Category: video

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.

Some follow-up, on a nice Sunday

I haven’t blogged in almost a month, and I have a few things I want to write about, so this is going to be a multi-topic catch-up post. And hopefully it won’t be too long, or take me too long to write. But we’ll see how that goes.

Taxes

I filed my taxes today. I used the H&R Block software that I’ve been using (on and off) since (at least) 1997. (I just poked around on my hard drive to try to find the earliest docs from TaxCut, and I found an installer for the 1997 version. At some point, they dropped the “TaxCut” name, and now it’s just H&R Block.) I owed less than I usually have, in recent years. I’m not sure why. And I seem to have reached the point in my life where I’m not obsessing too much about the tax rules and whether or not I’m fully in compliance with them. There were a few things on both the Federal and NJ returns that I wasn’t 100% sure about, but I didn’t spend a lot of time researching them and double-checking them. Maybe I overpaid a little, or maybe I underpaid a little. Life is too short to worry about it too much.

The Wheel of Time

I finished reading A Crown of Swords on Friday. And I’m likely to start The Path of Daggers today. A Crown of Swords was book 7, and there are 14 books in the series, so I’m now halfway done! (Unless you count New Spring, the prequel novel, which I’m sure I’ll slot in somewhere, so maybe I’m not quite halfway through the whole thing, but I’m halfway through the main series.)

I’ve been listening to The Wheel Weaves podcast as I’ve been reading ACoS, and I’ve enjoyed it enough that I signed up for their Patreon (though only at the $3/month level). It’s a fun podcast to listen to, and it’s nice when they point out stuff that I missed, or have an interpretation of something that’s different from my own.

I finished ACoS in just over a month, so it’s starting to look like I might be able to finish the whole series by the end of this year, if I can keep up this pace. I know that’s not likely, and that life will probably get in the way at some point, or I’ll get tired of the series and switch to something else for a while. But right now, I’m perfectly happy just reading the books back to back.

Streaming Services

I signed up for YouTube TV about a week ago. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but I’m starting to get more comfortable with the idea of giving up on my TiVo Bolt and what’s left of my cable TV service. (Which is just the broadcast channels, for $50/month, per my previous post.)

There are good and bad points to YouTube TV, vs cable/TiVo. On the bad side, the DVR interface isn’t nearly as nice as TiVo’s. Nor is the program guide. I guess I’ve been spoiled by TiVo’s great user interface (even though I’ve complained about it at times).

The DVR lets you add a series, but has no configuration beyond that. So I added NCIS, so I could get the new episodes, but now it’s also recording every other single episode of NCIS that airs on any channel, at any time. And since NCIS has been on for 21 seasons and almost 500 episodes, that’s a lot. But DVR space is unlimited, and in the cloud, so I don’t really have to worry about that. And I just pulled up the DVR interface, to see if it could tell me how many episodes of NCIS it’s recorded in the last week, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to see that. So that’s another annoyance with the DVR.

And for the program guide and the live channel interface, you can mark certain channels as favorites, so they’ll show at the top of the list, so that’s nice. But that’s about the only good thing about the interface. It’s hard to jump forward in time, compared to TiVo. You can go forward a page at a time, but it’s slow, and there’s no way to jump ahead a full day, like there is on TiVo. In fact, I think you can only go forward by 24 hours, total.

Also, fast-forwarding to skip commercials on DVR recordings is a lot less convenient than on TiVo. Of course, there’s no auto-skip, like there is on TiVo, but that doesn’t always work on TiVo anyway, so I’m OK with that. And there’s no full-screen fast-forward either; you can only see a thumbnail of the content as you’re fast-forwarding through it.

In terms of the actual channel line-up, it’s interesting to have the usual basic cable channels back again, after having dropped them a couple of years ago. My first impression is that cable has gotten even worse since then. About the only channel that seems to be sticking to it’s original mission is TCM. They still seem to be showing classic movies, and just classic movies. And I assume they’re still commercial-free, though I haven’t checked that yet.

Looking at some other channels, IFC is currently showing an Ace Ventura movie. (Definitely not fitting into their original prestige “independent film” category.) And Sundance TV, which should also be showing quality independent films, is running Andy Griffith and NCIS reruns. So it seems like a lot of the channels on cable are just showing miscellaneous reruns of random old TV shows.

In terms of interesting stuff that I wasn’t getting from Optimum, there’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart has recently returned to hosting, though only one day a week. And I could watch that on Paramount+ anyway. And I can catch up on Rick & Morty now, but, now that I’m checking, I guess I can watch that on Hulu. So I’m not sure there’s anything that I really need the cable channels for.

I still kind of want access to broadcast channels, though, for news and sports. I should mention that there’s a lot of sports available on YouTube TV, mostly basketball and hockey right now. I have no particular interest in either of those sports though. I might find access to sports stuff handy once baseball season starts up. (Though for that, I did just let my MLB.TV subscription renew. And the only regular games I can’t watch through that are Mets and Yankees, and YouTube TV doesn’t have either the Mets’ SportsNet NY channel or the Yankees YES channel for the Yankees, so there might not be much baseball to watch on YouTube TV, really.)

