Opinion/Editorial/Life

Opinion/Editorial/Life

State of Streaming in 2022

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I’ve shuffled around some of the streaming platforms I subscribe to and figured it was as good a time as any to do a little write up on what I use and what I’ve dropped and why. I suppose these are pseudo recommendations, but not really, since frankly, I don’t personally watch a lot of TV myself. I spend all day at my job with a TV going in the background, I have almost no desire to watch TV anymore.

Starting with what’s gone, for now. Netflix has been getting a lot of flack lately for a variety of reasons. One is the announcement that they plan to have an ad subsidized tier. Frankly, this is such a non issue, since it’s very unlikely they will add advertisements to existing tiers. More likely they will make a new tier, or two, with ads included, for less per month. The bigger reason they are getting flack is the recent price increase.

Again.

For what feels like the 3rd or 4th time in the last 5 years. I’ve used Netflix since it was ONLY DVDs. But at this point it’s up to $17/month. It’s considerably more than any other option. Also, while I don’t personally watch a lot, I do keep semi tabs on what my (adult) kids are watching, since they are the ones who use the services the most. Not so much because I care about content, just to know, “No one really watches Netflix much lately” so we can unsubscribe. Of course, I’m paying the bill, so it’s my call in the end to some extent. If they want to keep it, they can pick up the tab.

Another recently dropped service is HBO Max. I actually was not unhappy with HBO Max, and of every service available, this would probably be my personal choice to subscribe to, if I were only picking one. I’ll likely resubscribe again in the future. So why did it get dropped? I got HBO Max as part of my DirecTV package, which was heavily discounted through my job. That discount went away, and I have zero use for DirecTV, especially not at full price (it was a SIGNIFICANT discount.)

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that I also got rid of DirecTV, which I suppose makes me “officially” a cord cutter. Though in the past many years, the only thing we ever really watched on the service was the Super Bowl and the Macy’s Parade. In fact, when we moved in 2017, I moved the dish myself and it almost always needs a slight adjustment when trying to watch anything.

So what is kept and used?

  • Hulu/Disney+ – This one is a package deal, and it’s a pretty good deal. Hulu has an alright selection of shows, but Disney+ includes Marvel, Star Wars, and well Disney. It’s something like $14/month for both combined.
  • Paramount+ – My wife and kids like a lot of the crime drama shows on CBS, so getting Paramount+ seemed like a pretty good add to make up for the loss of Netflix. It’s quite a bit cheaper too at something like $5/month. Though that is with ads. Which I would not mind except the volume on the ads on Paramount+ are like 3x the loudness of the shows. Watching anything is an exercise on using the mute button. I tried to complain but their website feedback form does not work. It also has Star Trek, though I am still barely through what I started trying to watch 2 years ago and I really can’t get into the shitty New Star Treks. They really just do not feel like Trek, it’s too much flashyness.
  • Discovery+ – Why is everything called “Plus”? Anyway, one daughter loves house and cooking shows, the other likes True Crime shows. Discovery+ has both of these. Plus I lost the ability to “log in with your cable provider” when I lost DirecTV for the individual apps like TLC and HGTV. It’s also $5/month I believe.
  • AcornTV – My daughter likes to watch Murdoch Mysteries, and a few other shows on this service. I’m not real sure if it’s British based or Australian based, it seems to kind of be a mix of shows from both. It’s also $5/month. (Feels like a trend, though I may be off on a couple by a few bucks).
  • Peacock+ – We picked this one up for a month so everyone could watch Yellowstone, which is sort of the current trendy hotness show. I was going to drop it after the first month, but it sounds like they may want to keep it for a few shows. There also seems to be a pretty good selection of movies available on Peacock+ as well. Also $5/month.

I am not positive on the pricing on some of these services, but they are close-ish. Some are paid annually as well. I wanted to add them more to stress why I am upset about Netflix. For the price of Netflix, I can essentially get 4 other services, Paramount, Peacock, Discovery, and AcornTV. For less cost I can get Hulu AND Disney+. If I wanted to re-add HBO Max, I am pretty sure it’s either $10 or $15/month. All of these are less than Netflix, for arguably a better product. I actually have never really been able to get into a lot of Netflix’s original shows myself. A lot of them have this weird off-putting-ness to them that I can’t quite put my finger on. In some cases I am glad I didn’t get into them because it sounds like a lot of them get cancelled with no proper resolution.

