Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Thursday, October 17, 2019

The $89 Gamestop Premium Refurbished Nintendo Wii U is a steal | Plus Gamestop Black Friday Deals.


This offer might be interesting for some gamers.  I'm don't particularly trust GameStop on their refurbished items.  They have a reputation for doing a bad job on some refurbished (repaired) items.  However, they do have a return policy.

However, in the last couple of years, Gamestop has had some killer deals on Black Friday or Gray Thursday, like a $60 XBOX 360 with a $60 rebate.  I got one of these.  (I had to wait in line for like an hour.)  However, I found out that the XBox 360 has a high failure rate, especially the ones from Gamestop, so I sold the system.  I was also not thrilled about how bulky the system was and the fan in it was a bit noisy.

I make this point because in another month we will be looking at Black Friday Gamestop deals.  I would enjoy some of the Mario games on the Wii U, so this might be a worthwhile purchase, especially if the system is heavily discounted for Black Friday.  In terms of power, The Wii U is about 50% more than the Xbox 360 and has the advantage of being able to run many Nintendo titles, which according to the video are cheap for the Wii U.  (However, the Wii U is only about 40% of the power of the Nintendo Switch, which itself is much less powerful than the current consoles from Microsoft and Sony.)

Last year Gamestop had a killer Black Friday deal on the Nintendo Switch, which is a system that I want.  Instead of charging $300 just for the console, you could get the system with a game for that price, plus a $50 or $60 credit that you could use to buy a 2nd game.   I would have taken advantage of this deal, except that I had heard rumors that Nintendo was going to come out with a new Switch this year.  Nintendo did come out with a new Switch this year, but the only difference was a doubling of battery life.  These new Switches sell in a red box.

I don't know what is going to happen for sure, but there could be some interesting Black Friday deals.

For anyone wondering, both Sony and Microsoft are coming out with killer game systems 3rd quarter next year using AMD chips that aren't even released yet.  These have been described as extremely powerful game systems rivaling the best gamer PC's.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

This might be a reason to not buy a glass backed iPhone.

Unboxing a SEALED iMac G3 with MKBHD!

I think that some people will assume that older machines have more value than they have.  They might have some value as a collector's item, but as a computer, my out of date Raspberry PI 3 exceeds it in every way.


With a speed of 350 MHZ, 64 megabytes of RAM and 6 gigs of storage, the iMac G3 would be capable of only the most basic web browsing.  Many, if not most, websites would not work.  If it comes with some useful software, like word processing, then it would have some value.

Twenty years ago I remember trying to get some value out of an old 400 MHZ PC.  It was useful for playing old games, but I seriously needed an upgrade, which I did.  I went through about a five-year upgrade cycle, first getting a 2.4 GHz computer, which at the time seemed very impressive, and then a dual-core 2.4 GHz computer, and then a quad-core 2.8 GHz iMac.  I still have the iMac, and I got a whopping 9 years of use out of it, but this year I have upgraded to a better iMac.

I have learned through experience that older computers have a high failure rate.  Stuff just breaks, and the old machines aren't just worth fixing.

John Coffey

Sunday, October 6, 2019

DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive - YouTube

I remember around 2001-2002 my company gave me a 1 GB flash drive and I felt privileged.  In the stores, these were around $100, which seemed like a lot of money at the time.

Today you would have a hard time buying a 1 GB drive.  It is the kind of thing they would give away in promotional offers, assuming you could find any.  I would like to see them in cereal boxes, say for videogame promotions.

I was working for a company in 1992 when one of the programmers wanted to purchase a 2 GB HD for $2,000.  Our reaction was like, "A dollar per megabyte!  That's amazing!."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls