Category: Words

We recently cancelled our cable TV. We’re an Apple household, so we get most our stuff from AppleTV apps now. In addition to the usual Netflix and Amazon, here’s what we use.

iTunes: We purchased episodes of The Expanse (which airs on SyFy) on iTunes. We’ll have to do the same thing if we want to watch Better Call Saul. That, or wait for it to come on Netflix.

HDHomeRun: This is a TV tuner with an Ethernet port. An app on the AppleTV streams the video. This is working great for local broadcast channels. We use it the occasional live sports broadcast, a few network shows (The Good Place and Saturday Night Live come to mind), the BBC stuff that airs on PBS, and whatever else might show up on broadcast.

Channels DVR: This works with the HDHomeRun and runs on my QNAP NAS (which I already had). It writes the digital broadcast stream to the NAS and comes with an AppleTV app which ties it all together. The same app can either stream the broadcast from the tuner, or stream recorded shows from the NAS. The DVR service costs $8/month, which give you the schedule data and the ability to sechedule a season pass, etc. The price is on the high side for comparable services. There’s no contract, so I can switch if I figure out a better service.

I tried Hulu, both with and without the live TV option. Neither one was completely satisfactory. For example, I didn’t watch the first episode of The Good Place Season 2 soon enough, and it becase unavailable. A broadcast show unavailable? What am I paying for? That won’t be a problem if I record a broadcast off my HDHomeRun.

There’s one more service we use that isn’t generally available–membership to the Austin Film Society. They have a membership level that comes with free movie tickets for a montly fee. We live a few minutes away from their new theater, and we average about two films a week.

What’s missing is premium cable. We have no HBO or Showtime. If we had HBO, we would have watched the latest season of Silicon Valley and Westworld. There’s enough other stuff on that I can’t say I miss it too much. When Game of Thrones comes on, we will subscribe to HBO Now, but until then we have plenty of stuff to watch.

As everyone knows, the number one reason for poor craftsmanship is poor tools. To that end, I am addressing my poor blogging output by changing the blogging platform. I have moved from WordPress to Jekyll.

Joking aside, WordPress is powerful in lots of ways, but it does require care and feeding. For a business website, I would spend money on dedicated WordPress hosting that takes care of it. For a personal site, I don’t want to spent the money, nor do I want to spend the time to do it myself.

So here I am with a new Jekyll site. Most of the content is ported over, but not all of it came over cleanly. There’s some mangled posts. Also, I still have to find a solution to move the images over. Things may appear a bit under construction for a while.

If you’ve ever tried to research web hosting, you’re probably noticed the disreputable nature of hosting reviews. Most review sites are riddled with affiliate links, which calls into question all the reviews and ratings.

When I was shopping for managed WordPress hosting, one site I’ve come to trust is Review Signal. They now have a 2018 edition of their WordPress hosting benchmarks. I have a Lightning Base account based on their recommendation, and I’m very happy with it. I had never heard about the company before I read about them in Review Signal.

I’ve also tried Pressable. They rank highly, and their interface was nicer than Lighting Base. They are also a Texas comany. But I only have one site I really need top-tier hosting for, and Lightning Base had better pricing for that use case.

Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker laments that blogging is over:

Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun.

As evidence she cites the closing of

• Grantland
• Toast
• Gawker
• Gothamist
• Awl & Hairpin

Those are her idea of blogs? If you had asked me for an example of a blog, none of those would have come up.

Now here is a list of honest to goodness blogs, curated by Julia Evans. Where did I find this list? At Scripting News, a blog.

Michael Tsai on Swift:

I like Swift. But, having programmed in probably more than a dozen languages, I would not classify Swift as easy to learn. It’s at the end with the harder ones like C++.

People see the var declarations and think, “Javascript!”. Type inference hides a lot of the complexity of the type system. So, yeah easy things are easy. But then you think to yourself that you want to create your own collection and you’re deep into the a generics system that you never realized was there.