Category: video

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.

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.

more nonsense about sports and streaming

This is the third post I’ve written about sports and streaming this month. (See here and here for the previous ones.) Sorry. I guess I’ve been retreating into watching (and reading about) sports because the “serious” news is too stressful right now.

I mentioned the new ESPN streaming thing in one of my previous posts. I gave in and signed up for it yesterday. My previous Disney+ bundle was the “legacy” one that included ad-free Disney+ and ad-supported Hulu. That was $22/month. There’s no equivalent bundle with the new ESPN service. The bundle with ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu is $30/month. The bundle with ad-free Disney+ and Hulu is $39/month. So I went ahead and signed up for that. It’s probably too expensive, and I don’t know if I’ll stick with it. And that $39/month rate is a promo; after a year, it goes to $45/month.

It just seems like all of this stuff is getting too expensive and too complicated. I’m still pretty happy with my MLB.TV subscription, which lets me watch most of the Phillies games. (I wish I could watch all of them, but I guess it’s good enough.)

I’m still not sure if I’m going to be happy with my NFL situation this season. I’m still planning on watching RedZone on Sundays (via NFL+) and hoping that’ll scratch my football itch. And I can watch Thursday Night Football on Amazon, Sunday Night Football on Peacock, and Monday Night Football via my new ESPN subscription. So that should be enough.

I’m also trying to see if I can get into Premier League Soccer. I was randomly clicking around in the Peacock app last Saturday, and happened to notice that it was week one of their season. And Peacock has a whip-around show (similar to RedZone I guess) called Goal Rush, so I can watch that for a couple of hours on Saturday and see bits and pieces of a few different games. So now it’s week two, and I’ve watched a bit of this stuff, and it’s kind of fun, though I’m mostly treating it as background noise. I haven’t developed any real interest in it yet.

And I briefly thought about giving up on the NFL and following the CFL instead. That thought came from the storyline that ran in the Crankshaft comic strip recently, where the main character went to Winnipeg to see a Blue Bombers game. It turns out that streaming rights for the CFL in the US aren’t terribly complicated, but they’re not terribly convenient for me either. Some games run on CBS Sports Network, which I’d probably have if I still had YouTube TV, and which might be included with Paramount+, though I’m not sure. The rest of the games can be watched on CFL+, which is a free streaming service. So that sounds good! It’s free! But there’s no Apple TV app. I’d have to pull up the website on my laptop and then AirPlay it to the Apple TV. That’s too much work.

So overall, my plan for distracting myself with sports for the next few months is approximately as follows:

  • Phillies games on weeknights, via MLB.TV.
  • Some other random baseball games on ESPN and Apple TV+.
  • NFL games on Sunday via RedZone on NFL+.
  • Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football via Amazon, Peacock, and ESPN.
  • Maybe Premier League soccer on Peacock on Saturdays.

This will probably all fall apart at some point. If the Giants are as bad as they were last year, I may lose interest in the NFL. Or, conversely, if they do well, I might get frustrated about not being able to watch all of the games.

And I don’t even want to think about how complicated watching the MLB and NFL playoffs will be. Well, that’s a problem for another day.

Streaming Chaos

Preseason football has started up, so that’s got me thinking about how I might be watching (or not watching) football this year. Last year, I had YouTube TV, and the year before that, I still had the broadcast basic package from my cable company. So this is the first time I won’t have any way to watch regular old broadcast TV during football season. (I could still break down and re-subscribe to YouTube TV, but I’m not planning on doing that.)

Streaming is getting even more complicated this year, it seems. Here’s a fun article about how to watch football this year. ESPN has a new streaming service starting up soon. If I understand things correctly, my ESPN+ sub will become an ESPN Select sub, so no big change there. I guess I could switch to the “full” ESPN service, and then I’d be able to watch… whatever games are on ESPN/ABC but not ESPN+. I’m honestly not sure what those will be. Monday Night Football might be ESPN/ABC only, or might also be on ESPN+. Who knows?

For Sunday night games, I should be OK. I still have a Peacock subscription. I don’t have any way to watch Sunday day games right now though. I canceled my Paramount+ sub, so no CBS games. Fox has a new streaming service starting up, which should carry their Sunday games, but that service also includes Fox News, and I’m dead set against supporting that stuff, so I guess I’m going to go without.

I did just pay for a year of NFL+ Premium. That gives me NFL Network and NFL RedZone, so that’s something. I’ve never actually had RedZone before; maybe I can just watch that on Sunday? The NFL+ sub should let me watch all the Giants games on my iPhone or iPad, I think, just not on TV. So maybe I’ll just watch football on my iPad from now on.

Here’s an interesting article on the new ESPN/NFL “mega-deal.” I’m not sure I even understand what’s going on with football right now.

