Apple One & Home

 

We've been long term Amazon Prime subscribers. Due to increasing cost and perceived decreased benefits (along with some other things), we've decided to discontinue our Amazon Prime subscription. The reason I'm bringing this up here is because of some downstream ramifications that come with discontinuing Prime. When I first started subscribing to a streaming music service several years ago, I went with Amazon Music Unlimited, partially because of a discount that was received if you were a Prime subscriber. I'm not sure if we still receive a discount for Music Unlimited, but the decision to drop Prime got me thinking about switching music services as well. Generally I've been happy with Music Unlimited. However, like everything else it seems, the price keeps going up for the service. Additionally, and I'll get into more details on a future post, I had issues with the Music Unlimited app(s). We're heavily involved in the Apple eco system, and so I started looking into Apple Music. This escalated quickly as I discovered Apple One, a bundle package that includes all of the apps shown in the picture above. There are already a handful of shows on Apple TV that I watch, and there is another handful of shows that I'm interested in watching. Additionally, with Formula 1 switching from ESPN to Apple TV, there was additional incentive to pick up Apple TV again. I was already familiar with TV, but I decided to do a trial of Apple Music to make sure it would work for us. Apple News is part of the bundle, and so I decided to pay attention to it again as a potential source of news. After doing about a month trial of Music and News, I decided that it was worth switching from Amazon Music Unlimited to the Apple One bundle. On the one hand, the per month cost would go up. On the other hand, I like the Apple Music app better than the Music Unlimited app, I will watch content on Apple TV, and I'll use the News app daily. This is what I mean when I say that things escalated quickly. None of this was on my radar until one Saturday morning Sarah suggested we get rid of Prime. This decision, plus being heavily involved in the Apple eco system and the overall quality of the apps in the One bundle made the decision make sense for us.

What I plan on doing is having subsequent posts where I talk about (at least some of) the apps individually. Like I said above, I've been doing trials over the past month with the apps and have subscribed to the One bundle now for a little over a week, and so I have enough experience with them to have opinions and thoughts moving forward. The other thing I wanted to mention in this post was Apple Home. We have some lighting automation in our home, some of which is electronic (as opposed to being dawn to dusk with solar sensors). The electronic workflows were a bit of a mess, because of a mix of software being used. Some of the lights were running on Alexa, some on Belkin Wemo, and some on Apple Home. In January, Belkin discontinued support for their Wemo smart plugs, which were running all of our lighting timers. I decided that moving forward I wanted to run all of our smart home workflows through Apple Home. The app is readily available to me on all of my Apple devices, it is a nice looking and easy to use app, and Apple TV can be used as a smart home hub to help control your smart devices. Since my original go around with smart home devices, a standardized protocol called "Matter" has been developed, allowing for interoperability between devices made by different companies. This is a great step forward. For me, ensuring that my devices work with Apple Home is how I am going to standardize where I go to control my home workflows. The app is really nice, and the ability to use Apple TV as a hub is a nice feature as well.

New Computer 2025: Part 4 - A New Gaming Chair

 

The final part of my 2025 computer transformation was to get a new chair. I figured that since I was getting a new monitor and completely changing the look of my desk and office, it made sense to get a new chair as well. I had been using a cheap chair we bought from Ikea, and honestly for the price it was a pretty good chair. But it certainly wasn't fancy, and it was white so over time it started to show some wear and tear. I really wanted a Recaro racing chair. I really like racing and I think the chairs look really cool. Unfortunately, the only way I could find to buy one was to go to a dealer, and the closest dealer I could find is a couple of hours away in Chicago. I wasn't willing to make that trip, so I decided to look at other options.

It didn't take much research to stumble upon Secretlab chairs. They were consistently listed as one of the better gaming chairs. I did come across a couple of other chairs that looked comfortable, but they looked like they belonged in a board room for a meeting. I decided to go with a Secretlab chair because of the reviews and because of the style. They had a ton of customization options. I honestly could have selected 10 different chairs and been happy. In the end, I decided to go with the Lamborghini chair shown above. Since I couldn't get a Recaro racing chair, I figured this was the next best option. Plus, I really like the green on grey color pattern, and the chair is made of a suede fabric which is nice. It is comfortable to sit in (it reclines very far), and just as important, it looks super cool. 

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 9 - Streaming

 

I started 2024 debating between buying a Playstation Portal or a Steam Deck. I decided on the Portal since my gaming is deeply rooted in the Playstation ecosystem, and am happy with the decision understanding that the Portal is a bit of a niche device. I say that it is a niche device because of its inability to play games natively on the device. Its reliance on a solid network connection and a PS5 console is a major limitation in terms of portability. The device was designed to be played at home, and since I was already heavily involved with Playstation and Playstation Plus, the aforementioned limitations didn't bother me much. All of this has been well documented in the first 8 parts of this series, so I don't want to dwell on it too much more here. What I do want to discuss, however, is how my 2024 ended in terms of portable gaming and what I foresee happening in the future with mobile gaming. 

A few weeks ago Sony came out with an update for the Portal allowing it to stream games. This was a feature that I wanted from the beginning and I think is big news for the future of gaming. The idea of streaming games has been around for a decade or more, but not until the recent past has it become reliable enough to push to the masses. Certain games on Playstation Plus can be streamed from the PS5, and I've done this a few times and it seems to work well. Since the Portal updated I've had the opportunity to stream a few games on it and it worked well also. The benefit for me is that it allows for the opportunity to quickly play games without waiting for the download and without taking up precious hard drive space on your console.

