Ted's Blog

For years now I have been using Xfinity internet. I stopped using them for cable in 2018, but they were generally less expensive for internet than AT&T who seem to have set a minimum cost of $50 for any service, whereas Xfinity had intro deals I was able to renew for $30 to $40 per month for their lowest speed, which is all I needed. Last year they wanted $45 (for 150 Mbps, 100 Mbps is now their lowest speed; it used to be 25 back in 2015), but I found out that T Mobile was doing home internet via 5G (no cable, just a receiver in your house that makes a wifi hotspot) which I could get for $35 per month. Xfinity then matched that, so I kept them. Then my internet connection started getting spotty this year and I wondered if I was at the end of my contract. I was and was now being charged $59. I don’t think it was related though. I think either my cable came loose outside or my modem, which I bought so I wouldn’t have to rent one from them, had stopped working correctly.

Good time to look at options and I found that my cell provider, Mint, who has always used the T Mobile network and was bought out by T Mobile in 2024, now offers home internet similar to T Mobile, where you put a 5G receiver in your house and it broadcasts wifi. Mint only charges me $15 per month for cell service (plus fees, so almost $20), but you have to pay for a year at a time to get the best rate. No problem since I have been with them for 8 years now. They do the internet the same way and offer it for $30 per month if you get a year at a time (this is a discount that requires you to also have cell service with them). And, in fact, it seems to just be T Mobile. Although the box it came in had Mint labeling, the device itself (pre-owned) says T Mobile on it. I figured I would give it a shot and then I wouldn’t have to haggle with Xfinity every year. You get to try it for 2 weeks and can return it for a refund if you don’t like it. Meanwhile I had no internet for a few days until it showed up and quickly burned through my 5 GB cell data allowance from Mint, so I paid $20 for 3 more GB this month. Eventually I realized that there was a public xfinitywifi hotspot out there somewhere that I could connect to using my Xfinity account and that helped a lot.

I got the receiver yesterday. They suggest putting it near a window to get the clearest reception. The router does Wifi 6, so it actually covers most of the house pretty well and brodcasts 2.4 and 5 GHz. They don’t want to worry you with details, so all you can really set yourself is the network name and password. My old router had a guest network option that I used for my smart plugs (and guests, I suppose), but that isn’t an option. It also didn’t seem to be an option to turn off the wifi from the T Mobile receiver and send everything to my own router (bridge mode). My Roku stick in the back of the house was getting a weak signal, so I used a TP Link range extender to broadcast a different wifi network as an extension (getting it up to fair, which at least let me play movies), so I guess I could use that for the smart switches if I want. I’m not sure if that extended network can see the computers and server that are on my main network.

I plugged it in by the window and logged in on my iPad to check the internet speed and was quite surprised that it was 500 Mbps, though upload speed was only 10-20 Mbps. People say that the speed changes depending on how busy the local cell gets and maybe weather can play a factor too, so we’ll see. I think it will generally be less, because I just ran a test on my phone and it was down to 300 Mbps, with the receiver showing 3 bars of signal strength out of 5. I then changed the network name and password and started training all my devices to use the new network, which is kind of complicated because it isn’t just my computers, iPad, and phone, but also the 7 smart plugs, a wireless printer, a Roku stick, an Amazon Fire Stick, two TV’s, the Tablo for local TV broadcasts, and even my car. To get the maximum internet speed to the TV when I had Xfinity I had connected it directly with an ethernet cable from my old router, but I think it should work just fine with wifi now (4k movies only need 25 or 30 Mbps). That means a few less cables behind the TV. I still connected my home server to the T Mobile router with an ethernet cable because I don’t think it does wifi. Eventually I moved the receiver and server to a different window to get it away from the TV and other electronics, hoping for a better signal to the back of the house, but it actually got worse. Still, I like the diminished clutter behind the TV.

I haven’t canceled Xfinity just yet, but probably by Tuesday if everything continues to work well with Mint/T Mobile.

