Month: September 2025

more about media consumption

I’ve been blogging recently about how I’m watching football this year, and stuff like that. I’m continuing to think about that, plus going beyond that to more about media consumption in general.

Right now, I’m watching NFL RedZone for my Sunday football fix. Later tonight, I’ll watch the Giants game on Sunday Night Football, via Peacock. That’ll actually be the first Giants game I’ve been able to watch on my TV this season. (I did watch a bit of last week’s game on my iPad, which I can do with my NFL+ subscription.) This is all fine for now. I’m getting my fill of football. Depending on how the Giants do, I may get either more interested or less interested in the weeks to come.

I briefly mentioned the Colbert thing a couple of weeks ago. Now we’ve got the Kimmel thing too. I haven’t canceled my Disney+ subscription, though I support anyone who’s doing that. I’ve been thinking about how I should react to this stuff, and have decided that maybe a positive reaction is a better choice for me.

For instance, I’ve been listening to The Bugle for years. It’s a great podcast, with some great political humor. So I went ahead and signed up for a £50/year subscription/donation. I probably should have done that a few years ago.

I’m also looking at revising the way I consume news a bit, and maybe supporting some publications/sites/podcasts that I haven’t been reading/supporting/whatever. Weirdly, I seem to keep coming back to the idea of signing up for Apple News+. A lot of the publications I’m considering supporting are available on News+. I know that giving Apple that money won’t result in very much of it making its way to whichever publication I’m reading, but it would be convenient. On the other hand, it’s not available on Windows, and I’m not sure it would fit well into my usual workflows for reading and bookmarking stuff.

I think maybe the way forward is to support independent media, whether it be news or comedy or whatever. Big business has consistently shown that it’s more interested in being on the government’s “good side” than it is in accuracy, morality, or freedom of expression.

NFL Sunday

So here’s some notes and thoughts about my experience trying to watch football today, the first Sunday of the football season.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t have any “traditional” TV service this year, having discontinued YouTube TV. But I ponied up for NFL+ Premium and the new ESPN Unlimited service.

So, for pregame shows, I was switching between the NFL network pregame show and the ESPN one. Both are reasonably good. One thing I hadn’t considered about this setup is that I no longer have anything resembling a DVR; I can’t pause, fast-forward, or rewind any of this stuff. And it’s harder to switch between “channels”, since I’m now switching between apps.

For the actual games, I decided to try watching NFL RedZone. That was actually pretty cool; I’d never had access to it before. It’s a little too “busy” for me; I’d rather see more of each game and less switching back and forth. But it’s fun and really gives you a lot of coverage of all the games.

There was a lot of grumbling recently about the announcement that they’d have commercials during RedZone this year. What I saw wasn’t really a big deal though; I think there was one very short commercial during the whole first hour of RedZone.

Speaking of commercials: another thing I miss about not having any DVR ability is never being able to fast-forward through commercials. I was watching NFL Matchup on ESPN this morning, and, despite it being a show I was watching on-demand, there were commercials in it and no way to skip them. I may be misremembering, but I think, in previous years, whenever I’d watch NFL Matchup via ESPN+, it would be commercial-free.

The Giants and Jets have, of course, both lost their first game. I don’t think this is going to be a good year for the Giants, but hopefully it’ll be better than last year.

messing around with Firefox and Vivaldi

My usual browser setup, for a while now, has been to use Firefox on desktop and Safari on mobile. (I have my bookmarks syncing between Firefox and Safari with iCloud for Windows.) That’s worked out pretty well, and I really have no complaints. But, of course, I’m a nerd, so I have to mess around with things once in a while, even if they work well.

So my first experiment was to see if I could switch to Firefox on mobile, so I’d be using Firefox everywhere. That’s been working well, though there are some tradeoffs. Apple, of course, puts every browser on iOS except Safari at a disadvantage, in several ways. The most obvious one is content blockers, which only work with Safari. I use 1Blocker on iOS, and that works reasonably well, but not nearly as well as uBlock Origin on desktop. With Firefox on iOS, I guess that their Enhanced Tracking Protection helps a bit, but it would be nice to have real ad blocking.