If you take this concept a bit further, however, major ideas start to emerge. The biggest idea is the question of the relevance of the console. When you stream games on the Portal, it completely bypasses my PS5 and connects directly to Sony's servers. I haven't had a chance to test this theory, but I suspect that streaming the games on the Portal will perform better than playing them from the PS5, simply because their network is likely more robust. More to come on that theory, but bypassing the PS5 also opens the opportunity to play games on your computer, tablet, or smart TV. Imagine downloading a Playstation app on your smart TV and connecting your Dual Sense controller to play. To some extent this is already possible, but again, it requires owning a PS5 and this completely bypasses that requirement. 

Currently, the streaming library for the Portal is a bit limited. It doesn't even include all of the games that you can stream from Playstation Plus. I suspect (or hope) this will change in the future. The streaming technology seems stable enough to use currently, but does need to be tweaked and improved so that it includes all of the features that games have when you play them from your console. This should happen as the technology advances. As it stands currently, if I have the option to play a game from my PS5 vs stream the game, I still prefer to play it locally on my PS5. I think that still allows for the best experience. I find the most value in streaming on games that I really want to just trial or to quickly play a game that I'm not too serious about. However, I think this update for the Portal shows that Sony is serious about streaming games. I expect the technology to continue to advance and am interested to see how the Portal, streaming, and portable gaming advances in 2025. There are rumors that Sony is looking into developing a dedicated portable system (a la the PS Vita) and we still have not heard official news about the Switch successor but I expect news soon and I expect that it will be portable as well. It should be fun times in 2025 for portable gaming. 

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 8 - Tweaking My Network

 

I've had the Portal for 6 months and in that time I've been able to tweak my home network and make improvements so that it reliably works well nearly every time I play it. The biggest change I made initially was that I connected my PS5 to my network via ethernet. This makes a big difference in performance, but that change alone didn't result in a consistent experience. Using ethernet reduces latency and thus makes the games more responsive, but I still got internet connection warnings and quality drops periodically. A few additional changes that I was able to make over the past few months collectively helped a lot, in addition to switching to an ethernet connection.

The first thing that I did was increase my bandwidth. I was getting 100 Mbps down from my fiber optic, and I increased it to 500 Mbps. It subsequently has been increased again to 750 Mbps by my ISP.

The second thing I did was moved the location of one of my mesh routers. I have 3 connection points, and originally I had one on each level of my house. I noticed that the Portal was consistently connecting to the router upstairs, despite there being one on the same level just 20 feet away. I'm mostly just running Alexa devices upstairs, and thus don't really need a strong connection there, so I moved it down to the main level and placed it in my entertainment center in the living room, which is where I sit to play the Portal. 

The last thing I did was change some network settings. I identified the Portal on my network and switched it to always be a 5G connection, which is what Sony recommends. The other setting change I did was to have the routers download firmware updates automatically and to have scheduled reboots. What is the first thing you do when network performance is down? You reboot your routers, which nearly always fixes the problem. I now have my routers scheduled to reboot automatically every Friday morning at 3:00 am. 

I made all of these changes around the same time, so it is difficult to say for sure which one is helping the most. I suspect moving the router down to the living room so that the Portal can connect to it just a few feet away instead of connecting to it on a whole different level helped the most. Having additional bandwidth never hurts either. I suppose in the end it really doesn't matter which one helped the most. The bottom line is that after making these few and relatively easy changes, the Portal went from working well about 90% of the time to working well nearly 100% of the time.

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 7 - The Portal Away From Home

Given the amount of tweaking I've had to do on my home network to get the Portal to run smoothly (see here and more to come on this in Part 8), I did not have high expectations for playing the Portal away from home. Over the past few months, I've had a handful of opportunities to play it while on the road, and I must say I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it has worked. However, there is one big exception to this, a problem I've run into more than once while trying to play away from home.

The Portal worked well at my dad's house, as well as a rental cabin in the middle of nowhere in southern Illinois. My dad has quick internet at his house, similar in speed to the internet I have at home, so I expected it to work there. I didn't test the internet speed in Illinois, but presumably it was not too quick given the remote location of the cabin. It worked pretty well there. I had infrequent quality and frame rate drops due to low internet connection warnings, but they were brief and resolved without losing connection to the PS5, and thus didn't interfere with gaming. 

While playing on individual networks away from home has worked well, the one location where I've ran into trouble is hotels. The reason is captive internet. Most hotel networks require a login through a web browser, and the Portal does not have a web browser. This is a major oversight, in my opinion, and hopefully it is something Sony can fix through a software update. There are a couple of ways to get around this issue. One is through a concept called MAC spoofing, a process that is complicated and likely beyond anyone's capability unless they are highly educated in the nuances of networks. The other way around it is to create your own hotspot. This is a simple process on the iPhone. I've tried it twice and didn't have much luck either time, unfortunately. In Cincinnati, I couldn't even get the Portal to connect to my hotspot. While in Texas, I was able to get the Portal to connect but experiences very poor performance with multiple disconnections from the PS5.

To be fair, I knew about the lack of web browser and thus the difficulty with connecting the Portal to captive networks prior to buying the device. If I traveled a lot and was planning on using the Portal specifically for travel, I might have not purchased it because of this and instead purchased a Steam Deck. However, I primarily use the Portal at home, and about half the time when traveling stay in rentals not hotels, so I was willing to sacrifice consistent hotel connections with the Portal. Interestingly, one of the hotels we stayed at in Texas had a conference network that didn't require a password. I was able to join that network without any trouble and played the Portal just fine, without any disconnections or network performance issues. 

