The Force Is With Me

With the release of Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker as well as The Mandalorian and baby Yoda, there has been a lot of fanfare surrounding Star Wars.  After finishing the first season of The Mandalorian, I caught the Star Wars fever and decided to watch the Star Wars films from the beginning.  As bad as Jar Jar and the CGI was in Episode 1, I enjoyed episodes 2 and 3.  Actually, I don't think I ever watched episode 3 until now. 

I had seen episodes 4 and 5 on numerous occasions, but I think I only saw episode 6 once or twice so it was mostly new to me, minus the ewoks.  I enjoyed episode 7 quite a bit but thought episode 8 was just OK.  I will likely wait for episode 9 to come to Disney+ before watching.

We got Disney+ for the kids, naturally. Disney+ opens up a ton of Star Wars content that I have never seen before.  After finishing episode 8, I wanted to see more.  I enjoyed the Clone Wars and stories around Anakin and Obi Wan so I decided to watch the animated series.  Plus, I read where it ties into the Mandalorian's story at some point.  I wasn't sure of my commitment of 6 seasons at first.   The first few episodes I thought were just OK, but they are getting better as season 1 progresses and I'm pretty much hooked now.  It is extra motivation that the final season is being released soon and the trailer looks awesome!

The Five Year Router

The last time I ran into a router problem, my devices were having intermittent connectivity issues.  This was the issues this time as well, except that it was isolated to one device only.  Interestingly, the switch from satellite to streaming TV wasn't what exposed the problem.  It was a treadmill of all things.  I knew my router wasn't pumping out the internet speeds we were paying for but didn't notice any change in performance unless I actually ran a "test my internet speed" test.

It seems like almost all devices are connected these days.  Sarah got a new treadmill that connects in order to show workout videos with trainers.  We placed it in the corner of the basement which seems to be a bit of an internet dead spot and it really struggled to stay connected, making it mostly useless.  Since we were only getting 30-40% of our advertised speed, and because routers for whatever reason seem to just quit working after a few years, I figured a new router would fix the problem, which it did.

As was the case last time I bought a router, the wireless technology has changed a lot in the past few years.  I really struggled to figure out which router I should buy.  The reviews are worthless.  Most routers have a handful of 5 star reviews, balanced out by a bunch of 1 or 2 star reviews.   My friend, who is a cybersecurity guy, gave me good advice: pick a price point and find one with decent reviews and get it.  That's essentially what I did.  However, there was a curveball that didn't exist the last time I bought a router: mesh networks.

I read quite a bit about mesh networks and thought it could possibly fix my basement dead spot problem where the treadmill sat.  As mentioned above, most mesh routers got mediocre reviews with a lot of complaints on the complexity of the setup.  After a lot of thinking (too much thinking for Sarah), we went with a traditional router which seems to work just fine.  I've come to the conclusion that unless your house is huge or you have extreme circumstances, a modern traditional router should be able to support your devices just fine.

The new router is able to deliver the internet speeds we pay for when testing next to the router, with diminishing speeds with distance but still at least twice as fast at all locations tested.  It fixed the treadmill issue and everything seems to be working better.  Also, the interface on this router is much better than my old router, allowing for easier setup of a guest network and I believe the security is better as well.

Routers are one of the most important technology devices you can own.  So much of your tech infrastructure relies on them so purchasing a good one is essential.  What I can't understand is the lifespan.  Why do these things start to crap out after 4-5 years?  And the way they die is odd for electronics - slowly with exacerbations of symptoms between periods of normal activity.  Most electronics just die, it's strange.  But I've learned that if your network is acting funny or is just slow and your router is old, it seems like buying a new one will fix the problem.

What A Great Time To Be A TV Consumer

We got rid of out satellite TV a few months ago and I haven't missed it one bit.  I always liked my satellite and its large DVR and had no intentions to get rid of it as a means to watch Television.  While many people my age and younger cut the cable a year ago or longer, we continued with the more traditional method of TV viewing mostly because of sports.  In the past, there were few mainstream streaming options to watch live sports and the experience wasn't great.  Interestingly, this time wanting to watch live sports is what made us switch to a streaming only platform.  Dish Network dropped the Fox Regional Sports Networks with seemingly no intentions to get them back.  They also briefly dropped Fox Sports 1.  All of these channels are essential to watch the Pacers and Cardinals.  I couldn't be more pleased with my decision to switch.