I have documented my highs and lows of buying blu-ray movies on Black Friday over the years and realized it was pretty much all over last year. Very few people are still buying physical media, mostly turning towards streaming, not even buying digital copies of movies. I try to keep streaming subscriptions to a minimum, but I did take advantage of an early Black Friday Disney/Hulu bundle deal for $5 per month.

After Black Friday 2023, Best Buy stopped selling movies altogther, which was terrible beause they generally had some of the best deals for Black Friday which I could reduce even further with rewards certificates. Walmart has a small selection of recent and classic movies in its stores now and maybe Target has something similar, but those are pretty much useless. Gruv is an online store that sells movies at sometimes decent prices and also is a marketplace seller with Walmart’s online page. Best Buy picked them up too this year, meaning that at least online I could get movies at Best Buy again. Gruv is run by Universal and so mainly sells movies from Universal, but also a few others like Warner Brothers. At Best Buy the prices of movies stay pretty high for the most part, but I had some $5 and $10 reward certificates at Best Buy and was able to pick up a few movies in the last month or two (Wicked¹, The Fablemans²), knocking a $20 4k blu-ray down to $5 or a $12.99 one down to $3. Best Buy also let me use my rewards points to get gift cards at Barnes and Noble which always has a 50% off sale on Criterion discs in November. I was able to redeem 600 points (I usually redeem 500 points for a $10 Best Buy certificate) for $10 off of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio³ to get it down to something reasonable. Blu-ray selection at Best Buy and reasonable deals are limited, but in November I was able to get a few more rewards certificates to pick up 4k’s of Schindler’s List⁴, this year’s Sinners⁵, and the latest Superman⁶ movie. That’s six movies on 4k which is a decent haul. I also got a $5 credit at Amazon out of the blue which let me pick up the 4k of Two Mules for Sister Sara with Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine for $5 net. So really seven physical movies. But mostly I buy digital copies of movies so I have been getting those regularly by buying Fandango gift cards for 20% off on sale and waiting for movies to generally go down to $5, meaning I can get a movie for $4 (plus tax now). I also have picked up some decent deals on complete series of TV shows, for instance 11 seasons of Frasier for $10 total and 11 seasons of Cheers for $20. The Best Buy thing is key because I use a Best Buy Visa card which generates rewards points and then out of the blue they sometimes give me a $5 certificate or have a deal where if you spend a certain amount on the Best Buy card, they give you $5 or $10 certificate. Without movies to buy I had a hard time spending my certificates on useful purchases.

As the actual Black Friday and CyberMonday rolled around, there were still no good deals on physical discs, but some good deals came along for digital movies. On Black Friday, Fandango had a deal where you could get 25 action movies from Universal Studios for $7.99, which is a great deal. The titles weren’t great and I had 7 of the best ones already, but I felt like if I could find 4 movies worth paying $2 each for, it would be a good deal, which I did. On Cyber Monday, Fandango had some $4 movies (usually they are at least $5, plus I was getting 20% using gift cards), so I picked up Battleship Potemkin, On Golden Pond, and Memento, all solid movies. They also had some TV series for $20, so I got all 8 seasons of the show Psych, which I never watched (I always watched Monk instead, which went on sale for $15 a few days later so I bought it too), but people like it. Then I found a Buy 10 for $10 deal at Fanflix where you could pick 10 movies from a decent number of older movies, and picked up some classics and upgraded a couple of old SD movies I had to HD. So I ended up with a ton of new movies. Later on Fanflix had another build your own bundle of 10 movies for $20 that had surprisingly good movies available, so I wound up doing that twice, sometimes just upgrading SD or HD movies to 4k. Apple had a 16 days of Christmas where they had a different deal of the day and some were really good, so I wound up buying 30 DC animated movies for $20. Those are pretty good movies and I already had a handful of them and had watched a few others, so I felt like that was a good deal. Maybe not a sound purchase, I got Orange Is the New Black at iTunes for the irresistably low price of $8 (have never seen an episode, but I almost bought the first 5 seasons out of 7 on DVD at Walmart one year because it was only $10). I also bought the series The Blacklist for $10.