In summary, I've been pleasantly surprised by how well the Portal works away from home. I've had no or minimal trouble on individual networks, some of which were not overly robust. I think my success in these situations points to the importance of having a good network setup for the PS5 itself. My hotel experience with the Portal has not been positive, however. The lack of a way to connect to captive networks is a major oversight by Sony, one that I would assume is big enough to make people contemplate not buying the device. Hopefully Sony can fix this through a future update.

Addendum (6/20/24): It's as if Sony was reading my mind. Within a week of publishing this post, Sony announced than an update for the Portal was being released which includes functionality to support connecting to public Wi-Fi! I can't wait to try this out, so more to come in the future after I have a chance to give it a try. 

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 5 - The Playstation Portal

I've had the Playstation Portal for a couple of months and have had plenty of time to play games on the device and test it out. I like the device quite a lot and have found several use cases for owning one. With that being said, it isn't perfect and does have some limitations. Let's focus on the positives first.

The hardware is excellent. Not surprisingly, it feels like a larger DualSense controller in your hands. This is a good thing, because the DualSense is an excellent controller. It even features haptic feedback on the trigger buttons. It's a big advantage to be able to play Playstation games remotely using the same controller that you would use if you were playing on the main system. No other remote player could simulate this. The Switch feels clunky (albeit it is quite a bit smaller) in comparison as it is much less ergonomic. A couple of the buttons are in different places on the Portal compared to the DualSense, including the main Playstation button, and at times I've found myself searching for a button while using the DualSense where it is located on the Portal. This is a very minor issue. Also, a lot of games utilize the center touch pad on the DualSense, and the Portal doesn't have this button. Instead, you have to double tap on the screen to simulate the button. Again, this is very minor. Overall, the device itself is very nice.

Despite not having an OLED screen and not playing in 4K (a limitation of Remote Play), the games look really nice on the Portal. When the device is performing well (more on this below), playing games on the Portal feels and looks just like playing games on the Playstation. 

While the hardware looks and feels great, there are a couple of major software limitations that I have beef with. The first is the lack of bluetooth connectivity. It has a mini plug jack to connect headphones with a wire, but there is no way to wirelessly connect headphones unless you use Sony's new Playstation Pulse Elite headphones with proprietary Playstation Link connectivity. Gamers (or game makers) seem to be snobby about Bluetooth connections because of potential latency issues (I think), but it would have been nice to be able to connect my new Sony headphones to the Portal via Bluetooth. When I purchased those headphones last summer, I was debating between those headphones vs gaming headphones. I'm glad I didn't pick gaming headphones, because they would have been completely useless for the Portal. The good news is that the Pulse Elite headphones get pretty good ratings, and in the grand picture of headphones, aren't too expensive.

My other software beef with the Portal is that it does not have a browser, so there is no way to join a network that requires a browser, such as in a hotel. This is a major oversight in my opinion, so much so that if I traveled often I would have had to take this into consideration when picking the Portal over the Steam Deck. There are ways to get around this, such as using your phone as a hotspot as well as more sophisticated ways such as mac address spoofing. I've stayed in a hotel once since owning the Portal, and I did not have success using my iPhone as a hotspot (more to come on this in a later post).

I have to spend some time discussing the performance of the Portal. In my experience, it works really well 90% of the time, OK 5% of the time, and pretty poorly 5% of the time. The challenging and frustrating thing is that for the 10% of the time where it is working just OK or poorly, it is really challenging to figure out why. I have made additional tweaks to my network (more to come on this in a later post as well) which have helped, but I still have occasional periods of time where it isn't working well. This can include dropping out of HD, losing connection with the Playstation, frame rate drops and choppy video, as well as input latency. Typically when any of this happens, it is temporary and will fix itself. I knew that this scenario was possible when I bought the device, and I'm fine being an early adopter and dealing with it from time to time. However, I'm not sure this device is ready for the mainstream because of this.

All things considered, despite some of the aforementioned limitations, the Portal really is a great device. It has a lot of positive qualities, and I think if you are looking for a mobile device exclusively to play Playstation remotely, I'd recommend the Portal as it does a great job of simulating the Playstation experience. I'd give some caution to those who travel frequently, however. In my next post in this series, I'll discuss what types of games I play on the Portal and how it has opened up opportunities to experience new games that otherwise I maybe would not have played.

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 4 - And The Winner Is...

 

I wrestled hard with this decision in my mind for 2-3 weeks. There were clear advantages and disadvantages for selecting one over the other, and I likely would have been happy with either. In the end I decided on the Playstation Portal. The Steam Deck has one big advantage over the Playstation Portal in that it can play games directly on the device from the Steam library. That is a massive advantage if you are interested in playing Steam games. Steam has a great library, but I have access to almost any game I would want to play on Steam already, either on the Playstation or Switch. Because of this, the Portal had many advantages over the Steam Deck. It is markedly cheaper at $200. Compare this to the $400-$600 cost of the Steam Deck depending on which model you choose. Based on some articles I read and YouTube videos I watched, the Chiaki app seemed quite capable on the Steam Deck. However, it required some setup and there is always the fear that the app would stop working for some reason. The Portal is ready to go out of the box for Remote Play and is not going to quit functioning since Sony makes the device. There is something to be said about Portal's use of the DualSense controller as well. The DualSense is a fantastic controller, and playing Playstation games remotely on the same controller you are used to using for the games, complete with the haptic and rumble feedback, is a bonus. Considering my main objective was to play and have access to my Playstation remotely, the Portal made the most sense for me in the end.

