Ted's Blog

Just over a year ago I replaced my Moto G4 with a Moto Z3 Play. Motorola (really Lenovo) makes pretty good budget phones and one of the nice things about them is you can afford to replace them more often and not worry about throwing away a lot of money. Or if you break them, or don’t like the phone, or it breaks on its own, it’s not like you’ve invested a ton of money. I wasn’t crazy about the Z3. It did away with a headphone jack, and I had to use an adapter to connect headphones to the USB-C port. I don’t really use the headphones now that I’m not taking the train into work, but I didn’t like that. It had a protruding camera on the back and because when it is lying down it is bearing on the camera, the glass cover over the camera broke pretty early on. Then it got a line on the screen and I had to return it under warranty. And now lately it won’t charge, or won’t charge easily because the USB-C connector won’t stay in the port. I tried cleaning the port out, but it is still pretty loose. I can get it to charge, but it isn’t reliable, so I looked for new phones and found the Moto G7 Plus for only $120. It is cheap because it was released in 2019 and has been replaced by the G8. I usually shop at bhphoto.com for cheap unlocked phones, but was surprised that Best Buy had the same price on the phone, which let me use $20 in rewards credits and earn $5 in new credits for the purchase. It should arrive today.

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Black Friday has been creeping earlier and earlier. Last year it worked itself to Thursday morning. This year, in an effort to reduce door busting crowds, they have spread things out. I am mostly shopping for blu-ray movies and the two best sources are Walmart and Best Buy, with Amazon usually price matching those two as long as the items are in stock at those stores. This year, Walmart released 3 different Black Friday ads. The first was effective November 4, the second November 11, and the last on the actual Black Friday (closed for Thanksgiving for a change). The only one of those with movie deals was the November 11 ad, but it was for in-store purchases only, which didn’t actually start until November 14, with stores opening at 5:30 AM. Normally they have a lot of cardboard bins of movies (shippers) lined up in the aisles that are unwrapped at door-busting time (Thursday night lately) and quickly picked clean within minutes, certainly within an hour, by the masses. But my trick was to go that morning when the prices were already active and get movies off the shelf instead of the wrapped up shippers and avoid the crowds. Last year I was able to pick up some leftovers that night though. But with the store opening at 5:30 AM, that strategy probably wouldn’t work.
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I’ve always had spotty wifi coverage in the house. I can put the router in the back of the house, in the den that was added on outside of the original brick walls, which makes the signal weaker in the rest of the house, or I can put it in the living room, which is in one corner of the house and the signal doesn’t reach well to everywhere. In March 2019 I got a 802.11ac router that seems to have helped and I moved the router to the living room where it can be connected directly to the TV and DVD player, giving me great coverage if I am in that room, but weaker coverage for the TV in the back of the house and my laptop. One feature of the TP Link AC1750 Archer A7 router is it can support range extenders that create a mesh. There are a few different ways range extenders can work. One way is they create a new wifi network that relays stuff back to original wifi network. But if they are meshed, there is just one wifi network all over. I have pretty low speed internet service at 30 Mbps, but the router can support much higher than that, supposedly up to 1750 Mbps. One problem with a range extender is that if you are downloading 25 Mbps (for streaming a 4k movie) from the extender, it has to get 25 Mbps from the original router and can fill up you bandwidth passing that along. So I have a lot of extra room in the local wifi signal.
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I have been insured by USAA for car and home insurance for decades. When I bought my house 23 years ago my real estate agent asked if I had insurance yet, and I said USAA, and he replied “Well, you can’t do any better than that.” Every now and then I might shop to see if I am doing okay and lately USAA has gone up. Five years ago the monthly premium was $125 and now it is $215, insuring a car that is five years older and a home that is exactly the same. USAA has always issued a yearly dividend, but it is rarely very much ($27 last year). Lately, with Covid, they have been issuing special dividends because people are driving less and getting in few accidents, and therefore USAA isn’t paying out as many claims. I don’t drive that many miles anyway and again, the dividends aren’t much (3 payments totaling $61).
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When I got the Mazda, I played around with a synthetic wax called Zaino. It turned out to be very labor intensive and kind of complex, but it did give very nice results when I did it. One of the neat aspects was there was a wax and you added a couple of drops of hardener to it right before applying it, which seemed like a pretty neat idea. Eventually the paint went bad anyway. The car sat out in the sun for 12 years straight, so not that surprising, and during the drought washing your car was banned, which didn’t help me keep up the Zaino coating. Jeb says it isn’t just sunlight, but dirt that digs into and destroys the paint and I wonder if parking near a MARTA station allowed it to pick up rail dust, fine steel particles, though I don’t know how far those travel.

So hoping to keep the Ford Escape for 10 years, I would like to protect its paint. I turned down a $600 paint protection package offered by the dealer which involves applying a coating that has to be reapplied every year anyway. In the past 12 years, synthetic waxes have gotten more advanced, easier to apply and maybe lasting a little longer. And there are still some who use real wax, carnuba wax, sometimes in conjunction with other coatings. Right now the rage is ceramic coating, in particular silicon dioxide (SiO2, which is quartz). It is scary to rub quartz on your car, but they also talk about nanoparticles, so the quartz is too fine to do anything I guess. Most products also have titanium dioxide. The ceramic coatings are supposed to last longer than synthetic waxes (now called sealants, since they aren’t wax), though you can use both. The detailers want really glossy results that bead water great, but what I really want is just good protection for the paint. The detailers use some expensive products by small companies and can save some money by buying in bulk, but one spray bottle of ceramic coating might be $40 and would maybe treat your car twice. That’s not horrible if it works, but it is expensive if it doesn’t, or if it is something I have a hard time applying correctly without a foam cannon, pressure washer, or electric buffer that most detailers already have. You can also get more consumer-oriented products at auto shops and even Walmart. Most products get some great reviews and some awful reviews, so it is hard to know what really works best. Ceramic coatings can last up to a year, but hardly anyone has evidence of them still beading water after more than four months, certainly not without regular washing, possible touchups, and keeping the car in a garage. While applying something once a year would be great, I could live with six months and washing every month or two in between.
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