I suppose I should mention Amazon Prime as well. I don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime for their TV Streaming. It’s there, I use a FireTV, but I don’t subscribe explicitly for that. I am not sure I am going to keep Amazon. My current subscription ends at the end of December, and it’s not currently set to renew. Like Netflix, the price keeps going up and up, and all I care about is the Free Shipping. Everything else is a nice bonus, but I don’t factor into it, and I believe the new renewal rate is $150/year. This is over double what it was when I first subscribed to Prime. This would not be the first time I unsubscribed to Prime either.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Twitter Drama and Mastodon

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

What a completely non eventful roller coaster the latest Twitter Drama is shaping up to be. I suppose it’s somewhat in the “early stages” and a lot of people, including myself, may be acting a bit over dramatic, but I don’t think Elon Musk buying Twitter will be anything good long term.

Twitter isn’t, wasn’t, whatvern’t that great. It was ok, personally, I’ve been kind of struggling to care about Twitter as a platform for a while. It’s probably just some sort of burn out, I’ve been there since essentially the beginning, in 2006. Back when good ol’ Leo Laporte was the number one most followed user, until Kevin Rose was. Then Leo again, it was sort of a competition. Those whopping follow counts were in the thousands as well back then. Twitter is definitely much larger and much more since then. And I find it hard to keep up with anymore.

I’ve tried using lists, but for some reason Twitter only lets you easily pin 5 lists. How useless is that? I have dozens of lists. Politics lists, tech lists, toys lists, music lists, transformers lists, also split across several sub lists, like “Toys – News,” and “Toys – Bloggers”, “Tech – News,” or “Tech – Cybersecurity”. Segmentation of content makes it much easier to follow and be in the right mindset for each topic.

Over time, it also became sort of a crazy place for politics and the spread of misinformation campaigns promoted by trolls and bots. These are the classic style trolls of the days of Ye Olde Usenet, where one person might be harassing another over something the latter was taking a bit too seriously. These are weaponized trolls pushed by people wish absolutely awful agendas against large groups of people. This was bad during the Obama Era of the US but made absolutely worse during the Trump Era.

It’s not entirely just a Trump thing, or a US thing, there is idiocy going on all around the world, but I’m still going to use the US as a frame of reference, since I am in the US. It’s also a problem across many Social Platforms. Lately there have been a lot of actual efforts to stem the spread of lies and stupidity on a lot of platforms, Twitter included. This is where we end up with more rift and part of Musk’s stated reasoning for pissing away billions of dollars on a platform that isn’t worth anywhere near that.

Free Speech.

Which is the real crux of the issue. Some are trying to confuse it with the idea that people angry over this don’t like that Musk is a Billionaire. How it’s hypocritical because Bezos bought the Washington post. The problem isn’t that Musk is a billionaire, it’s that he’s kind of a jackass. And he wants to open the platform back up to let other jackasses be jackasses. “Free Speech” isn’t at all about free speech to these people it’s about freedom to be an asshole. This is why people are upset. They are tired of people spreading lies and idiocy then just screaming people down when they are called out on it.

It was getting better.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of all this. I don’t think it’s going to be anything good. For one, every discussion about Musk buying Twitter on Reddit, seems to end up locked. Because just discussing the issue, people can’t keep civilized. There have also been a LOT of “Free Speech” platforms pop up over the past several years, and basically every single one failed. Some still limp along, but they all devolve into a bunch of jackasses calling for violence and spouting endless hate speech. They get kicked off their hosting platforms for violating TOS, sometimes the creators realize what a mess they unleashed and close things down themselves, sometimes they just fall apart because they can’t create any real way to financially support the platform.

Twitter may be big enough to survive for a while, but that’s not even real clear. It’s still one of the smallest social platforms in terms of users at around 350million. For comparison, Facebook and TikTok have Billions, with an s. Basically a measurable 25% of the entire world’s population. There is a greater than good chance that at least half of Twitter’s users are bot accounts, either actual scripted agent bots or sweat shop people in 3rd world countries clicking retweet buttons “bots”. Add this in with a lot of people leaving Twitter in disgust, and it will be interesting to see what the user base is in a month or two.

So what’s the alternative? A lot of people are pushing and moving to Mastodon. Mastodon isn’t quite the same as Twitter but it’s very similar, especially to old Twitter. For starters, it’s Federated, which means, anyone can host a Mastodon server (called Instances), and it can connect to other Mastodon Instances. This means there are many Instances themed around specific topics. It also means that if an Instance becomes full of idiots, then it can easily be blocked by other Instances.

This is not my first attempt at Mastodon either. I’ve used it off and on for a while and even ran a script for a long time that would sync my Twitter and Mastodon profiles, creating an illusion of activity. Now I’m trying to use it full time though. I have wanted to make it work for a while anyway, now, with all of the attention it’s getting, seems like as good of a time as any. I guess maybe it might be best to just treat it more like the “Classic Twitter” days, and just toss stuff out into the Ether and see if anyone reacts.