Interestingly, the Nintendo Switch helped with my decision for two reasons. The first is that since the Switch is portable, I already have an option for portable gaming where wi-fi isn't available. This is a major draw-back to the Portal. While major 3rd party games on the Switch are oftentimes a disappointment, the first party Nintendo games are fantastic and there are a number of simpler games that are fun that run just fine on the Switch (see Dave the Diver). The second reason is because of the Switch 2. Rumor was the Switch 2 would be released in late 2024. Now the rumor is that it will be released in the first quarter of 2025. Regardless, Nintendo's next generation system will be released in the near future, and there is a large chance that I will purchase it. With that being said, I was hesitant to spend $400+ for a Steam Deck when I will likely be spending that money for Nintendo's next system. 

I've had the Portal for a few weeks as of the date of this post, and have plenty of experience using it. In Part 5, I will discuss my experience with Sony's remote player thus far.

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 3 - The Steam Deck

 

I've been interested in the Steam Deck since its release. The thought of having a handheld gaming device powerful enough to play high-end PC games is super cool. I don't have a PC at home (I use an iMac) and so I also saw this device as a gateway to computer games, as games for Mac are limited compared to the library for PC. Despite my interest, time and money have prevented my pursuit of the device. Between the Playstation and Switch, I already have access to more games than I have time to play. Additionally, the Steam Deck isn't exactly cheap. It's priced well for what it does, but at $400-$600 depending on features, I need to be all-in on the device in order to spend that kind of money. With that being said, the Steam Deck is a device that has remained on my radar but I never seriously considered buying one until a chance conversation over the holiday.

I had never seen a Steam Deck in person until this past Christmas. I was talking to someone who had one and so I got the chance to play with it a bit. We were discussing the advantages of handheld gaming, and I mentioned my intention to buy a Playstation Portal. He then informed me that you could use Remote Play for the PS5 on a Steam Deck. My head nearly exploded as I had never once thought about that possibility. I started doing research and discovered that there is an app for the Steam Deck called Chiaki that enables Playstation Remote Play (apparently you can run this on the Switch as well). For the first time since the Portal was announced, it had competition in the form of the Steam Deck. Now I had a decision to make: Do I pick the Portal that is more affordable but with less features, or do I pick the Steam Deck that is more expensive but is a whole separate gaming system? Tune in to Part 4 to learn about my decision.

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 2 - My Network

 

We have fiber optic internet at the home with 100 MB download speed. Fiber optic is considered the optimum connection method, but in the grand scheme of fiber optic speeds, 100 MB down is not all that fast. With that being said, we have had no issues with our internet speed. We can simultaneously stream HD videos, surf the internet, stream music, etc. I haven't had any trouble playing games online either. The only issue I've consistently run into in terms of internet performance is when trying to use Playstation Remote Play. Anything I've ever read says 10 MB should be adequate speed to stream efficiently. Remote Play is no different, as Sony's site recommends 5-10 MB minimum. We have 10X that speed, so the question is why do I have so many problems with Remote Play? The answer I've discovered is that speed isn't the problem. It's latency.

I have very little understanding of internet latency beyond what I can infer from the words in the phrase. However, it doesn't take much reading to learn that one of the best ways to improve latency is to bypass wi-fi and hardwire your devices with good old fashioned ethernet cable. In the past this would have been very difficult to accomplish, since my PS5 is in the basement and my main router is upstairs in my kitchen. However, when I updated my wi-fi router a little over a year ago, I decided to go with a Mesh network. This provided me with a node or access point on every floor of my house. Simply moving the basement node close to the PS5 allowed me to connect the Playstation to the network via ethernet.

Preliminary results have been promising. In addition to Remote Play, I also ran into issues streaming games on the PS5. Limited testing has shown improvement in both streaming games and Remote Play since connecting the PS5 to the network via ethernet. Using my iMac, I was able to play 30 minutes of Ghost of Tsushima without major interruption and complete an entire race on Gran Turismo 7. Using Remote Play to play a racing game would have been impossible when the PS5 was connected to wi-fi. Ghost of Tsushima did drop out of HD a few times, but only momentarily and there were no major frame rate drops or interruptions in the connection that made playing the game difficult. Using ethernet seems to have improved performance enough that I was satisfied with moving forward with Remote Play. I thought the Playstation Portal was an obvious choice, until a chance conversation over the holidays. 

My State of Mobile Gaming in 2024: Part 1 - The Current Situation

                               

Ever since I first discovered Playstation Remote Play, I've been fascinated by it. When I was younger, portable gaming never interested me. The only portable system I owned was Sega's Game Gear, and I never played it. It wasn't until I got the Nintendo Switch in 2017 that I realized the advantages of mobile gaming. For me, it is all about the freedom of gaming anywhere I want throughout the house. Sure, mobile gaming is great for travel, and I do use my Switch when I travel. But I don't travel that often. Having the freedom to play my PS5 on my couch without going down into the basement, or playing my Switch in the sunroom in the summer while we watch a baseball game appeals to me. Despite interest in Playstation Remote Play, I rarely use the feature because my experience has been less than stellar. Periodically I will get enthusiastic about it and try it again, just to be disappointed by the results. I experience frequent frame rate drops, frequent drops out of HD, and a lot of input lag. Despite these frustrations, I have remained interested in the concept of mobile gaming, and my interest grew in 2023 for a few reasons.

