Category: Uncategorized

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fry’s to buy a copy of Trend Micro Internet Security which would be free after two rebates. I really try not to buy anything else at Fry’s because if it isn’t on sale, it usually isn’t a good deal. However I have been looking to upgrade my Lexar Firefly jump drive that I raved about a couple of years ago. My rule is I don’t like to spend more than $10 on a thumb drive. They had a bin of Kingston Data Traveler 110 thumb drives with 2 GB of memory for only $9.99, so I bought one. That’s four times as much memory as the Firefly. It’s a decent drive, but bulky compared to the Firefly. The USB part slides out so it doesn’t need a cap, but it has to be connected to my keychain when I plug it in and it blocks adjacent USB drives due to the large size.

Naturally, the following weekend Fry’s advertised a 4 GB Firefly for less than $10 after rebate. I looked up the Firefly on Amazon and there were a lot of complaints about it being slow. If I was going to be moving 4 GB of data, I didn’t want that data to move slowly. So I decided to run a test. I moved a 344 MB video file (appropriately enough, an episode of the TV series Firefly) to the Firefly and timed how long it took: 129 seconds. Then I measured how long it took to copy the file back to my computer: 40 seconds. So the write speed was a lot slower than the read speed. Next I tried the Kingston drive and got 57 seconds for writing and 19 seconds for reading. That’s more than twice as fast. At work I have e-mail archives that are about 2 GB and I need to bring them home for a backup. That would be 12.5 minutes on a Firefly and only 5.5 minutes for the Kingston. That’s a big difference. It seems like these speeds should be posted somewhere. So here they are (in megabytes per second) [USBDview results in square brackets]:

Drive	Write	Read	USBDview
Lexar Firefly 512 MB	2.67w	8.61r	[ 2.39w 7.48r]
Kingston Data Traveler 110 2 GB	6.04w	18.12r
Corsair Flash Voyager 8 GB	5.17w	22.40r
60 GB Archos	0.98w	7.65r
20 GB HD Enclosure	7.83w	18.13r	[11.29w 18.06r]
Microcenter 4 GB	3.51w	19.13r	[ 2.80w 20.07r]
OCZ Diesel 8 GB	6.62w	19.13r	[ 9.68w 17.56r]
Emtec C400 16 GB	9.83w	14.96r	[ 9.14w 15.64r]
Kingston SE9 16 GB	6.43w	14.02r	[ 6.43w 16.97r]
PNY Attache 4 32 GB	7.45w	27.81r	[ 6.34w 25.82r]
Simpletech 320 GB hard drive	22.96w	22.96r	[19.01w 31.82r]
32GB SanDisk removable	22.96w		[10.81w 21.82r]

I decided that as much as I like the form factor of the Firefly, I didn’t want to wait so long and so I didn’t get the 4 GB model.

I got a card in the mail from Georgia Natural Gas the other day saying I could switch to them and get natural gas for 99.9 cents per therm for 12 months. I found out that is only a temporary price for new customers and after 12 months it would go up to a more normal rate (though rates have dropped lately and currently the rate is 105.9 cents per therm). I visited Clark Howard’s website and saw an ad to get a $75 gift card from GNG for new customers, but at the 105.9 cent rate. Since I only use 400-500 therms in a year, this still represented some pretty good savings over current Walton EMC Natural Gas prices. However, the small print said the $75 gift card was available from May to December and only available to the first 500 customers. That’s not many.

I called the number (866-665-9464) and asked if that deal was still available. They asked what the promo code was and I gave it to them: GLOC-1-080-000. They said the gift card was still available and I would get it after November 1 when the switch took effect. Additionally they gave me the 99.9 cent rate and also waived the switching fee (I found out later you can switch once a year without a fee as long as you aren’t locked in). Also, this plan has a monthly fee of $3.99 instead of $5.75 at Walton. As long as competing prices elsewhere don’t fall below 85 cents, I should see some savings from this plan.

