Category: Uncategorized

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”

Although I have bought Savings Bonds a few times, I have never bought Treasury Bills or Treasury Bonds before. The bills are short-term notes of 1 year or less (4, 8, 13, 17, 26, and 52 weeks being the most common). Treasury Bonds are long term: 10 or 20 years. Treasury Notes are in between (2, 3, 5, 7, or 10 years, with the 10 year note being the one that commercial mortgage rates are based on). Usually the yield on the bills has been so low it isn’t really worth bothering with. I could get about as much with a CD or money market. I have a savings account right now earning 3%. Nothing can compare to the Series I Savings bonds I have which are getting 9.6% interest at the moment, but I have maxed out my purchases for the year on those and they hold your money for at least 1 year and penalize you 3 months interest if you cash them in before 5 years, plus the rate changes every 6 months, and it will be less soon. I had a lot in some short-term corporate bund funds, but because interest rates are still going up, I have lost money on those: their share price has dropped about 4% and they still only yield about 2% in dividends. Continue reading “T Bills”

My 6 year old HP laptop that I had been using as a desktop had been getting slow lately, so I started looking for a replacement. I had gotten a Lenovo 2 years ago to use as my portable computer, but had to install bolts to hold the lid on when its hinges failed. I didn’t feel like getting another Lenovo and a lot of people with Dells had issues, so I didn’t want to go that way either. Even the HP had more problems than I would have liked, but I was running out of companies. I thought with Black Friday coming up there might be some deals. Despite inflation and chip shortages, I think a lot of people upgraded or bought laptops recently and lately demand has dropped so prices seem to have come down to more reasonable levels.
Continue reading “Acer Aspire 5 A515-56-53S3”

I’ve written about Black Friday movie shopping many times in the past. During that time Black Friday changed from Friday to Thursday night to Thursday morning and then the entire month of November. This year it is now a week before Thanksgiving and it is essentially over. What makes it more complicated is that while a few stores still create advertising circulars with all of their deals, Best Buy has completely stopped doing that and the deals just sort of show up and disappear without warning.

The entire month of November has always been when Barnes & Noble runs a 50% off sale on all Criterion movies. Criterion blu-rays in this sale are usually $20, but now they are finally also releasing 4k movies which are usually $25. I had enough points at Sony Rewards to redeem a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card, so I just had to pick what I wanted . . . and couldn’t really find anything. Wall-E, has a Criterion edition coming out on 4k at the end of the month, the first time Disney has done a Criterion release, but Disney usually includes a lot of nice extras with their movies and I already had Wall-E on blu-ray. With the gift card I could get one 4k movie for free, but it seemed like it would be better to get two movies for $25. In the end I picked a couple of older Criterion blu-ray releases, Five Easy Pieces¹ and The Uninvited² and only had to pay about $13.
Continue reading “Gray November”

I have been playing Wordle for a while, starting about 100 days after it first started. Like a lot of people I wanted to try to solve it in as few guesses as possible which meant having a good starting word. Early on, I found sources that said the best word to start with was CRATE. I put together some of my own statistics by playing older games on the Wordle archive and also seeing how I did with different starting words. The most common letters appearing in Wordle are, in order, E, A, R, O, and T (the next 5 are L, I, S, N, and C) so I decided the best starting word would be ORATE, which uses all 5 of the top letters. At some point, the New York Times bought Wordle and started running it, and since I already had a New York Times games subscription (mostly to play Spelling Bee), I was able to use their Wordlebot analyzer that analyzes how skillful and lucky your guesses are and tells you things like how many likely words are remaining. It does this after you finish the puzzle, so it isn’t cheating. Wordlebot’s current preferred starting word is LEAST which it assigns a skill level of 99. But my own statistics also look at which letters are most commonly placed where and I came up with this table, based on Wordle answers 1 through 465:
Continue reading “Wordle 505 2/6*”