Year: 2016

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.

Note: In 2023, they stopped the “Get 5 Free, Buy 3” promo codes that made this such a good deal. I don’t recommend the club right now and am no longer a member.

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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:

Last year my lunch buddies, Brad and Paul, went up to the far northeast corner of Georgia to find Ellicott’s Rock. This rock was determined to be the three-way border of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia by Andrew Ellicott in 1811. Ellicott was a well-respected surveyor who had already laid out the city of Washington, DC according to L’Enfant’s plans. He was hired by the state of Georgia to correct the location of the Georgia and North Carolina state line 3 miles to the north. Ellicott asked for Georgia to pay for better equipment but they refused. And when Ellicott confirmed the location of the line and kept it in place (he actually missed the correct 35th parallel by about 300 feet to the north), Georgia refused to pay him at all. A couple of years later the three states put together another expedition to settle the issue and another rock, called Commissioners Rock, was chiseled. The area is deep in national forest shared by the three states, in an area now called the Ellicott’s Rock Wilderness. Last year, Paul and Brad were able to find Commissioners Rock, but were unable to find Ellicott’s Rock, which they understood was 500 feet downstream. With more research, they decided that Ellicott’s Rock might be much closer. We decided to go on State Holiday No. 1, formerly known as Confederate Memorial Day. That was yesterday.

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I’ve been buying silver and gold bullion coins for a couple of years now. Reading news about the latest coin designs, I saw that the United States Mint was coming up with a gold version of the Mercury dime to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It was first issued in 1916 with a design by Adolph Weinman featuring lady liberty in a winged cap (not actually Mercury). Lincoln had already replaced an indian on the penny in 1909, but all of the other coins featured liberty. Though it is very small, the mercury dime is a favorite design. I remember Jeb had a bunch of them when he was collecting coins, but it seemed like they were pretty beat up. However, a lot of people collected Mercury dimes and I was able to get a pretty nice one for $7.50 on eBay. I thought I would get a Mercury dime and then maybe get the gold one when it comes out next week. However, the mint is going to charge $205 for the new coin which has only 1/10th oz. of gold worth about $124. I don’t think I want to pay that big a premium, which is why I end up never buying the mint’s commemorative offerings and instead stick with bullion coins with much lower premiums, including a privately produced 1 oz. silver coin with the mercury design.

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