Category: Uncategorized

I first joined the Disney Movie Club five years ago and have cancelled and re-enrolled repeatedly in order to stock up on a lot of blu-rays from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Eventually I got pretty much everything I wanted so I have been picking up newer movies. During my fourth enrollment, I picked up a lot of referrals and got more movies from the referrals than enrollment. Eventually the referrals started to dry up and I joined a fifth time in February of last year. Since then I only picked up one referral, but the bigger problem was that once Covid hit, there were fewer movies being released and therefore fewer blu-rays. Now things are picking up again and I was able to put together six titles I wanted for a new enrollment. Disney’s releases lately haven’t been great, but still decent enough to justify $8 or so per movie and I wound up picking up Onward (B+), Cruella (A), Raya and the Last Dragon (A), Black Widow (B), Luca (B+), and Soul (B+). I could easily pass on Black Widow, but I didn’t want to wait for Shang-Chi (B+) or Free Guy (B+) to be eligible for enrollment (usually 9-12 weeks after the movie is released on blu-ray). I definitely would not get Jungle Cruise (B-) or Ron’s Gone Wrong (D).
Continue reading “Disney Movie Club, Part 6”

Last year, the Black Friday sales on blu-rays were spread out over the month of November, but were mostly not great. This year, that happened again, but it was even worse because Best Buy doesn’t even make ads anymore, so you just had to wait and see what they put on sale. For the most part, they started a sale on November 1 and then another one on November 15, and kept the prices the same for most of the month. Their selection and prices were not great, with a few $7.99 4K discs, but mostly $9.99 and more. They finally released a few blu-rays at $5.99, but pretty sparse. I had about $40 in rewards credits at Best Buy, so I wound up picking up a few 4K blu-rays including Ad Astra¹, Jojo Rabbit², and Gattaca³ for $9.99 each and then picked up A Quiet Place⁴ for $7.99. I wasn’t crazy about Jojo and have never seen A Quiet Place, but both had slipcovers and digital copies which is a nice plus. Gattaca is a favorite that I never got on blu-ray and Ad Astra was a neat movie too. I thought about getting Tenet for $9.99, but decided I didn’t like it enough to upgrade my blu-ray that I had gotten cheap from Redbox. On Black Friday they had Shazam⁵ blu-ray for $5.99. That was a fun movie, so I went ahead and got that for $1.07 after using a $5 reward. Only 5 movies from Best Buy is pretty low for me.
Continue reading “Blackish November”

Lately inflation has edged up. Some are saying it is temporary, due to supply disruptions caused maybe by Covid shutdowns. Others say inflation is back. Meanwhile Mom was looking for a way to get a better return on some money she had in a money market drawing less than 1% return. We started looking at bond funds. I like Vanguard’s short term corporate bond fund, VFSTX (or its ETF equivalent, VCSH) which I use like a savings account, but also a place to put money in reserve if I feel like the stock market is due for a correction. But Mom already had some money in some USAA mutual funds, a short term corporate bond fund similar to VFSTX called USSBX, and a junk bond fund called USHYX. So we just added her money to those existing holdings. USSBX actually seems to have a slightly higher yield than VFSTX (1.8% vs. 1.7%), so I put some money into that too. One way it does this is by having slightly higher risk bonds which pay higher interest. USHYX, the junk bond fund, buys all lower quality bonds, so it is yielding around 5%, but there is more risk there plus the bonds are longer term, meaning the value of the bonds will go down more if interest rates rise, which they seem to be doing.
Continue reading “I Bonds Again?”

Eight years ago I bought two light switches to control my front porch and back porch lights, automatically turning them on at sunset and off at a certain time or at sunrise. These worked well for the most part, but didn’t track sunrise/sunset perfectly (you picked one of four zones in the US) and the clock lost a few minutes per month, so I would have to re-enter the current time and the time of sunrise and sunset a few times a year. They had a built-in battery backup which would usually keep the settings during a brief power outage, but not always. Lately, they have stopped saving settings during any power outages, so I think those batteries died. Taking one of them apart, the batteries are soldered in place and can’t be easily replaced. The switches still work, I just have to reprogram them every time the power goes out.
Continue reading “Smart Switches”

Fourteen months ago I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad 5, specifically model 15IIL05 81YK, from Staples. The other day it started making some cracking sort of noises as I opened and closed it and some of the plastic around the left hinge was deforming. Not much later, the left hinge gave away, barely supporting that side of the screen. I looked online and found that a lot of people have this problem with Lenovo notebooks and there are class action lawsuits about bad Lenovo hinges. On the Lenovo forums, people complained about the problem, but even for computers still under warranty (incredibly pathetic that a hinge would break in the first year of use!), Lenovo feels that physical damage is not covered by their warranty, though they sometimes will relent and fix the problem under warranty anyway. I usually use a credit card that doubles the standard warranty, but for some reason used a card that doesn’t do that in this case. Also I never get an extended warranty, but since this isn’t covered by the warranty, you would have to also get an accidental damage extended warranty. Since mine was out of warranty they would not let me add any kind of warranty now.

UPDATE: Lenovo seems to acknowledge that this is a manufacturing defect and will fix computers with the problem if they are still under warranty. Some people even were able to get repairs covered out of warranty, but this is not universal. You have to open a support case and then post the case number of the support forum and they will contact you to fix it. Dozens, of people have been able to get their laptops repaired via that forum.

Continue reading “Lenovo Hinge Repair”