My next experiment has been to see if I could switch from Firefox to Vivaldi. I haven’t gotten too far with that, and I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it. I have Vivaldi set up on all of my main devices now: Windows desktop, MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPad. Vivaldi does do ad-blocking on iOS, since it’s got built-in ad-blocking. I’m not sure if it’s all that great though. I need to use it some more and get a feel for it.

One issue I’ve been having with Vivaldi is their settings sync. In theory, all of the settings should sync between all the installs of the browser, but that hasn’t worked out perfectly. The ad-blocking exception list doesn’t seem to sync at all. Another one is that my search setup doesn’t sync correctly. There seems to be a workaround, but it’s not perfect.

Speaking of search, I’ve been sticking with Kagi. I first started using it earlier this year, and I’m liking it. Of course, setting it up in a new browser can be a hassle, since you need to be logged in to use it, and since it’s not on the list of default search engines in any major browser.

So, overall: I’m going to continue messing around with Vivaldi a bit, but I might give up on it. If I do, I don’t know if I’ll go back to using Firefox everywhere, or my old system of using Firefox on desktop and Safari on mobile.

 

sports, eyesight, and other stuff

I’ve got a list of stuff I want to blog about. I’m not sure how far I’ll get, but I’m going to try to cover a bunch of stuff.

Sports & streaming

My last post, from two weeks ago, went into a lot of stuff around my plans for watching sports on TV this fall. Not much has changed there, except that I gave in and signed up for another one-year Paramount+ subscription, since they just started a 50% off deal. So now I can watch any of the CBS NFL games on Sunday, though that’ll mostly be the Jets rather than the Giants. And I can also watch the new season of Strange New Worlds.

I’m still not happy with Paramount, after the Colbert thing, and the more recent Bari Weiss thing, and… other stuff. But I guess my protest against them is only going as far as refusing to pay full price for a Paramount+ subscription.

I’m still holding out on Fox though. I haven’t even really been tempted to sign up for a Fox One subscription. That would be a step too far.

My plan for tomorrow, the first Sunday of NFL season, is to try to watch NFL RedZone (via NFL+) and see if I like it. (And, of course, annoyingly, this is the season when they’re going to start running ads on RedZone. Oh well.)

My eyesight

I had a little incident about a week ago, where I got a new floater showing up in my left eye, and that brought on a migraine. I wasn’t sure if this was the return of my migraines from ten years ago, or something else. Long story short, I saw my eye doctor and she sent me to a retina specialist, to see if I needed laser surgery. And that specialist poked and prodded my eye and decided I don’t need surgery. Which is good, I guess, but it also means that I’m stuck with the floater, which hasn’t quite gone away. I don’t notice it most of the time, but it’s somewhat noticeable when I’m working on a computer (and unfortunately, I make my living sitting in front of a computer). So we’ll see how things go. Maybe it’ll go away?

Switching cell phone service providers

I’ve been a Verizon customer since I got my first apartment after college. Back then, it was Bell Atlantic, and it was for a POTS line. And when I got my first cell phone, it was on Bell Atlantic Mobile. That all got smushed together into Verizon at some point. So, basically, I’ve been paying a Verizon bill every month since 1989 or thereabouts.

So there’s a lot of inertia there, and it wasn’t easy for me to talk myself into considering switching to another provider. But there have been some issues that had been pushing me in that direction for a while now.

First, they cut the copper to my apartment building (in 2018) and cut off the POTS service. After that I switched to a home cell service thing, but cancelled that last year, and “parked” my home number with Park My Phone, forwarding it to my cell #.

Then there was the issue we had in the office, starting about a year ago, where Verizon cell service deteriorated to the point of being essentially unusable. (It’s gotten better since, but still isn’t great.)

And also, I’ve found out that the Verizon discount I get through work is limited to my old “legacy” plan and doesn’t apply if I switch to a new plan, with a higher data cap (or unlimited data).

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to switch to Consumer Cellular. They’re an MVNO for AT&T, and I knew from coworkers that AT&T service in our building is fine, so that was one selling point. (I have, in fact, found out that it’s not just “fine”, but significantly faster than even my home internet service.) And it’s a lot cheaper, even with a bigger data plan. With Verizon, I was paying about $65/month for 5 GB. With Consumer Cellular, I’m paying $35/month for 10 GB. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, as far as I can tell.

Well, that’s about half of the stuff I wanted to blog about. Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow, if the football is boring, and if my left eye isn’t bothering me too much.