Currently I’m on the core Mastodon.social, though I may look into moving elsewhere, but if you want to give me a follow, you can find me <a rel=”me” href=”https://mastodon.social/@RamenJunkie“>Here</a>.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Reddit Rate-Limiting VPN Users

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Yesterday I started getting these annoying pop ups on Reddit.  “You’re doing that too often, please wait X minutes”.  This most often happens with new accounts that are low in Karma.  It’s a sort of trust trap that prevents spam.  My account is almost 10 years old.  I have almost 500 thousand Karma.  I don’t meet any of the new account nonsense.  This block, is very suspicious.

I’ve seen it before though.  It seems individual subs can enable something like this for accounts that post infrequently to that particular sub.  But this block seemed to span across many subs, so it was clearly site wide.   I assumed at first Reddit was blocking 3rd party apps in an effort to push people to use the shitty official app.  So I installed the official app.  And good fucking God does it suck.   The problem persisted though, so I uninstalled the app.  I also tried just using the web interface in Firefox mobile.  No go.

So I decided to try on another account.  Not only did this still happen on the other account, but the block from the first account, applied to other accounts.  So clearly the block is IP based.

Now, on mobile, when not on my home network, I use a VPN basically full time.  Why would fill a blog post on it’s own but all we need for this is to know that I use it all the time, I’ve done this for something like 5 years.  It’s not a cheap freebie VPN, I use a paid service that’s trustworthy (I am the customer, not some other advertisers).  I also use Reddit basically daily, a lot.

I disabled the VPN for a bit, the problem went away.

I re-enabled the VPN, the problem came back.

I did some searching on Reddit and Twitter and found a lot of other people having similar issues.  Reddit is rate-limiting VPN users.  It’s super annoying and super bull shit.  There are plenty of valid reasons to use a VPN, like I said, that’s a whole different blog post.  Blanked throttling VPN users is not a good solution.  I would dump using Reddit before dumping using my VPN.

Hopefully it’s just a temporary glitch that gets fixed, but for now it’s incredibly annoying.

Opinion/Editorial/Life Technology

A Long and Short Journey with Dogecoin

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Something something, I am not a financial advisor and am not giving financial advice.

Everyone is talking about Dogecoin in the last few days. I’m not sure why exactly, there are a thousand different Crypto Currencies out there and DOGE isn’t new. Personally, I do not follow Cryptocurrency at all. It really feels like it’s just a digital MLM scam. Sure, people are making money but the long term use and sustainability isn’t going to last. People like it now because it’s all “deregulated” but at some point, if it ever became big enough to be mainstream, it’s going to become regulated, which would kill the appeal. It doesn’t help that your regular everyday person has no idea what Crypto even is. The best quote for “what is crypto” I’ve seen floating around…

“Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

One of the most common points I see is that “Crypto is just as real as the dollar (or any other currency).” This is of course because the dollar is “worth” what it is “only because the US government says it is”. Which honestly is kind of a misrepresentation of why a dollar is worth a dollar, but ok, lets go with that. Dogecoin, or any crypto, is “worth” something, because a bunch of speculators trying to get rich quick and not be holding the bag when everything collapses say it is worth something. The Dollar is worth something because the entire economy of the US, and a lot of the world, and the Government, backed by it’s people and an army and a general long term trust, says it’s worth something. So technically the original statement is true, but in reality, the level of backing on the dollar is much larger than that of a bunch of random kooks online.

Anyway…

Back in 2014, Dogecoin got big on Reddit. It was literally just a meme making fun of Bitcoin and people were using it as a sort of upvote/award system with Dogetipbot. Which was fun. I bought around 5000 DOGE for around $5. I got some tips, I gave some tips, eventually I stuck in all in a local wallet and I think the Dogetipbot broke so the whole thing kind of gotten forgotten about.

Then, this year, for some reason, Dogecoin started booming. Fortunately I had my old wallet. Unfortunately, syncing the last 7 years of blockchain takes a long time. It took something like a month to get my wallet in a usable state, and the software felt really buggy, requiring many restarts to kickstart the sync. Suddenly my 5000 DOGE was “worth” about $1500. I admit I got a little caught up and figured, I’d see how far it would go. Everyone says they want to take it to a dollar per DOGE. Let’s see if that happens.

I could see the hype taking it to a dollar. I really can’t see it every getting to Bitcoin levels of thousands. At the very minimum, it would take long enough that by the time it happens, the Governments of the world would have started regulating crypto to the point where it all mostly died off anyway. DOGE kept climbing, fifty cents, sixty cents, seventy-five cents. At some point, I decided that if it managed to reach a dollar, I’d go ahead and buy myself a new PC. I’ve been considering updating my desktop, some of the components are around ten years old (the Processor specifically), and what better to spend my sudden surge of fake money on. I also decided to buy a pre-build machine. The main thing keeping me from working towards an upgrade was how hard components are starting to be to acquire, a lot thanks (no thanks) to crypto mining.

