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After thinking about it for a long time, then buying an indoor TV antenna that worked fairly well, I decided to cut the cord and abandon cable TV, replacing it with a system for receiving over the air (OTA) broadcasts and recording them on a digital video recorder (DVR). I picked Tablo over some of the other options because it seemed to offer a little more versatility than Tivo and was still pretty advanced and reliable. I ordered it from Best Buy and got it this week. At $200 it isn’t a horrible price up front, but there are other costs associated with it. One is they charge $5 per month for the programming guide which not only tells you what programs are coming up, but also helps you record them, record a series of shows, customize the start and stop times, etc. It seems essential to have the guide. You can also pay $50 per year for the guide or a one-time fee of $150 for lifetime guide support. I’m leaning towards doing the 1-year guide and if it works out and I keep using it, getting the lifetime. I don’t have to decide right away because it comes with the first month guide for free.

Also the Tablo does not connect to your TV’s HDMI port like a Tivo. Instead it connects to your home computer network via ethernet or wifi and you can watch shows on your phones or tablets via apps, cast shows to your TV via those devices, or gets apps for your TV. Unfortunately, Tablo seems mostly locked out of the TV app market so you have to buy a Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV stick or box to have the apps and then play the shows on the TV.

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As cable television has gotten more expensive, I have seriously thought about cutting the cord and doing without. Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that cable companies charge you for broadcast channels that you can receive for free with an antenna. But I have suffered through cable because I love having a DVR and being able to record my favorite shows and watch them when I want, skipping over the commercials. The other really difficult part is that there are really only two internet companies (Comcast and AT&T) and both of them usually require you to bundle television with your internet in order to give you any kind of decent deal. For a while I had $20 internet from Comcast and TV through Dish for $60, then I got TV and internet from Comcast for $75, but lost almost all of my cable channels. Right now I am at the end of my contract with Comcast Xfinity. They want $80 for internet only, or they are willing to give me discounts that will come to $80 for a very basic cable and internet plan. So they were kind of throwing in cable for free. In fact, they threw in HBO, Showtime, and Starz for the last year. While I enjoy some of the movies, the only HBO show I watch regularly is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. I never got into Game of Thrones or watched Westworld. Now in my second year, I can’t get HBO free for another year, though they were willing to offer Cinemax.
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Recently a couple of things happened. First, I bought some Marvel movies from Redbox. They were pretty cheap at $4 each but they come in a small Redbox case, nothing like a regular Blu-ray. I thought maybe if I wanted I could put together a case for the movies, but I knew I had to watch the cost because I could get these same movies brand new from Disney Movie Club for about $9 and they would include the case, a digital copy and Disney Movie Rewards points worth about $1.50.

Continue reading “Building a Blu-ray”

It was really cold last weekend and then Wednesday and Thursday were snow days, so I was glad temperatures were up in the 60’s this weekend and I could take Bella on another hike. We had been to Arabia Mountain a few times, so this time I found a good walk to take at Panola Mountain. The main attraction is the granite outcropping, but you can only go there on a guided tour. However, PATH has a paved trail that goes through the park and eventually ties into one of their main lines. I couldn’t figure out a good 3-mile loop so instead we just left from the state park’s parking area and walked towards Alexander Lake, a little over a mile away. There is a short boardwalk off of the trail that goes to a viewing area of the exposed granite of Panola, so we walked down that. There was still some ice on the ground, but a lot of pretty moss and lichen on the rock and a pretty blue sky. We continued on the path towards the lake, passing right through an old barn (the paved trail goes right through) and then towards the lake, but the trail was cut off for construction or something. We could have approached from another branch, but it was getting kind of late, so we headed back. My phone says we walked 3.6 miles. I’ll have to see when they plan on completing the work near the lake so we can see that whole thing.

The Disney Movie Club, which I first joined in September 2016 and am now on my third enrollment, has a refer a friend program where you can submit an email address of a friend and Disney will send them a sign-up email for the club. If they sign up you get to pick two “free” movies (have to pay shipping). I knew one person who thought they might want to join and I sent them an email, but nothing ever came of it. Not that many people buy physical media anymore though a lot of the movies come with digital versions. They also let you create a unique link to the club that is supposed to work the same way. I don’t have any realistic expectation of having an audience with this blog, but I hoped some random person might see my post about the club, decide it was a good deal (which it totally can be if you use the promo codes), and sign up using my link in that post, which never happened. I am still not sure that if you use my link and then use a promo code that I would get free disks, but it cost me nothing to put the link there. Honestly, I would rather people use the promo code and get a good deal than for them to get a bad deal and I get free disks (the deal without the promo code, by adding one more commitment title that you pay $25-$35 for, is bad enough that even if I gave them the two free disks, they would still come out better just using the promo code). Then yesterday I got an email from “Friendbuy” and the preview said “Good News! A friend has joined the Club”. I thought it was spam or maybe a Best Buy promotion, but I warily opened it today and it was from Disney Movie Club. Yay! My refer a friend dashboard shows the email address of the person and it is not someone I know, so thank you random person! They signed up on January 14. The email address and signup date are the only things I know about them.
Continue reading “Refer a Friend”