In my search for a new place in the world to live, one criteria would be the murder rate. Generally this is the number of people murdered (Wikipedia calls this “intentional homicide”) per year per 100,000 people. In the United States, which is a pretty violent country, the number is 5.8. I was looking at moving to Chile, which has a pretty low crime rate (for Latin America) and a murder rate of 6.3, just a touch above the US. In lieu of Chile, I was thinking of Costa Rica, which comes in at 17.7, much, much higher. One place I wasn’t looking at, mostly because of crime, is Mexico, which had a rate of 24.8. The number for Costa Rica really gave me pause. Maybe instead, I could go to Spain, which has a rate of only 0.7, one of the safest countries in the world. Then I wondered what the rate for my home state of Georgia was. It is a little higher than the average for the US, at 8.2. It is harder to find numbers for Dekalb County, but one source says it is 9.3 and another said 13.7. Now Costa Rica doesn’t look quite as bad, but Spain is looking really, really good.

I started learning Spanish on Duolingo in January, so 8 months ago. I spend about an hour a day doing lessons on Duolingo, a little more at first when it was more fun, for a total now of 344 hours. CEFR has levels of language learning which are A for beginner, B for intermediate, and C for advanced. These levels can be subdivided, so right now I am on Duolingo level 79, which is right in the middle of level B1. Once you finish level 129, you have finished B2 and could start C1, but Duolingo doesn’t teach C1. C1 is basically fluent. I was happy to finish A2 (Duolingo level 60, so I had just reached B1, early intermediate) just as I was going to Santiago, Chile for a visit, but discovered that I had a pretty hard time with verbal communication, despite a lot of work and knowing a lot of words. Because Duolingo is an app, it has a hard time teaching verbal communication. Written words are easy, including reading, and it is easy to play recordings of Spanish to the user, but although it can listen to you speaking, it doesn’t do a good job of evaluating that. It also isn’t great at having you put together sentences on your own: a common exercise is for you to translate by putting a list of words in the correct order, and it gives you a few extra words to choose from as decoys. That’s not really composition where you have to recall words and the correct form of each word. It also has some exercises where it asks you to write down a free form sentence, but I’m not that confident it always even knows what I am trying to say, so while it makes corrections, they don’t always seem to end up saying what I was trying to say. Plus it rarely tells you why a mistake you make is wrong, and even though I pay for the service at the Super level, because I don’t pay more for Max, it often hides “why” behind a pay wall. I still like Duolingo and it does give some grammar lessons, builds vocabulary, and gives you a lot of time to listen to Spanish. And it can be pretty entertaining, which makes it easier to keep studying. They have lately emphasized more and more AI instead of using actual voice actors and teachers writing lessons. It shows, but they want to make a profit and AI lessons cost them a lot less than human teachers.

Continue reading “Aprendiendo”

I started thinking about retiring to another country and there are a handful of Latin American countries that seem like good alternatives to Europe which has a higher cost of living. The countries I have looked at are Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica. All have stable democractic governments with good scores for human rights. All three offer retirement visa programs open to people from the US who can show some kind of passive income, which I have from my pension. While it is easy to visit any of those countries with just a valid passport, living there longer than 6 months requires a temporary residence visa, usually a first step to a permanent residence visa, and possibly citizenship. The temporary residence visa for Chile is valid for two years. The requirements sound pretty easy: valid passport, proof of pension, clean criminal history, a passport type photo, and $200.

Back in January I was renewing my library card and one of the benefits of having a card was free online language lessons from a service called Mango. That got me looking up the best ways to learn language and Mango did not fare well, one site saying it teaches language in the most boring way possible. There are better alternatives that you pay for, sometimes a lot. But there was also Duolingo, which is incredibly popular and can be free, though I very quickly decided to get a 1-year subscription for $60. It does a much better job of keeping things interesting and is more interactive, though I don’t think it is that good at listening. Still, it is a good way to learn vocabulary, grammar, and practice listening. Lately the company has taken heat for trying to do too much with AI tools instead of having voice actors read scripts, and I think their AI stuff is definitely lower quality even though I am learning their most popular language.
Continue reading “Visa Application”