There are two channels I’m currently getting through Optimum that I don’t get from YouTube TV: News 12 and MeTV. I don’t watch a lot of MeTV, but I do like Svengoolie, so I’ll miss that, but it’s not a deal-breaker. And I like having a 24/7 local NJ news network, but I can probably live without it.

So, overall, I’m not super-satisfied with the value I’m getting out of YouTube TV, but it’s probably better than the value I’m getting out of my $50/month Optimum basic service. Optimum bills on the calendar month, so I’ve already paid for March. So I might call to cancel at some point before the end of this month, and give it up then.

After that, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with YouTube TV, or eventually wean myself off of the whole idea of live broadcast TV. I’ve spent some time thinking about it, and I can really follow everything I need without it. I can get the local NJ PBS news through the PBS app and/or on YouTube. And I can still get local NY news through various other means. (I’m pretty sure I can watch the local ABC news on Hulu and the local CBS news on Paramount+.)

So, wow, that was a lot of rambling on about TV. I didn’t really intend to write so much. (Sorry.) It’s a nice day out, and I’ve gone out for two walks already, and I even have a window open for the first time in a while. It’s getting close to lunch time, so I should start thinking about that, and maybe another walk, this time with a light coat! (It’s 60° out!)

 

thinking about cord-cutting again

Back in 2021, I dropped my regular cable subscription down to their “broadcast basic” package. At the time, it was $25/month, I think. It went up to $35 at some point. And now, it’s gone up to $50. Which seems like a lot to pay for mostly just regular over-the-air channels. (I’m too far from both NYC and Philly to pick up OTA channels with an antenna, so if I want them, I need to get them from cable TV or streaming.)

The price increase, and an occasional desire to watch ESPN, has gotten me interested in maybe shutting down cable entirely, and switching to YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV.

I’m also paying $150/year for TiVo service, which comes out to $12.50/month, so my total cost is $62.50/month. YouTube TV costs $73/month, so I’d be only be paying $10.50/month extra, and getting both my local channels, and a bunch of cable channels. And I could ditch my TiVo and stop having to switch HDMI inputs on my TV every time I want to switch from watching broadcast TV to streaming and vice versa. I could just do everything from my Apple TV.

And if I switch to the Hulu + Live TV bundle with Disney+ and ESPN+, I can actually save a couple of bucks. I’m currently paying $19/month for my legacy Disney bundle, so cable + TiVo + the Disney bundle is $81.50. Ditching those three and switching to the Hulu bundle would cost $77/month. So that’s probably my best bet. (I’d lose the ad-free Disney+ that way, but I could live with ads on Disney+, I guess.)

On the other hand, maybe the new streaming service from Fox/Disney/Warner would be a good compromise. It looks like that would get me my local ABC and Fox stations, plus ESPN and some other random channels. No clue what it’ll cost though.

The prices on all of the streaming services are getting too high, really. Maybe I should rethink the whole thing and spend more time reading books and comics.

I’m a baseball person now, I guess.

I’ve been watching some MLB baseball this year, off and on. Not much, though, until fairly recently. I think that a combination of the writers/actors strikes killing the late night shows, plus just a need to watch something kinda slow and calm and with (for me) low stakes has led me to watching more and more baseball. Until a couple of weeks ago, I could only watch what was on ESPN+ or one of the other streaming services I subscribe to. But I’ve now gone all-in and subscribed to MLB.TV.

Since the season is half-over, the price was half-off, around $50. For that, I can watch basically every MLB game except for Mets and Yankees games, which are blacked out. I think that, for a normal fan in NJ, not getting the Mets and Yankees games might be a pain, but I don’t really care. I’ll watch whichever game has the most calming announcers.

I’ve been watching a lot of Phillies games, since they’re almost local, and at least in the same time zone as me. I also like to watch San Diego Padres games, but since they’re on the west coast, a lot of their games are on after my bedtime. (And of course my reason for liking the Padres is mostly about their proximity to the San Diego convention center, and hence to SDCC.)

In theory, I can watch Somerset Patriots games with the subscription too, but I haven’t figured that out yet. I haven’t been to a Patriots game since before the pandemic. I’d like to start going to them again, but it never seems to work out. Either it’s too hot, or it’s raining, or I’m not feeling up to it, or whatever.

I’ve also been enjoying tennis, which is even better than baseball for calming my nerves, but there’s not much of it on TV. I enjoyed watching a lot of Wimbledon on ESPN+, and I’m looking forward to the US Open, which should start at the end of this month.

In the past, I think I would have been embarrassed to admit any of this, but I’m an old man now, and if I want to sit in front of the TV watching baseball until I nod off, that’s a perfectly respectable thing to do, right?

some downtime

It looks like I unexpectedly have the morning off from work. Or maybe all day. I’m not sure yet. Anyway, this means I can waste time on the internet and nobody can stop me and I don’t have to feel guilty about it. Anyway, I noticed this old post from 2006 in my “on this day” sidebar this morning, and I clicked through on the link, expecting it to be dead. But it’s not! And, weirdly, there’s a new Jigsaw video out! With the first appearance of Dr. Kranium since 2011! And it’s a really funny video too! I’d completely forgotten about Jigsaw, and would likely never have stumbled across this video if I hadn’t been pointlessly clicking around on my own blog. So the lesson here is, I guess, that blogging links to dumb puppet videos sometimes pays off 10+ years later.