account just for your installation, maybe? There is a reason I don’t know the answer to this question.
I have been using Bing as my search engine so I can earn free movies (24 earned since May) and I searched for whether whether Hostgator supports Mastodon. I found a page at blackboxxdigital.com filled with a bunch of boilerplate about Hostgator trying to get you to sign up, posing as a review. Nothing even mentioned Mastodon despite the title of the page being “Can I Run Mastodon on HostGator?” So I did a search of the page looking for “Mastodon” to see if I had missed it. And it highlighted dozens of instances of Mastodon, previously invisible, but now highlighted in between paragraphs and at the end of lines. They were fooling the search engines into thinking the page was about Mastodon.
Only when I searched for “mastodon” could I see it was on the page 22 times.
I listened to a podcast recently about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program that is said to be able to carry out lifelike chats with people. One of the demonstrations the reporters had it perform was write a short fictional story. You can also have it write essays about pretty much any subject and it either already knows or finds stuff out and gives that to you. I wonder how much paraphrasing it is doing vs. just plagiarizing, but the results sound decent. I’ve also noticed more and more really poorly written pseudoinformative web pages that give you paragraphs of uselessly broad information and almost nothing actually helpful, or maybe just one sentence at the end that is actually about what you want to know. I’ve seen a lot of pages that “review” a product by telling you about the features the sellers say it has and then saying it gets good reviews on Amazon. They haven’t necessarily even used the product. I don’t know that those articles are written by computers, but they will be. In fact ChatGPT could kill the internet, clogging it with tons of garbage pages that search engines will think is relevant to what people are looking for. It may sometimes even be of some use, but given how easy it will be for something like ChatGPT to write millions of web pages of garbage, that is the result that seems more likely. The people doing it won’t even need to understand the English that is being generated. Ugh. Bing isn’t as good as Google (in fact the page I found in Bing doesn’t appear in Google search results at all), and Google has been working around sneaky search engine optimization for years, but it is going to get a lot harder I think.