Last night I saw Mamma Mia. In my review I said it was kind of like a 2-hour Mentos commercial (if you remember the cheesy commercials from the early 90’s). I did a search to see if anyone else had made this comparison and came up with all of these results about Mentos and Diet Coke, including experiments done on Mythbusters. There is some pretty amazing stuff done with Mentos and Diet Coke and I highly recommend going to YouTube and searching for Mentos and Coke. I especially like the rockets where they dump Mentos in the bottle, put the cap back on about 90%, and then throw the bottle on the ground. But there is also a website called eepybird.com where they have made chain reactions and displays using hundreds of bottles of Diet Coke.

This is one of my favorites because it shows the whole development process (a little bad language):

These two are good, showing rockets backfiring:

One

Two

Here are some of the more elaborate ones by the people at eepybird.com:

One and Two

Millions of people have seen these already, but it was new to me. There is also an article about this on Wikipedia of course.

Yesterday Susan and I went to Circuit City and found a DVD/VCR combo player for $80. She wanted it for her old TV in the sewing room (she calls it her studio). When we got it home and went to hook it up, we found that the TV had only Coax input (the threaded nubbin that you connect cable to; also called an F connector) and that the DVD/VCR had only more modern outputs like composite (red, white, and yellow) and S-video. Worse still, it had no coax input at all so we couldn’t even connect it to the cable coming out of the wall. I said we should take it back, but she called Zenith (now apparently owned by LG) and they said she should get an RF converter from Radio Shack.

We looked up other VCR/DVD combos on Amazon and discovered that you can’t buy one with coax input anymore. This is because of the switch to high definition and the only combo players with coax are high-end players that are converting HD signals. Nobody makes analog tuners (the pre-HD signal we’ve always had is called NTSC). From what it looks like, recording TV shows onto VHS tapes won’t be possible anymore and these combo players are really only meant to play tapes and DVD’s and record DVD’s on to tapes.

I wonder if an HD converter box would help at all with this, but I’m thinking it would not. The converters require a separate antenna and only convert the broadcast channels plus the broadcast HD channels. I don’t know what they would do with the cable signal.

Even if you get an RF modulator, I still don’t think it would be tuning in any particular station. It would just be a physical adapter so that the combo player could send a signal over coax to the TV (on Channel 3 or 4). There still wouldn’t be a way to connect the combo player to the wall. Even if you got some other kind of adapter, I don’t know that the combo player could differentiate the cable signal containing all of those channels.

Meanwhile, Susan also bought a 22-inch HDTV last night by Toshiba for her bedroom. We connected the coax cable to it and it recognized all of the regular channels she was seeing before (without a cable box) as well as a number of digital channels that her old TV wouldn’t recognize and some HD channels including at least a few of the local HD channels (though these have numbers like 800-01 instead of just 21). The TV includes a DVD player and is amazingly lightweight. We had also been thinking about a 24-inch Samsung TV that can be used as a computer monitor as well, but Susan liked the DVD player being incorporated (just a slot in the side) and Circuit City didn’t carry the 24-inch Samsung in their stores, only online.

Bill at work told me about a timer switch he installed at his neighbor’s house. Purchased at Lowe’s, the timer has a microchip that allows you to enter the time and date and the time the sun sets that day. From then on the timer will calculate sunset and turn on the light at the correct time each day. You can also program the switch to turn off at sunrise or at a certain time in the middle of the night (or put it on a 7-day timer with several on/off cycles). I have four indoor lights on timer that I adjust a few times each year as the length of the day changes. A switch like this could eliminate those adjustments. I did a search and found another brand where you actually enter your latitude and longitude so that it can calculate sunset, but entering the current time and sunset also gives you a point on the curve that can be used. I believe the one he installed was an Intermatic EJ500C. They call this an “astronomic” timer. I will check to see if I can get it locally, but found a couple of places online to buy as well:

1000bulbs.com $18.34 free shipping

Amazon $20.49

This device fits in a switch plate so that it could control the outdoor lamp which is on that switch and there is also a battery inside so that it won’t forget the time and date when the power goes off. They also make a plug-in version that I could use with my indoor lamps. These also have a “random” feature that will turn the lights on and off randomly to make it look like someone is home turning the lights on and off. But since my lights are on timer all the time my house always looks like nobody is home.

The downside, I realized later, is that these timers are not supposed to be used with compact fluorescent bulbs and all of the lights I want to control are CF bulbs.