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.
During Covid, the local animal shelters were able to adopt out all or nearly all of their dogs (not sure about cats). But now they have filled up again unfortunately. Having two dogs is perfect for me. They keep each other company but I can keep one on each side of me during walks and have one hand to pet each of them. Three gets to be a lot. But I thought maybe I could foster a dog temporarily and maybe the shelters would catch up on adopting their dogs out. I finally decided that I should do that over the holidays since I was planning on being home all of that time anyway. I made an appointment for today and they matched me with a dog named Pretzel. They said she is a favorite of the volunteers and has been at the shelter since June. She has been fostered out a few times, but nobody had adopted her. Her web page says she is 4 years old, but it seems like she may be a little older than that. She looks like a cross between my old dog, Rosa, and Bella. She was very well behaved while she waited for me to fill out the paperwork and to get fitted with a new harness for her trip home. They gave me a bag of stuff to take home, but it was mostly just some contact information, a collar, and a gallon ziplock bag of the food she has been eating. Continue reading “Pretzel”
In 2015 I bought a 2 TB external hard drive that could be attached to my router and used as a shared hard drive. I use two computers in the house, a desktop (really now it is a notebook with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse) and a laptop for portability. But the documents I use day-to-day are the same, so I keep everything on the shared drive. Microsoft wants you to use OneDrive, but I just don’t want to deal with all of that. Ultimately it is probably more trouble avoiding OneDrive than it is just using it, but I’m a little bit hard headed. One nice thing about that drive, a MyCloud by Western Digital, was that it could make files available to me even when I wasn’t at home, over the internet. So it became a true cloud, not just a networked drive. You could also attach another external hard drive to it and increase the storage. However, the external drive was very slow and the My Cloud wasn’t that fast either. In 2021 Western Digital said they would no longer support the internet cloud function on the device and that feature should be turned off, which I did. I could never be sure how secure it really was. I sent a link to Jeb which he could use to browse movies I had stored on the hard drive, which seemed to work, but a link doesn’t seem that secure. I guess it was okay while it lasted. I was able to access the files from my phone (which was nice) or just about any laptop except the one at work which wouldn’t let me do that. It was a good solution and still is, but then I would need to back up that drive periodically which is kind of a pain and too easy not to do. Plus at only 2 TB it couldn’t store everything I wanted. And the attached 500 GB drive was too slow to be really practical, though it did work. I set up a T: drive on my computers with all of the main storage and U: drive for the 500 GB drive. I needed a better solution.
Western Digital also makes a beefed up solution called a My Cloud EX2 Ultra. It is an enclosure for two hard drives that you can set up a few different ways, including as a RAID where the two drives back each other up constantly and if one fails you can just replace it with a new drive without losing any data (not hot swappable). There are all kinds of RAID servers out there and they tend to be very expensive. Some hold 4 or 6 hard drives. But this device is more for geeky home use and maybe a small business. The 8 GB version (with 2 4 TB drives) was $380 at Best Buy. But you could buy a version with no hard drives for only $160 and then buy two of the exact same red WD 4 TB drives included in the 8 TB version for $87 each, for a total of $334. Or you could buy those same hard drives at Walmart for $70 each for a grand total of $300, so I did that. Later on I found out Jeb has a bunch of leftover 4 TB drives so maybe I could have gotten those for free. Continue reading “Home Cloud”
