Category: Uncategorized

For the last fifteen years, I have been a one television family. That’s plenty for me, and the TV I have is enormous. But lately I got an elliptical trainer, and instead of sitting on my sofa watching The Daily Show and NBC News every night, I could be exercising. As it is, I am always looking for something to keep me entertained (distracted) while I am exercising and so far have been working through episodes of The West Wing, watching them on my computer screen, which is in the same room as the elliptical. But that’s just more TV to watch, so it would be good if I could combine exercise with TV I’m going to watch anyway. While I record shows on my Dish Network 722k VIP DVR, there is no way to copy those to the computer, so I have been thinking maybe I could get another TV. Prices on HDTV’s have come way, way down. This Christmas I have seen 51-inch TV’s for $400 and a 24-inch TV for $150. I was at Fry’s this past week getting a new hard drive and some anti-virus software and looked around at their TV’s. It seemed like most of the smaller ones (30 inches and less) were 720p instead of the higher resolution 1080p, but the 24-inch one on sale is 1080p (however the $400 51-inch TV was 720p, probably one reason it was so cheap).

Continue reading “Two TV’s”

For Christmas, Mom gave me a Mr. Beer homebrew kit. I had noticed these in a couple of advertisements and was a little intrigued, so it was a good idea for a gift. I have thought it would be neat to make my own beer, but you can buy pretty good beer in the store, plus the equipment and ingredients are expensive because you can’t just go to the grocery store and buy hops and malting barley. You end up going to a specialty store which means it will be expensive. Plus most beer-making equipment has you make 5 gallons at a time and I probably don’t drink 5 gallons of beer in a year.
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Recently, I bought a 500GB Buffalo Stealth portable hard drive, and then quickly tore into it to extract the actual drive. Then I was able to successfully copy over my notebook computer’s files and upgrade the notebook’s hard drive. Afterwards I put the notebook’s original 250GB hard drive back in the Buffalo case (though I haven’t reformatted it yet, so it isn’t real useful; but I’m thinking now it would be safe to reformat).

But my old desktop’s hard drive is still pretty full. Fry’s had a special on a 1 TB Western Digital external drive (“external” or “desktop” drives have 3.5-inch desktop size hard drives in them and are usually powered from the wall, while “portable” drives usually have a notebook-size drive in them and are powered by USB; really both types are external as well as portable) for only $58. The nice thing about an external drive is that I can use it to extend my Dish Network DVR (up to 2 TB drives will work, but they have to have their own power source). However, the desktop’s drive is only 160 GB, which doesn’t add much capacity to the 500 GB DVR and isn’t all that useful as an external drive either.
Continue reading “Another Hard Drive Upgrade”

Starting next year, the sun will supply about a third of the power used by my house. I have always liked the idea of installing solar panels on the roof and making my own power. I looked for a while at installing a solar water heater, but the water heater system was going to cost thousands of dollars for the panels, pump, heat exchanger, and a plus-size water tank, which would never allow me to recoup the investment since my hot water bill is only about $10 a month. There is a house in the neighborhood with solar panels for power. I looked into that too and I have a south-facing piece of roof that would be good for soaking up the rays. But again, it’s not just the expensive panels to buy and install, but then you have to have voltage regulators that will turn the power into AC and send excess power back to the grid while letting the grid supply power when the sun isn’t shining or demand exceeds the solar supply. Even if I divide the installation costs over a long period and I include federal grants that cover 30% of installation, I don’t think I could ever make a system economical.
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I got a new 500 GB hard drive. Since the 250 GB hard drive on my notebook computer was kind of full, I thought it might be good to take the hard drive out of the portable and put in my notebook, then take the old notebook drive and put it back in the portable case. The basic idea would be I could move all the files over to the new drive, then put the new drive in the computer, boot up and I would have exactly the same thing except with more space (I’ll call this Option 1). But there are some wrinkles. First, I have a lot of junk on the drive and the computer acts up from time to time. Since the notebook is five years old, it might be worthwhile to reformat and start over. The existing drive has a RESTORE partition that can be used to reformat the C: drive and restore the notebook to exactly the same setup as the first day I got it (Option 2). That would still mean installing all of my software, moving over my pictures and other documents, and downloading a ton of windows and other updates. But the advantage is the computer should run a lot better that way. The downside is how do I do a restore from the old drive to the new drive? Or could I move the restore partition over to the new drive as a new RESTORE partition? Option 3 is to just use the Windows Vista disk that came with the computer and start a new Windows installation after putting the blank hard drive into my notebook, and rebuild the system from scratch, which would be even more trouble than the restore option.
Continue reading “Drive Cloning”