And, of course, I could just give up on football. I’ve done it before. I’ve gone back and forth on it, over the last decade. Some years, I’m enthusiastic about it, and some years I’m not. (Often, that has to do with how well the Giants are doing that year…)

Meanwhile, I’m still enjoying baseball. I watch the Phillies on MLB.TV a few times a week. I’m always a little annoyed if a game is blacked out because they’re playing the Mets (or Yankees), or because it’s on ESPN or wherever. But there are so many games in a baseball season, it doesn’t bother me that much if I miss a few.

Of course, if the Phillies get into the post-season, that becomes a problem, as those games aren’t on MLB.TV. Sigh.

status update

I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”

First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.

The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.

I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.

Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.

I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.

Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.

Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

Roland-Garros, YouTube TV, and other stuff

I’ve finally talked myself into cancelling YouTube TV. I had signed up for it about a year ago, after (finally) cancelling my cable TV service. So I’m slowly finding my way into the 21st century, at least with regard to video entertainment.

It’s going to be weird giving up the system I grew up with, with all the “OTA” TV channels I’m used to. But I’ll figure it out. My post-work weekday routine used to include watching a combination of live and DVR’d stuff from YouTube TV, generally the previous night’s Colbert from DVR, and the NJ PBS news either live or from DVR. This past week, I’ve been watching Colbert from Paramount+, which is arguably better than watching it via YTTV, since I don’t have to fast-forward through commercials. (I have ad-free Paramount+.) Watching the NJ PBS news is a little more difficult. It airs live at 5:30 PM, so I can watch it streaming via the PBS app, but if I miss it, the on-demand version isn’t available until a bit later in the evening. So I’ve been missing the NJ PBS news most nights. I may need to figure out a better way to watch news, overall.

Of course, right after I cancelled YTTV, I saw an article about the TV broadcast arrangements for this year’s Roland-Garros, which starts soon. Last year, it was on NBC and Peacock. This year, it’s moved to Max, and other WB/Discovery networks. It looks like they’ll be carrying matches on TNT and TruTV, so I’d be able to watch those if I still had YTTV. But I don’t, and Max is the one major streaming platform that I don’t subscribe to. So maybe I need to subscribe to Max if I want to watch Roland-Garros this year.

Maybe I should cancel my Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle and replace it with the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle. Why did we let this stuff get so convoluted and expensive? Maybe I should just read more books and watch less TV!

Lots of Doctor Who

I’ve been fighting a cold the last few weeks (on and off). I stayed home on Christmas, all by myself, and did very little, other than watching Doctor Who. I’ve really been on a Doctor Who kick lately.

I’ve watched all of the Doctor Who: The Key to Time DVD set that I bought a couple of years ago. That was a lot of fun. The episodes themselves are great, and so are the commentaries. The episodes are from 1978-79. The commentaries were recorded around 2002, I think. So both are capturing a moment in time that’s long gone. It was cool listening to the actors, writers, directors, and other creators reminisce. Especially Tom Baker. He’s a hoot.

I’ve now started watching The Complete David Tennant Collection Blu-ray set, which I bought in 2019. This is a little more recent, but still feels like a relic from a distant past, in some ways. Again, I’m watching the episodes and listening to the commentaries, and having a lot of fun. I’ve probably seen most of these episodes multiple times, but I haven’t seen them in a while.

And of course I watched this year’s Christmas special, Joy to the World, on Disney+. I have mixed feelings about Ncuti Gatwa’s first season, but I really liked this special.

Seeing Doctor Who stories from all three of these different eras all in the last few weeks is interesting. There’s a lot of common threads going through this stuff, but also a lot of change and evolution.

Honestly, this is shaping up to be kind of a rough holiday season. I really haven’t been able to spend time with anyone else, for various reasons. And I haven’t been able to do some of the oddball things I used to do during the holidays, pre-pandemic. So I’m just spending all my downtime watching TV, alone in my apartment.

converting EPUB files to CBZ, and ripping DVDs

Here’s a follow up to my post from earlier today. I went ahead and decided to see if I could write a PowerShell script to convert an EPUB file to a CBZ file. I thought this would be a quick process, but of course it got a bit out of control.

I started by asking ChatGPT to write one for me, given some fairly specific parameters. I asked it to use the 7-Zip command line tool to zip and unzip the files. And I told it where to find the images in the EPUB, and gave it the steps to follow to complete the process. It spit out a script that looked pretty good but (of course) didn’t work.

Long story short: I spent an hour or two tweaking the script and eventually came up with this one. It worked fine, and I used it to convert about a dozen EPUBs to CBZ.

I gave up on calling 7-Zip, since passing parameters into 7-Zip from PowerShell turned out to be a very annoying process that I could never quite get right. (And which gave me a bit of deja vu, when I remembered that I’d had this problem at least once before, when I was trying to write a backup script for my dev VM at work, probably ten years ago.) I switched to the built-in Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive commands, which was probably the better path anyway.

