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”
My introductory year of AT&T U-verse fiber internet at $40 was over. The price would have gone up to $50 per month for 50 Mbps service, but I called them to see if they would keep my rate at $40. They said they don’t do any service for less than $50, but if I upgraded to 100 Mbps service I could get that for $50 for a year. I knew Comcast had plans for $40, so I said no thanks, please cancel my account when it expires. But they said I could only cancel at the end of a billing cycle which was April 8 (originally got service March 12, 2018) so I would need to pay them nearly a month at the new higher rate to avoid a cancellation fee. That really made me mad. There is no way in the world they can’t make plenty of money by leaving that wire hooked up to my house and having me pay them $40 every month, but whatever.
Since now I had nearly one extra month of service, I didn’t need to sign up with Comcast yet, but as it got within 10 days or so, I started shopping deals and found Comcast Xfinity for $30 per month for 25 Mbps service, which is the minimum for streaming 4K content (they also had 60 Mbps for $40). I think it may be better to start at the lower speed not only to save $10, but in a year it might allow me to get an upgrade for another year at $40. They don’t allow discounted downgrades. I already had a Comcast compatible cable modem from the last time I was with them, so I didn’t have to pay a fee for that and I think I had to agree to automatic payments and electronic billing (which I would do anyway). Since it was still over a week off, I was able to pick a weekend appointment for installation, so I wouldn’t have to miss work and use vacation time.
Yesterday I found a round worm from Buddy Baer, so today we went to the vet. It was a good time to go anyway since he needed a follow-up check to see if he his heartworms were really gone (they are). The vet, Dearborn Animal Hospital, doesn’t take appointments on Saturday so you just have to show up when they open and get a place in line. We were third or fourth, so it wasn’t terrible, but still took over an hour for everything (a long time in the waiting room). Buddy was overly excited with all of the other dogs that were there and I noticed four other people with dogs sat in the other seating area and we were all alone. He would bark sometimes when he got excited about seeing a new dog come in, which is not appropriate for the doctor’s office. Fortunately they called us in pretty quickly (not that we were going to be seen, just to fill up all the exam rooms).
The technician was really nice to Buddy and he loved meeting a new person, just wagging his tail watching her while she typed stuff into the computer. The doctor came in and said something like “Oh my gosh, he’s just all head!” I guess so. I don’t think she meant it in a bad way, but that was the first thing she noticed. Then she said it takes two hands to hold onto his head as she scratched around his ears, which he really liked. She thinks he is more closely an american bulldog than a white boxer. He was perfectly happy to be examined by her even while she was checking his teeth. She pulled a decent size piece of wood from between two of his back molars, no doubt from some of the yard work he does in the back chewing up limbs and small trees. He has torn all of the ivy from all of the trees back there. Unfortunately he also has pulled a lot of bark off some of them too. He has also gone after the privet and wisteria. It’s pretty impressive work. Anyway, Buddy was just super cooperative the whole time, wagging his tail, and just being a good boy. And the vet came around, saying he is a “great dog” and “soulful.” He is a handful, but I think she really got what Buddy is all about. She was shocked he was listed as eight years old, but I think the shelter just put that down so they could adopt him out for free (no charge to adopt seniors). She commented on his prominent nipples and said that can be a side effect of being neutered later in life. Sorry, Buddy.
Anyway, it’s good that he is free of heartworms, but given his energy level, I already figured that. And I gave him his first round of dewormer, so even though he didn’t seem like he was feeling bad, that should clear that up. He gets another dose for anything that hatches later in three weeks. Then he gets a follow-up in April when he is due for some shots anyway.
Later: They called Monday with the results of his fecal exam and said they didn’t find any worms or parasites, but I don’t know what that was that I found. Maybe there just weren’t any eggs. At any rate, he ate all the dewormer and I will go ahead with the follow-up dose on schedule.
I have had dogs for many years now and I have mostly avoided buying poop bags by raiding the Kroger shopping bag recycling barrel. I figure they don’t really care because recycling plastic can’t be a moneymaker, so it is just more work for them. In the sustainability pyramid, the best thing is to reduce consumption, which I have done with shopping bags by using reusable bags when I shop. Next is re-use, which I am doing with the plastic shopping bags, and last is recycle. So overall it is much better to re-use a shopping bag instead of recycling it, even if it ends up in a landfill eventually. Plus cheaper. Win-win. Still I couldn’t count on Kroger to always have bags when I needed them and I wound up returning a lot of the bags that had holes or were too big or whatever. Lately I have had a hard time getting bags and finally ran out over the weekend. So I started doing some research.
I have finished ripping all of my Blu-rays that did not come with digital copies. Using existing hard drives, I should be able to fit all of the movies and TV shows I have on my 2 TB My Cloud, backing them up on a 2 TB external drive. The only problem is the My Cloud maxes out at about 11 MB/second reading or writing, but hopefully that won’t interfere with playing the movies, though I think it might be the limiting factor.
Plex is a great tool for sharing the movies over my home network, using my desktop/laptop as a media server. I just told it where the movies were on the My Cloud and it created an index, downloaded metadata, movie artwork, etc. to make a really professional looking interface with very limited work on my part (not perfect: in A Few Good Men below it lists Christopher Guest and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as stars while leaving out Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, I guess alphabetical by first name? Didn’t realize until later that for the sample artwork I picked the same movie for this blog entry as the one on Plex). All I had to do was correct some of the mismatched movies, which I could have avoided if I had included the year of the movie in the file name. Unfortunately even though I have Plex apps on the Amazon Fire Sticks connected to both TV’s, I don’t know if I will use it that much since I already have the Blu-rays and DVD’s at home and could watch those. And since I had to compress the movie files to make them more manageable (they are still 5-10 GB each, but smaller than 25-40 GB of the original mkv files on the Blu-ray disk), it is better to watch on disk anyway. So Plex is great, but not that useful ultimately.