We decided to go through YouTube TV because of the experiences of a couple of my friends.  Admittedly, it is a bit odd at first not to have TV "channels" on the guide.  However, its "Home" screen learns what you like to watch, making a guide and channels almost unnecessary.  Additionally, YT TV's DVR is arguably better than the Hopper.  Both offer an endless amount of storage (The Hopper is technically 2 TB, but come on, that is plenty!), but YT TV's DVR seems to offer more recording options.  When trying to record a game between IU and Maryland, it asked if I wanted to record this game only, all IU basketball games, all Maryland basketball games, all Big Ten basketball games, or all college basketball games.  Amazing.  The only downside is that the recordings only stay active for 9 months and then they delete.  But honestly, unless we're talking about Glastonbury rock out concerts, if you haven't watched something in 9 months it is probably time to move on.

We decided to go with Apple TV as our hardware platform.  While not too interested in TV+ or their software, we are heavily invested in their hardware.  It seemed to make sense from that respect.  Plus, I am not a fan of Amazon's firestick interface.  We were going to go with Roku, but decided to go against it once I read a bit about their company history.  Regardless, beyond the sometimes great, sometimes awkward remote, we like Apple TV.

Here is where things get interesting.  Streaming television, as many know, is markedly cheaper than cable/satellite packages.  YT TV is a splurge for the live content at $50 per month.  We added Disney+ mostly for the kids, for a deal of $4 per month.  We also have Amazon Prime, which I will include to be fair, but we've had Prime for years and never purchased it for TV.  I think it is like $10-12 per month.  It has a ton of great content.  So our monthly content bill is $65-70 per month.  Our satellite bill under contract was $110.  Not under contract it was pushing $200.  Granted, there was some hardware infrastructure that had to be purchased: two Apple TVs at $180 a piece and a new router at $190 (more on that in a bit), but those are one time fixed costs.  We were paying monthly to rent the satellite receivers with no end to payments.  What I don't know is how the cost of streaming will change in the future.  We are already starting to see bundles being formed, and individual channel providers are starting their own streaming services with their own monthly bill.  The current a la carte options are great for a small handful of services, but can start to add up if multiple services are needed to get the content you want.  But in the current day and age, the options are affordable and provide great content.  The traditional cable and satellite companies have competition and this benefits the consumer.  What a great time to be a television fan.  Now, off to binge watch the next show.

Joy-Con Drift

I'm glad light was shed on this topic.  About 6 months ago I periodically noticed Link moving forward in Breath of the Wild without me pressing up on the joy-con.  I actually thought it was a bug with the game.  It started to occur more frequently and a few weeks ago this "joy-con drift" topic started showing up on my Twitter feed.  Apparently it is a known issue affecting many people.  Lawsuits are apparently being discussed.  I placed a ticket with Nintendo and Sarah took my left joy-con to the UPS store today to be shipped to New Jersey to be repaired.

Trimming Twitter

A few months ago Apple introduced its Screen Time feature to its iOS platforms. I already knew I was probably spending too much time on Twitter, but seeing the numbers on the screen were a bit depressing.  I was spending well over an hour per day on Twitter. I was following about 200 people making up a combination of personal interests, professional interests, and news.  Essentially, I use Twitter as a modern day RSS feed.  The trouble is that I follow a lot of accounts that provide overlapping information or retweet each other.  I was already thinking of trimming up my timeline and a conversation with a couple of my friends about the subject convinced me to do so.

I started with getting rid of overlapping accounts. I don't need to follow Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated sub accounts as they frequently retweet each other.  Next, I got rid of mostly individuals that I follow who post a lot of non-sense.  I love Ariana Grande, but good grief her Twitter feed is neither informative or entertaining.  This cut my follow number nearly in half, to around 100.  I'm hoping to maximize the amount of information that I can get from the site while minimizing the number of retweets and useless information that I see.  So far this has been successful. The first week my screen time was down 27%.  I am hoping to get my news for the day in an hour or less.

I Now Live In A Smart Home

After buying an Alexa earlier in the year I became intrigued with the idea of the smart home.  However, while cool in theory, I struggled a bit to justify spending the time and money to do something that was already as simple as flipping a switch.  Someone pointed out to me that hooking a Christmas tree up to a smart system was helpful so I decided to try it out myself.  I bought a smart plug and was easily able to set up the tree lights on a complex timing system to turn the tree off and on automatically. Pretty useful and much easier than climbing to the back of the tree to reach a plug.  Secondly, after a bit of finagling with the sketchy Alexa app, I was able to install the skill for the smart plug on my Alexa device.  Now I can turn the tree off or on using just my voice and Alexa. It's really pretty amazing. I feel like I'm living in the future.  We have some under the cabinet lights that currently we are turning off and on every night. I might extend this smart home functionality there if I can get the smart plugs on sale.

Red Dead Is Here!

Finally, Red Dead is here! I plan to spend a lot of time in this world, after the 105 gb install, that is.  I'll see you in the spring.