Ted's Blog

Many years ago at work I got a computer with two giant CRT monitors. I think they were 21 inches (always measured diagonally across the viewable area). I loved having the extra screen area so I could have two programs open and easily copy info or refer to info on one screen to write an email on the other. The next time I got a home computer I made sure it would support two monitors and it was just as great at home though my monitors weren’t as nice. I remember when they switched to LCD flat screens at work and the big 22 inch monitors were $1000 each so we put locks on them.

At home I decided to start using a laptop in addition to my desktop and eventually replaced the desktop with a laptop, so now I have two laptops, one being used as a desktop with external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. The problem with that is hardly any laptops support two monitors, but they can extend their desktop on to an external monitor and you can have a window open on the laptop and another on the external monitor. I have been using a 4:3 17 inch monitor (1280 x 1024 pixels) that came with my last desktop computer in 2005 as the second screen. This has worked fine for the last few years. What is really amazing is that the laptop, with a screen resolution of only 1366 pixels by 768 pixels, can support an external display of 3200 x 2000 pixels, 6 times as much working area (my newer laptop supports full 4k output).
Continue reading “New Monitor”

Several years ago now, Mom gave me a beer making kit called Mr. Beer. I wound up making some beer and then helping Mom and Jeb make beer with generally acceptable results. After a not so great batch I realized I would rather have someone else make the beer. I think you can get better results by going full home brew, but there is a fairly large initial investment involved (at least $500) and you make 5 gallons at a time which is probably more beer than I drink in a year. Plus if you screw up 5 gallons of beer, that’s a lot of money to throw away (about $50). Mr. Beer takes a major shortcut by providing the malt extract and hops so that all you have to do is heat it up and add water and yeast, which takes no technical proficiency.

Ultimately I was willing to leave beer making to the experts (though it was fun going on brewery tours where they often ask if anyone has made beer before and I would get to raise my hand) and enjoy the variety and quality that professional brewers provide. But Mr. Beer started sending me emails again recently and then they went and had a Buy One Get One free sale on beer mixes with free shipping on orders over $30. So I bought four cans of beer syrup, and therefore must make 4 2.5 gallon batches of beer.
Continue reading “More Beer”

Over the past few years I have been buying a lot of Blu-ray movies, really entirely too many. Sometimes they come with a digital copy that can be stored on a service like Vudu or Movies Anywhere, and sometimes they do not. Vudu has an interesting service called Disc to Digital that lets you buy a digital copy of a movie you already own on disc, but it only works on maybe a third of the titles I have that didn’t come with a digital copy already (depends a lot on the studio releasing the title with Fox and Sony often working, but most others not). To prove ownership, you can use the Vudu phone app to scan the Blu-ray case UPC barcode while you are at your house. Using the GPS coordinates of the phone and confirming the UPC tells them that you have the disk at your house (this is called Mobile Disc to Digital) instead of scanning them in a store. Another way to do it is to load the disk into your computer and a desktop Vudu app will read it to confirm you have the actual disk (called Disc to Digital Home). That’s great except none of my computers have a Blu-ray drive, only DVD. There are ways to cheat that system, but I don’t really want to cheat the system. Then you pay $2 to get a digital copy, which is a great deal since most digital movies cost $10-20 to buy and cost more than $2 just to rent. Most of the movies I have gotten for $1 at Dollar Tree have a replacement UPC code stuck very securely over the original UPC code and D2D won’t let you use those barcodes to buy a D2D movie (sometimes Dollar Tree will put the sticker on the clear plastic cover instead of the paper insert with the artwork and UPC code, so you can still scan the original code). I have tried peeling the sticker off, but this generally does not go well and there is still no guarantee the movie will be eligible for D2D. I wrote about a lot of this earlier, mostly in the replies to my post about Digital HD. Continue reading “Getting Paid to Watch Movies”

Many years ago I tried installing a MyBB bulletin board for an employee organization, then I did another as a community bulletin board that never really took off. I was looking into having a family bulletin board just to exchange information about the upcoming cruise and tried a Google Group, but the interface on that was surprisingly clunky. There are also bulletin board services you can use to easily set up a bulletin board, but I don’t know if they put ads all over, so I decided to do a phpBB installation, which is the most popular free bulletin board software.

My web host is HostGator and they have a “one-click” installer for a number of common web packages, including phpBB, so I did that. It wasn’t really one click, but it was pretty easy. I set up a subdomain first so that I would have a place to put it, then ran the installation and it emailed me the admin password. The only problem was it installed an older version (3.0.12) of the software and for some reason the home page didn’t work right away, but I think that’s because I didn’t wait for the email. So one of the first things to do was update the software to 3.2.5, which was probably just as hard or harder than installing it by myself without one-click. Whatever, at least HostGator was able to set up the database for me. It was a good exercise to see how updating the software works and it really isn’t that bad, though it’s not as easy as WordPress where you just push a button. Easier than updating my wikis.
Continue reading “phpBB Installation”

I have been using Tablo as a DVR for local broadcasts combined with Amazon Fire Sticks to run that app on my TVs for a year now. And I just renewed the Tablo program guide fee ($5/month) for another year and renewed my internet for another year ($30/month). The cord cutting has gone pretty well and I don’t really miss cable since I still have plenty to watch on TV between broadcast, Netflix and other streaming services, and my Blu-ray collection.

But one thing that has kind of bothered me with my setup on my main TV is the Fire Stick is only HD, not 4K. It doesn’t matter that much since broadcast and therefore Tablo is only HD anyway and I still get 4K Netflix via the TV’s own app plus a few of my Blu-rays are 4K via the 4K Blu-ray player (though only a handful since 4K Blu-rays are much more expensive than the discounted Blu-rays I usually buy). There are also online services like Vudu, Movies Anywhere, Amazon, and Google Play where I have a few additional movies, some of which are 4K. The Vudu app on my 4K TV and my 4K Blu-ray player are only HD, but the Roku will actually play the handful of 4K titles I have on Vudu in 4K (if the wifi signal is good enough anyway).
Continue reading “Roku”