News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

I got a Blu-ray player a couple of years ago for Christmas. The picture quality of Blu-ray is clearly better than DVD, especially on my big 65″ TV, but unless I think about it I don’t really notice it. But Blu-ray has one characteristic that makes it much inferior to DVD.

When I insert a Blu-ray disk, it takes a little longer to start up. That’s OK, it’s just a few seconds. But then almost every Blu-ray disk starts playing previews, one after another, and most of the controls are locked out. You can’t cut directly to the menu, you can’t skip to the next preview, and in some cases you can’t even fast-forward through the preview. You have to just let them play, one after another, for several minutes.

I find this extremely frustrating. Previews of a movie tend to spoil that movie for me when I watch it later. I want to go in knowing as little of the plot as possible. When I go see movies in a theater I usually wait outside the theater until the previews have finished playing. I know, it’s a little bit anal, but I like it that way.

I’ll do that in a theater. But in my home with my own equipment and a disk that I have paid money to buy or rent, I feel that I should be able to watch the movie when I want. Leave the previews there on the menu as an option for those who want to watch them, but let me skip them and cut directly to the movie.

So I cancelled my Netflix Blu-ray option and am going back to plain DVD for all my movies. With a DVD I can always skip the previews, or some people even copy it and strip out the previews, FBI warning, etc.( though of course I would never do anything of such questionable legality). I’ll stick with DVDs or streaming until I can get a Blu-ray player that will let me control the disc instead of vice-versa. Maybe I’ll find one in Taiwan…

Verizon is still ranked number one for coverage in the US, but it’s becoming very expensive. We pay about $220 a month for 4 phones, one of which isn’t even “smart”.

The rest of my family is going to stay with Verizon for now, but I’m in the process of jumping ship. I bought the new Google Nexus 4 phone, unlocked, for $350 direct from Google. That may seem expensive when you are used to buying subsidized phones directly from the wireless company, but for an unlocked phone it’s very cheap. Verizon would sell an equivalent phone without a contract for $600 or more, and at least $250 with a 2-year contract.

The best part is that I got a month-to-month no-contract connection with T-Mobile for just $30/month. That includes unlimited data and text, and 100 minutes of voice.

On the potential downside, the phone doesn’t support LTE, the latest high speed data connection. But it does support “HSPA+“, an enhanced 3G service that is supposed to be pretty fast. I temporarily have both phones, so I did some comparisons using SpeedTest at a few locations around town. Here are the results:

Surprisingly, in most of the locations around the East Valley (Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert) T-Mobile download was faster than Verizon. Uploads were all slower on T-Mobile, but that is much less of a concern for me.

A couple of years ago when I bought my Verizon Thunderbolt, it was the first Verizon LTE phone on the market, and the LTE bandwidth was all available for a few users. At that time I was regularly getting 20 MB/S download speeds. But (I assume) as more and more people are using LTE, it is getting crowded and therefore slower.

Tomorrow I’m taking a trip half-way to Payson, so I’ll see how coverage is outside the metropolitan area. I assume that Verizon will be better, but that’s what I assumed for the local speed test, so I’ll wait and see. I also haven’t done much voice quality testing since I haven’t ported my number over yet. Funny how the most important thing to me about my phone is not using it as a phone.

Consumer Reports just published the results of their car ownership survey, and for two years in a row the Chevy Volt has the highest rate of “Yes” answers to the question “Would you buy this car again?”

92% of Volt owners said “Yes!”, just nosing out the Corvette and Porsche 911 at 91%. I’m certainly in that 92%.

There was an article yesterday from Reuters saying that GM is losing up to $49,000 on each Volt that they sell, and that it costs about $89,000 to produce one.

You have to read the article carefully to realize that they are including the development cost, over a billion dollars, in the price by dividing one billion dollars by the number of Volts that have sold. By this logic, if I invest $500,000 and open a new McDonalds I will be losing thousands of dollars on every hamburger I sell, at least for the first few days, weeks, months and more.

Bob Lutz was head of GM when the Volt was conceived and brought to production — he’s the “Father of the Volt”. He had a pointed response to the Reuters article. Among other things, he called their statements “preposterous”. He claims that the Volt is near or slightly better than break-even based on production costs, and that things will improve a lot with future generations and new vehicles taking advantage of the technology.

Every summer we get ants in the house, especially in the kitchen where they like to harvest Apollo’s leftovers. We hate to spray insecticide around where Apollo and we eat, but hate having ants in the house too.

Last year we found Ecosmart Ant and Roach Killer at Home Depot. The active ingredients are peppermint oil and rosemary oil. Without much hope, we bought a can to try. We were very surprised. It is quite effective in killing any ants that are present, and it discourages ants from entering where it has been sprayed. I suspect that the neurotoxins the big chemical companies market may work better and last longer, but this seems fine and I feel a lot better spraying it around the house.

It makes sense, when you realize that plants developed many of their chemicals to discourage insects from eating them. Fortunately these particular chemicals are benign to humans, and in fact we use them to flavor our foods. They smell a lot better than the petroleum-based sprays too.

Anyway, that’s my recommendation for the day.

Just a couple of comments on solar power.

I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on house and business roofs. There are several benefits, but primarily that power is generated right where it is used and so transmission costs and losses are almost eliminated. Roofs will last a little longer too by reducing sun and rain exposure. And in the summer the sunlight and power that doesn’t hit the roof lowers the temperature in the attic a little, reducing the cooling bill. It may increase the heating bill a little in the winter, but in Arizona that’s an acceptable trade-off.

The negative of solar, wind and other alternative sources of power, however, is that it is not available 24 x 7 x 366. The power company may use less fuel when the alternative sources are active, but they still need to have enough capacity to provide ALL the power for times when there is no sun or wind. The big problem is energy storage — a way to efficiently store the extra energy created by the sun or wind and distribute it when it is needed. Current chemical batteries are just not up to the task. Several other ideas for energy storage are in the works, including compressed air, raising and lowering water levels, and heat storage using molten salt or other materials, but until the problem of energy storage can be solved, alternative energy sources will have a limited usage.