The first reason is Playstation Plus. I now have access to tons of games, many of which are suitable for putzing around on a smaller, mobile screen to kill time. I don't have much interest in playing blockbusters like God of War or Spider-Man on a mobile device. By the same token, I don't have much interest in playing games like Two Point Hospital on my home theater system in the basement. I think games like Two Point Hospital are perfect for mobile gaming around the house, where I can play while sitting on my couch while a basketball game plays in the background.

The second reason is the Playstation Portal. Up to this point I have been playing Remote Play on my iMac and iPad. I thought that some of the performance issues I've experienced could be because of the devices I've been using. My iPad isn't exactly new, and while I would think my 2019 iMac would be plenty powerful to use Remote Play, it isn't exactly optimized for this use. Additionally, while it is cool that you can connect a DualSense controller to your iPad, you can't exactly lounge on the couch and play games while holding an iPad and a game controller. The Playstation Portal solved both of these issues. However, I am still uncertain about the performance of Remote Play. After doing some reading on the issues I've experienced, and after a random conversation with someone who has a Playstation Portal, I got an idea of what I needed to do next. To be continued in Part 2.

Playstation Remote Play - Attempt 2

 

Two years ago I wrote about Playstation Remote Play. Having access to my Playstation remotely is appealing for numerous reasons. However, at the time I experienced connection issues and frame rate drops, making the service unreliable and not too useful. I said that once I got my hands on a PS5 and was able to do some improvements on my home network, I would revisit the service. That time has now come, so I decided to give it another go.

In addition to upgrading from the PS4 to the PS5, I also upgraded my home network. I finally decided to go with a Mesh network, and have an access point on each floor of my house instead of one central router. This has improved performance of my network in the basement, which is where I keep my PS5. Previously when I've tried to use Remote Play, I tried it out by playing the F1 games. That type of game obviously won't tolerate any drops in frame rate as your car will end up in the wall. What prompted me to revisit remote play was Cities: Skylines (C:S).

C:S is the type of game that I'd prefer to play on a computer. I find the mouse and keyboard combo much more functional for this type of game. I actually have the game on Steam, but don't play it because my iMac apparently isn't powerful enough. It runs well on the PS5 (via the PS4 version), but I honestly don't see myself sitting in my basement recliner in front of my big screen building cities. I want to be able to turn this game on and tinker with it when I have 20 minutes or so here and there to spend. This is where Remote Play comes into the conversation. I'm able to pretty easily connect my DualSense controller to my iMac or iPad and begin playing anywhere in my house.

My second attempt at Remote Play was a better experience. The app connected to my PS5 most of the time. I believe the resolution is 720p, which is a noticeable drop from 4K, but is still functional. I still ran into connectivity and frame rate issues, however. The majority of the time this wasn't the case, but periodically it would happen and gameplay would suffer. Occasionally to the point that the connection would drop. Periodic frame rate and resolution drops are tolerable on a free service for a game such as C:S, but it really limits which games you can consistently play on the app. I will admit that despite my new Mesh network, I don't exactly have the most robust internet connection. It is fiber optic, but only 100 MBPS down. I don't run into any other streaming issues and this is well above the recommended connection speed for the app. I've even streamed games on Playstation Plus on my PS5 without trouble. There has to be something specific to the nature of the app contributing to these issues.

Last week at the Playstation Showcase, Sony revealed Project Q, a dedicated device for Remote Play. I am intrigued by this device because I want to make Remote Play useful. A dedicated device for the app could be an improvement. However, given the limitations mentioned above, I somewhat struggle to understand the full purpose of the app and who it is meant for. This is not a replacement for the Switch or Steam Deck.

IGN Playlist

My gaming landscape has become so complicated that it has come down to this. I am now using an app to organize the games I am playing, games I want to play, and games that I have finished. I had previously come up with this idea of an "A List" and "B List" of games. The A List contains games that I know I want to play. Tears of the Kingdom is an example. The Zelda games are some of my all-time favorites, so there is no question that Tears of the Kingdom is a game that I want to play. The B List contains games that I am interested in and would check out if I had a chance, but may not necessarily purchase. 

All of this has become necessary because of Playstation Plus. I've never had access to 400+ games before, and having access to this many games greatly increases the number of games on my B List that are available for me to play. This opens the possibility of an interesting phenomenon where B games transition to A games. For instance, Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War were both on my B list. Now that I've played them, the other games in those series have transitioned to my A List because I liked them so much.

Previously I was saving both A and B List games to store wish lists. The advantage of this is that you are notified when games go on sale. Otherwise, there are no additional options. You can't even make separate lists of games. Last week I stumbled upon the IGN Playlist app. I already use IGN quite a bit to read game reviews and guides. Playlist allows you to organize games into categories such as "Currently Playing", "Want to Play", etc. One of the advantages of using the app is that it can cross platforms, something the store wish lists cannot do. The bigger advantage of using the app, however, is that it acts as a gateway to all of the great content IGN has on the game. Instead of searching for what you're looking for, you can now go to Playlist and click on the game to access the walkthrough, for instance.

I've always been a fan of digital organization, and it is easy to micromanage game lists with this app. That is not what I want to do. However, it is cool to have a place to organize my thoughts on what games I want to play next, as well as have a quick gateway to guides and other relevant game info.

Twitter, What A Dumpster Fire

 

Social media is constantly getting scrutinized, and probably for good reason. I don't get too involved with the conversation, as I don't routinely participate on social media platforms. The major exception to this is Twitter, however. I routinely check Twitter. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, RSS was developed and gained popularity, and there was a time when I utilized RSS as a way to bring news to me, rather than going to retrieve it. At some point RSS use and popularity faded and Twitter was developed and became popular. I started to use Twitter essentially as an RSS replacement, as a way to get news items I care about to me quickly and efficiently. 