I found I could buy directly from NewEgg using BitPay, so I prepped up half my DOGE into a Bitpay wallet. When it got up to seventy-five cents I was really close to just going ahead and pulling the trigger. I got to a point where I cared more about my PC upgrade than the DOGE. I even dumped a bit more into my BitPay, ready to use. I also figured I should pull the trigger at eighty or ninety cents, since it seemed like a lot of people were planning to dump at $1.

But then I saw news about Elon Musk going on SNL, and being a mechanism to propel DOGE to $1. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk at all, for reasons I’m not getting into here, but I figure if anyone can make this go up, it’s probably Elon Musk. So the decision was made to just wait for SNL.

Then Elon was on SNL, and DOGE dropped from $0.70 to around $0.50. It seems to have leveled off around this point as well, even dropping a bit at times. At this point, I had to remind myself, that I am not a “cyrpto guy” and I have no interest in becoming a “crypto guy”. This was just a dumb meme that I had jumped on years ago.

Long story short, I dumped the rest of my DOGE into BitPay, and ordered up a new kick ass gaming desktop PC.

I am now super looking forward to running games in blazing FPS with RTX and all the Ultra Super Graphical bells and whistles. In the meantime I’ve got to work on shuffling some files around to make everything work once the new desktop arrives. I currently run two desktops, one is my “main PC” and the other is an old 32bit Linux PC that mostly serves as a file server and a web project server. I don’t need to run 3 PCs and the 32bit PC has been a thorn in my side for a while with it’s 32bit limitations, so I plan to shift my current main desktop to be the new Project server and dump the old Linux machine. I look forward to being able to actually host a sweet Minecraft server and OpenSIM server and getting the chance to better learn how to use Docker.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Endlessly Learning

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

One thing I have always done in my life is worked to constantly be learning something. It may not actually be a useful something, but it’s something. Back when I was finishing up my degree in 2003, I was telling people that I wanted to get the RA job in the dorms so I could just live there for the rest of my life taking classes. Granted, the RA position only meant your room was covered, I don’t think it covered any of the course work expense.

Fortunately, we live in a world of connected possibilities, or whatever buzz word you want to use. While I didn’t get to work from home or even end up with extra time at home from the Pandemic, it’s really given me a ton of extra online courses to take, mostly “just because”.

I have taken and completed several single courses over at Real Python. Though I am not entirely sure how useful some of them are, to anything I’ll ever do, but it was good to get some general incite into things like, Facial Detection and Functional Programming.

I took a multi week course called The Science of Well Being, over on Coursera. It was kind of more of a psychology themed course covering concepts behind what makes us happy in our daily lives. I kind of feel like I’ve already been sort of naturally using some of the ideas discussed in my life, but it was interesting.

I’m almost at 2 years of Duolingo learning spanish as well, with a 700+ day streak. Mi Espanol no es perfecto, pero es un poco bien. I guess. I’ve actually been branching out some and have been reading a few children’s books in Spanish. I’ve also been browsing bits of Spanish speaking Twitter and Reddit as well. While I can’t really speak or listen to it well, I am doing alright and comprehending the reading and okish as getting the idea across in writing.

It doesn’t always work out the first try though. Starting at the beginning of this year I started trying to learn how to play Piano. Though the Piano part is the easy part, what I’m really doing is trying to learn how to read sheet music. Unfortunately, I have not sat down at the Piano to practice in nearly 6 months now. Maybe next year on that one.

I get access to Linked in Learning through work as well, I’ve been taking a Full stack Developer course there as well. I kind of got distracted from it doing web development work at work, but it already helped improve my technique in managing PHP file layouts.

I have been doing some tutorials on how to write Markdown, which isn’t super impressive or complicated, but it’s a skill that I feel like may actually be more useful in the future.

I finished off a tutorial on basic COBOL programming. While I don’t think I could write a COBOL program if I had to, it did a pretty good job of giving me an idea of how COBOL is structured and flows.

This is all just scratching the surface of a long list of learning resources I’ve collected up over the past few months. I am hoping to pick up doing some art again next year, I used to be pretty good at drawing in my youth. If I every finish the Spanish tree in Duolingo, I hope to either brush up on the Japanese I had in High School or learn some Norwegian. I’d like to take up 3D modeling at some point as well, I always really enjoyed doing CAD work in College and 3D modeling is essentially just a less precise version of CAD.

In general, I just plan to keep on learning.

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