I had heard a low level, yet steady buzz about HBO Max streaming from a variety of sources, and was intrigued. I am not, and have never been an HBO subscriber, but I recognize that they have produced epic content for decades. The Sopranos being but one of their efforts.
Then Hulu lost South Park to HBO Max, and I began looking hard at adding HBO Max to the stable.
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I recall a lot of talk about how the power of the cable companies and their “bundles” of channels was anti-consumer. If you liked sports, you paid a bunch for a package that had the ESPN, and other sports channels, and you were pretty screwed if you didn’t care for all extra crap.
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If you have been following the thread, about 3 years ago, I bit the bullet and built a Plex server. A simple Intel NUC with a Core i5 CPU, 8 gigs of ram, and a 300gig SSD inside, and a big spinning rust external drive hanging on it.
(more…)With the shifting allegiances in streaming music, I found myself re-enabling my Apple Music subscription. There are some benefits, and some less desirable aspects.
This is relevant as I again ponder the mix of music that I have in my collection, as well as the convenience of streaming. In the following post, I lay out the pro’s and con’s of Apple’s Music subscription plan. $9.99 a month, it is in the ballpark of the offers, between Amazon and Spotify. All three of them also offer family plans for the same price (alas, my Wife isn’t interested in sharing a plan.) (more…)
When we last checked in, we had come to the conclusion that the two “winners,” Spotify and Amazon, were the two services I kept subscriptions to. Both offered excellent coverage, deep catalogs (more on this later), and quality apps for computers and my iPhone (presumably for Android too).
I will admit that I have been listening more to Spotify. Their “Daily Mix,” personalized for my tastes, are outstanding. 6 playlists, that are fresh, and quite appropriate to my preferences. Spot on. (more…)
I know that I post often about my musical travails, as I wove my path between the various services, Spotify, Apple, Google, Pandora, and Amazon, so this is another installment.
The last episode found me back in Spotify, cancelling my Apple Music service. Partly this was due to my desire to back away from the Apple ecosystem, but also because Spotify is vastly superior to iTunes in streaming on my train commute.
I have been using it pretty consistently for 2 months, and without a doubt, the Spotify streaming is the champion. The only service that comes close to its performance is the Amazon service. (Google is just lousy at streaming. Every time I have evaluated it, it has been glitchy, even on wired, high bandwidth connections.) (more…)
A follow-on to my last post. Having last fiddled with linux (on the desktop, not as a hosting solution) was a VM running under vmware workstation probably 7 years ago. Back then it was just a fancy, enough to get my feet wet.
Last weekend, I resurrected an old PC (the one that I ran VMWare Workstation on, surprisingly), and the Windows 7 installation was borked. As good a time as any, I grabbed a Linux iso (Ubuntu) burned a DVD (alas, this machine is old enough that booting from USB is not supported) and I was off to the races.
Amazingly, one of my gripes in the past was the lack of out of the box support for a lot of hardware. This system installation it found and properly setup all my hardware. Even the cheap wifi card in this system (it is a small PCI board with two antennae and supporting only 2.4GHz radio). (more…)
Throughout 2015 and into 2016, I was evaluating the streaming music services, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon, and Apple. The result of that initial evaluation was that the then new Apple Music plan was the winner. The combination of all my music collection in their cloud, plus the access to their enormous library, and arguably at the time, the best streaming over wifi at home and on cellular data. I ended up keeping Apple, and ditching Spotify, when
Fast forward to today, late 2017. I dropped my Spotify account in early 2016 due to a stretch of unemployment, and grooved on Apple. But lately, I am souring on the Apple ecosystem. Not enough to ditch my Mac and my iPhone, but having experienced iTunes on windows (that is truly a trying experience) I knew I needed an alternative for general use. (more…)
I do not watch much “regular” television. I have my Tivo set to record MotoGP, I have some of my favorite old TV shows set to record on MeTV (currently “Perry Mason” and “Get Smart”), and I simply can’t live without “Full Frontal”. Other than that, I watch Netflix, and am in general satisfied with that.