As my Twitter utilization increased, I started to realize how terrible their native app was. It was littered with unwanted ads, retweets, and awful timeline jumps. I eventually jumped to a third party app called Tweetbot, and have been mostly happy since. However, Twitter recently announced that third party apps would no longer be supported, essentially shutting down Tweetbot and forcing users to use the native app, and it is terrible. At times it can make Twitter almost unusable. Case in point, the "show more tweets" button. If you go more than about 20 hours without looking at your timeline, it will want to jump your timeline until about an hour in the past. I usually only access Twitter once per night, so every night I have to press the "show more tweets" button several times in order to see Tweets about the days events. Last night when I did it, the button disappeared and my timeline jumped from 23 hours ago to 11 minutes ago, with no way to access or view the tweets that happened the entire day prior.

I've already thought about quitting Twitter altogether because of this development, but it isn't that simple. I actually rely on Twitter for news, for both professional and personal interests. At the moment I don't have anything that would adequately replace the service. If the app continues to perform like this, however, I will search a bit harder for a replacement. If one doesn't exist currently, I suspect another company has one in development already.

Is Mesh the Answer?

 When I bought my previous router in 2019, Mesh and Wi-Fi 6 were all the rage. I got a router with neither technology. I wasn't sure if any of my peripheral devices supported Wi-Fi 6, and I had previously done fine with traditional routers, so didn't think Mesh was needed. Plus routers with these technologies cost more. I went with the traditional wi-fi router and it has worked fine until a few months ago, when it did what routers tend to do - drop signal. I typically get 4-5 years out my routers before signals start to drop. This time it happened before 3 years had gone by. Streaming issues in the basement is what we experienced this time. I'm using a range extender because of previous issues in the basement, which seemed to help temporarily. But it got to the point where we were rebooting the range extender, then rebooting the router, and trying to connect to one of the 6 networks that now existed in our house, that I thought it was time to upgrade our router.

In this age of wireless devices and streaming, the home router is one of the most important pieces of tech in your home. With this being said, you want to get a good one. However, they are very difficult to research. Despite being somewhat intelligent about home tech, even I have a hard time understanding the difference between them. Reviews can be deceiving because someone can give a router a bad review simply because they couldn't get it hooked up, which may or may not be the routers fault. 

With all of this confusion surrounding routers, I did what I typically do in these situations. I bought one that was middle of the road on price, and one that generally got favorable reviews. I decided to get a Mesh system this time. Our house isn't huge, but it is spread over 3 levels and the basement is a common struggle for consistent streaming. Our main router is on the main level, so I was thinking that routers aren't great at broadcasting below their location. I don't actually know that for sure, but it makes sense to have a device broadcasting the network as close as possible to where it is needed. The system I got has three nodes, one for each level of the house. It was simple to set up and I like that I only have one network to connect to now, instead of multiple that existed with my previous router which caused confusion, mostly for the internet of things.

It's impossible to judge how well a router is working after only a few days of use, because all new routers are going to work well. I can say that I have fiber optic and pay for 100 Mbps down. Previously when doing internet speed tests on my PS4 & 5, I would get around 30 Mbps. When I tested this with my new Mesh system, I got 85 Mbps. Quite an improvement! The real judge of success will be how the system performs over the long haul, however. I'm hoping to get more than 3 years out of this system.

Indycar on Peacock

 

When NBC shut down NBC Sports at the end of 2021, they shifted qualifying for IndyCar races on to Peacock, requiring a paid subscription. I typically watched qualifying and so was a bit bummed by this decision. I decided not to get the $5 subscription initially. This decision was less about the money and more about the principal of having to pay for something that used to come with my YouTube TV subscription.  I thought I might pick it up for the month of May, as there is a lot of Indy 500 content that is broadcast on the channel, but I didn't. Turns out I was too busy to watch it anyway. The season prior to the 500 is pretty sparse, commonly going 2-3 weeks in between races. Once the 500 hits, however, the rest of the season throughout the summer is pretty busy with weekly races. All of the races except one are on NBC or USA, which I get through YouTube TV. The race in Toronto, however, was exclusively on Peacock. That weekend I didn't have much going on, so I decided to go ahead and subscribe to the service to see what it was like. I must say that I enjoyed the experience more than I expected.

One of my buddies who went through this experience last year complained a lot about the app. He said you couldn't pause/rewind live TV, it took a long time for recordings to reappear on the app, etc. I think they've improved their app since last year. You can pause and rewind live TV, recordings appear on the app as soon (or shortly after) they finish live. The headlines do not contain spoilers. It is overall a nice presentation and app experience. One of the fears of removing content from a more traditional provider is that you loose DVR functionality, and I'll say that for the most part this app does a good job of replacing what you would get on a DVR. My only small complaint is that if you watch the race on Peacock, you don't get side-by-side coverage for commercials like you do on NBC. This is at least true for the $5 tier, I'm not sure if this is true for the $10 tier. Overall, the app experience is nice.

There is no question that racing is a niche sport. The obvious negative to this whole setup is that you have to pay $5 a month. There are positives, however, and if you are a big fan (which let's be honest, if you're looking into getting this for racing, you're a big fan), I think the positives easily outweigh the $5 per month fee. In addition to qualifying, you also get the practice sessions and Indy Lights content, none of which was previously available on NBC Sports. Keep in mind, too, that Peacock isn't a racing app. In addition to the racing content, you get other sports content, including English Premiere League soccer, as well as a lot of NBC content as well.