On a separate (but semi-related) subject, I decided to watch a Doctor Who DVD this afternoon. I was going to watch the second DVD from my A Key To Time box set, which I bought in 2022. I watched the first disc in 2023, then never got around to the second. Well, now it’s 2024, so I decided I should probably make some progress with it. But my Xbox refused to play disc 2. So I checked another disc, and it was fine. So it’s not that the Xbox Blu-ray drive is broken. The DVD seems to load fine on my PC though. So now, I’m using Handbrake to rip it, so I can watch it via my Apple TV.

All in all, I’m spending way more time in front of my PC than I intended to today. And whatever disc space I saved by futzing with my comic book files is going to get eaten up by the rip of the Doctor Who DVD. Oh well. I guess this is still more fun than work!

baseball, and various office complaints

Baseball season started yesterday, so I thought I’d write up a few thoughts. I paid for MLB.TV this year, at the full price of $150. (That’s after paying just $50 last year, since the season was half-over when I signed up.) Hopefully, I’ll watch enough baseball to justify that price. I still can’t watch many Mets or Yankees games, since YouTube TV doesn’t include Yes or SNY. But at least now I can watch the random games that show up on ESPN and other basic-cable channels too. Anyway, I guess I’ll try to be a Phillies fan again this year, since I can watch all (or most) of their games on MLB.TV.

Today, I listened to a bit of the 1 PM Mets game radio stream, and am now watching the 3 PM Phillies game, both via MLB.TV on my computer, while I am (ostensibly) working. Later, I’ll watch at least some of the 8 PM Yankees game that’ll be on Apple TV+. So, plenty of baseball.

And as a follow-up to my moving day post from a couple of weeks ago: We are now in our new temporary space. The cubicles are the same style as the ones we had in our old space, but unfortunately they’re the “low wall” version, so we’re all essentially in an open-plan office now (or very close to it). I can’t say I’m happy about it, but it hasn’t been too bad so far. Most of the folks in my group are pretty quiet. And I’m not sure if I’m more likely to catch COVID (or whatever) in this space vs. the old one, but it’s probably not that much of a difference.

One weird thing about these cubicles is that they only have a single network port. That seems crazy to me, but I guess it was fine for whoever was previously in these cubicles. I scrounged a four-port switch from someone else, and have been using that, but it’s been iffy and I’ve lost my network connection a few times. I opened a support ticket to see if I could get a new switch, but that’s mostly led me into some bureaucracy, so now I need to decide if I want to keep pushing on that, or give up and just buy a $15 switch from Amazon.

My other dumb problem at work over the last few weeks is that, for some reason, the Verizon cell signal has been really bad, at certain times and in certain places. It seems to be fine early in the morning, then gets worse as the day goes on. And it’s worst, for some reason, when I’m sitting in my car at lunch time. So my habit of streaming a 10-minute meditation on Calm or Insight Timer in my car after lunch isn’t working out so well. (And that meditation time is even more important, when I have no privacy at all when I’m at my desk.) So I need to plan around that. I can still use the plain vanilla timer and do a silent meditation, but the guided meditations usually work better for me.

Oh, and I can’t do an advance order with Starbucks or Dunkin for my post-lunch coffee either, on some days, and that’s a big inconvenience. (I joke, kinda, but waiting in line to order coffee is a pain in the butt.)

no more cable TV

After plenty of dithering back & forth (see here and here), I finally went ahead and canceled my cable TV service today. And returned my cable card to Optimum, so there’s no going back now.

My TiVo still works, without the cable card, so I can at least finish watching the backlog of stuff I have on there. But eventually, I’ll have to cancel the TiVo service (which renews in October), wipe the TiVo, and recycle it. (Or find somebody to buy it, which seems unlikely.)

Canceling cable was a bit of a pain, but not as bad as I’d thought it would be. The phone call took about 15 minutes. The rep made one attempt to get me to stick with the service, by offering me $25 off for three months. If she’d made it $25 off for a whole year, I might would have accepted that and canceled YouTube TV instead. But I don’t really want to just kick the can down the road by three months.

Returning the cable card was pretty easy too. It turns out that Optimum now has a store quite close to me, in a strip mall on the Somerville Circle.  There was no one else in the store when I got there, so I got in and out pretty quick. There was a half-hearted attempt to get me to upgrade my internet connection while I was there, but I said I was fine, and they said OK.

(And then I stopped at Steck’s and got a corned beef Reuben to take home for lunch. I hadn’t been to Steck’s in a long time, but they’re in the same strip mall, and it’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, so it seemed appropriate.)

So, that’s that. I’m not 100% satisfied with YouTube TV, but it’s good enough for now. I think I’ve decided to stick with YTTV for three months, at least, since it’s $10 off for the first three months. After that, I’ll decide if I’m sticking with it, switching to Hulu + Live TV, or giving up on “regular” TV altogether.