Despite the annoyance of having to pay for what was previously "free" on my main TV service, I think the amount of content and delivery through the Peacock app is worth the price of admission. We were reluctant to cut the cord from our satellite initially because of fear of losing live sports content. YouTube TV has been an excellent substitute for cable/satellite TV. However, at this point in time I feel as if we are very close to being able to eliminate the traditional cable service. Most of the sports we watch we can access through individual apps, and most shows we watch are the same way. More to come on this topic, but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future we migrate to a more individual app experience. 

Grand Theft Auto V Online

 

When I finally got a PS5, one of the goals was to do some online gaming. Generally I prefer single player games, but my buddies now have a console for the first time since the PS3 era, and there was lots of talk about playing racing games together online. They've had their console for a little over a year, and I've had mine for a few months. Thus far there has been no online racing. We have played together online several times, however, and from an unlikely source: Grand Theft Auto V.

I say an unlikely source because GTA V is a PS3-era game from 2013, and the online version was released shortly afterwards. I actually posted about the game way back in 2015. The Playstation store was offering the online version of the game as a free download (I think it is normally $20) so it was a no-brainer to pick it up to revisit Los Santos once again. Despite not playing the game since 2015, I had loosely followed it on social media and knew that it remained popular and received consistent updates. As someone who is essentially new to the game, I must say it was a bit overwhelming when I started playing it again. There is a lot going on, and a lot of opportunities. 

Not surprisingly, coordinating the schedules of 5 guys in their mid-to-upper 30s with families to be able to play online together is quite a challenge. Typically only 2-3 of the 5 of us are ever on at the same time to play together. With that being the case, I have tried to play the game by myself to build up my character but with minimal success. Rockstar was generous to give new PS5 players of the game $4 million to start a career and not have to start from scratch. While this is helpful, I have still struggled to find a way to consistently make money. My nightclub was a bust. I had enough money left over to buy a "clubhouse", which is basically an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. From there you can start a motorcycle club and subsequently run illegal businesses like weed farms or money laundering services. Should be great sources of money. The trouble is, you have to have additional money to purchase the businesses first, which I don't have. And after watching a few YouTube videos about the process, there is quite a lot of grinding and time commitment that must occur after starting your business before you start to make money and recover from your initial investment. I'm not sure that I'm interested enough to go through the process, and even if I was, I haven't really found a good way to consistently make money to purchase the business in the first place. Most of the smaller missions available to make a little money either require 2-3 people, or are pretty difficult unless you have 2-3 people on your team. Completing the mission alone is pretty tough, which gets back to the scheduling issue discussed above.

Despite this aspect of the game, it is an absolute riot when playing together with your friends. The environment remains fun as ever, and it is a game where you can be serious and accomplish some missions and get some cash, or have a few beers and screw around at the casino or just driving around listening to the radio. I've pretty much given up on trying to accomplish much with this game on my own. I have too many other games I want to play to dedicate a ton of time investing millions into business opportunities. With that being said, I still hop online once a week or so when my friends are available. It's tons of fun. I just didn't think my first reason to get Playstation Plus on the PS5 would be to play a nearly decade-old game.

Playstation Plus

 

I knew once I had a Playstation 5 I would need to get Playstation Plus. I had never had much need for it in the past. I didn't think I played enough games to make the game sales worth the price of the subscription, and I certainly didn't play online games. However, with the arrival of the PS5, a couple of my friends joined the gaming scene for the first time since the PS3 era. One of the big agenda items for them was to join together to do some online gaming. At some point in the past, a subscription was required to play games online on the Playstation, and thus the subscription was inevitable.

Previously Playstation had two separate subscriptions: Playstation Plus, for online gaming, and Playstation Now, a cloud-based game streaming service. Earlier this year, Sony announced they were combining the services into a newly rebranded Playstation Plus, that will now have tiers based on the features you want to have included. With this announcement, I wanted to wait until the new Playstation Plus launched in June before subscribing. 

The entry tier costs $60 per year, and essentially gets you online play. The middle tier costs $100 per year, and is a hybrid of Playstation Plus and Now. This is the tier I got. In addition to the online play, it gives you access to a fantastic game library, where you can download the games to play on your system. I already downloaded a couple of games and started playing one of them. This is the first time in my life where I've had access to 100s of games to download and play. What's cool about this is that it allows me to play some games I'm interested in but may not have purchased outright in the past. It's a bit overwhelming, honestly. Similar to streaming services where I have access to 100s of shows, having access to all these games leaves me a bit confused on when and how I'm going to play all of them.

The third tier costs $120 per year, and allows for game streaming (vs needing to download them to your system), and access to more games as well as vintage games from PS3 & 2. I decided to split the difference and get the middle tier, as I don't have much use for games from PS3 era and earlier, and I'm OK with downloading games, though I needed to buy a hard drive to have more storage. My justification for the middle tier was that even if I played one game per year, it would make up the cost difference between $60 and $100, as purchasing new games is expensive. I'll likely play more than one game per year. Despite my initial reservation in subscribing, having the service has really transformed my PS5 into an ultimate gaming destination. The amount of games available is staggering. Interestingly, what sparked all of this was Grand Theft Auto V, a game from the PS3 era that is nearly 10 years old. More to come on this in a subsequent post.

Kid A Mnesia, Now Streaming in HD!

Kid A Mnesia is Radiohead's first album in several years. A triple disc set, the first two discs are re-releases of Kid A and Amnesia. Both albums are among my favorite Radiohead albums. They were the beginning of when things started to get weird, when Radiohead went from a mellow 90s grunge rock band to whatever you would call the music on these albums. It's somewhat difficult to define in words, but fantastically weird comes to mind. Kid A was my introduction to the band, which I like a lot, but of the two albums I like Amnesia even more. The third disc contains new music. Some of the songs are new versions of previous songs on the albums, while others are brand new. I'd say its pretty good overall, definitely worth a listen if you're a Radiohead fan.

I became interested in music at the end of the cassette tape era. I had a small tape collection, most of which was given to me by my uncle. Mix tapes were a big deal as well. I lived through the entirety of the CD era, and had a fairly large CD collection, including a 200 disc CD changer. Entering the MP3 era, we sacrificed quality for quantity, free quantity at that. For the first time, I had access to essentially any song I could think of for free. At the time, I had a PC connected to dial-up internet, connected to a component stereo through a mini-plug that could go loud enough to shake the house. A song would take a half an hour to download, and the quality of music was pretty bad, especially at higher volume levels. Somewhat recently, 2018 I think, I advanced to listening to music through a paid streaming service. There was hesitation on my part because such services lack any form of ownership. As someone who used to have 100s of CDs and thousands of MP3s, it was a bit difficult to wrap my mind around the idea of listening to music without owning anything. The benefits of having access to millions of songs far outweighs those concerns, and eventually I decided to pay for the service, which I am glad that I did.

I bring all of this up for one simple reason. A few weeks ago, Amazon Music Unlimited started playing most of their music in HD or Ultra HD. I had to look this up to determine what it meant. Essentially, HD is equivalent to CD quality, and Ultra HD is even better quality. Living in multiple eras of music consumption, I've experienced the pros and cons of all types of music media. I can say without question that I haven't listened to music on any media that sounds as good as the compact disc. The sound is so rich and full, especially when listening on a nicer stereo at higher volumes. One of the big drawbacks of streaming is that it is typically a compressed music file. I don't usually notice this when listening at lower volumes or on simple speakers, but when you stream it to a larger stereo it just doesn't pack the punch of a CD. You'd have to turn the volume up louder to achieve the same sound levels and typically the poor sound quality stands out. That's why when they made the announcement about streaming in CD quality (or better), I was super excited to return to the era of CD-quality sound. Now I get the best of both worlds, in terms of CD quality and streaming's large music library. 

Tweetbot

 

I've thought about getting a secondary app to access Twitter for years. If you use the Twitter app, the reasons for switching are probably obvious. Your timeline becomes cluttered with retweets, promoted tweets (i.e. ads), etc. But the most annoying thing of all is the Twitter timeline jump. The app will go through periods of time when it works fine. However, there are periods of time where it can't seem to keep a linear timeline. It typically either jumps several tweets or sometimes hours forward on your timeline, requiring constant backward scrolling. Or even worse, occasionally it will jump on your timeline to an alternate Twitter reality, where the tweets you were seeing are completely gone, replaced by new Tweets as if the previous ones never existed.

When I went to the app store there were fewer 3rd party apps available than I expected. Tweetbot was one I had heard of before and got decent reviews, so I downloaded it. Accessing my Twitter account was as easy as logging in, and before I knew it I was viewing a clean, streamlined version of my timeline. I've been using the app for around two weeks and there have been no timeline jumps, no promoted tweets, and no clutter. The tweets are formatted differently, taking up more of the horizontal screen space requiring less scrolling. The overall experience is cleaner and improved.

I fully expected to pay for this app, but this far I haven't paid anything. I have mixed emotions about paying to access something I can access for free, but I use Twitter often enough that an improved experience is probably worth the few dollars. I may be in a free trial period, but I've been using it for a few weeks and it hasn't asked me to pay yet. Most of the Twitter features are locked, like responding, liking, direct messages, etc. If you pay for the subscription those features are unlocked. At this point, I'm thinking you can use it for free but sacrifice those features. I'm fine with this as I am not a Twitter power user and tend to use it more for consumption of information versus sharing my opinion or interacting with others. Plus I can always switch to the native Twitter app to access those features if wanted. With all of this being said, I will likely continue to use Tweetbot as my main Twitter app as the experience is quite a bit better. This will especially be true if I don't have to pay anything for the app.

MLB.TV

Way back in 2015 I wrote about my struggles with streaming TV.  As previously discussed, so much has changed in that arena in the past 5 years.  I wanted to take a brief moment to mention MLB.TV, which has also changed a lot since we used last in 2015.  With the switch from Dish Network to YouTube TV, we no longer had access to MLB Extra Innings and so we had to start using MLB.TV.  The experience this time around was much better.

With Extra Innings, we had a guide of games with no additional information.  When using MLB.TV, it shows us all games, the score of the game, the inning, etc. to help monitor close games for viewing.  If something exciting is about to happen, like a no-hitter, we receive a notification to switch games.  You can watch two games simultaneously.  You have easy access to standings within the app.  We experienced minimal-to-no buffering issues.  The overall experience was great.  Not only better than our 2015 experience, but better than our Extra Innings experience with Dish.  The only small complaint is that sometimes it takes a bit of time to load the game from the game selection screen, but honestly that could be an Apple TV issue.  It didn't do it at the beginning of the season, but became an issue as the season ended.  Overall a great app and great experience for watching baseball. I would recommend it over Extra Innings, even if your carrier has Extra Innings.  I think it's cheaper too.