Ever since I learned about how little in Amazon pays in local or state taxes, compared to Walmart, I’ve had trouble with deciding which is the better consumer overlord. Eventually, it will be Amazon, but in the meantime, only one of these two giants pays a substantial amount of taxes or employs local people.
Both are evil in their own special ways, but Amazon has the distinct advantage of delivering stuff to your house so you don’t have to get depressed shopping at Walmart.
And absolutely phenomenal, world class customer service. (How they treat their employees, on the other hand…)
Lots of elements of today’s economy are fantastic, if you’re on top. Take the gig economy. I can get eight heavy cases of diet coke delivered to my door in under two hours for free, charging less than the local supermarket. I can take a car ride across town for much less than a taxicab.
These things are fantasticabulous for me, but for the poor bastards lugging my soda and driving me around for peanuts, not so much. And they hurt the old taxicab drivers and brick & mortar grocery store workers too.
Yeah. I don’t use Uber of Lyft unless I have to — I use Flywheel, which calls me a taxi. I had a Flywheel driver take me from SF to Sonoma a few months back (on the company dime) and he had just taken what amounts to a mortgage on a taxi medallion before Uber drivers from the far parts of the East Bay started flooding SF every day. Now he’s effectively underwater, just like people were who bought homes just before the 2008 collapse, and he won’t be able to retire as planned.
There will always be Internet shitbags eager to burble “He did it wrong” through the dicks in their mouths, but we’ve all learned to spot their accent by now.
[edit]But cable companies won’t get any pity from me. They’ve run as local monopolies for a long time and have been abusive, and we see their nature affirmed in the demise of net neutrality. Fuck 'em.
I wish! There’s a setting to stop auto-playing the next episode (Netflix) but not minimizing the credits, unfortunately. Drives me batty.
Prime Music has an “add to My Music” concept you may need to use to get stuff playable on the Roku app.
Walled Gardens are open to the sky, dude. Side-loading an app is like tossing a brick of cocaine over the wall.
That’s very poetic. Are you a poet?
Mine keeps wanting to show me a random episode of full house from the original series. I also started looking for a replacement.
Yes. Would you like to buy a chapbook?
I got an email from Plex saying I should get Plex Pass and use the DVR feature to record the olympics through their DVR feature. Very tempting, so i signed up. Now we’ll see if the DVR feature really does work with my old HD HomeRun like someone was saying in another thread. Was it @Gendal?
Anyway, I’ll find out tonight for sure.
Yeah I’ve had Plex Pass for a while and enjoyed the preview of upcoming features while supporting the development. I’m going to try with the Hauppage USB tuner soon.
Yeah, that was me. I have the original dual HD Home Run. Dual ATSC, ethernet, etc. It seemed to work fine and did continue to grab some old Great British Bake off episodes off PBS but I turned that off after awhile and pretty much just plan to use it for the Olympics. I figured we might also use it for the Oscars but everybody, especially me, was pretty much ‘meh.’
I just had a major blow out on my plex server, an ancient hard drive finally died so I just restored from backup but it looks like it didn’t keep the DVR setup for some reason. So going through to set it up again right now. If this was MythTV I would be shitting bricks but the Plex DVR is stupidly simple.
Actually it just finished before I could even finish typing this up. I had to type in my zip code and click Next 6 or 7 times. Just started watching NBC in a browser.
So today, here’s my setup:
- Home theater PC connected to TV
- USB Hauppauge Dual-tuner connected to an over-the-air antenna
- NextPVR is my comprehensive software for scheduling, recording, and watching TV
- NextPVR uses my Schedules Direct subscription to get TV listings ($25/year)
This all works really well for me. What benefits would I get with a Plex Pass instead?
Well if you get the right promo email, Plex Pass is $75 with a lifetime subscription. Also it will automatically remove commercials and stream to pretty much every device under the sun, including over the internet. Beyond that, I don’t know enough about NextPVR to compare.
This is a great description of what I just did. Now I set it to record all new Episodes of the Amazing Race. It’s supposedly recording now. I’m going to the gym. When I get back in about an hour, hopefully the episode will be ready for me. @ineffablebob says the feature to cut out commercials is not ready for prime time, so I left that off.
I checked into that and unfortunately there is no way to trigger that email. It appears that they send them out randomly, so it’s basically a lottery to get one. I would probably jump at a Plex lifetime for $75 but sadly I suck at lotteries.
They sent it to me thrice over many years, and I finally bit last year. I don’t use Plex very often but I figured what the hell. It’s a good product.
Well, that didn’t go well. It’s winter, so the TV signal is never 100% clear in winter time for most channels, you know? Back when I had Windows 7, Window Media Center used to handle this pretty gracefully. Basically it would just skip over bad recording areas where the signal didn’t come in strong. But Plex handles it very poorly. When streaming on my Xbox, or playing it on Plex on my PC where it’s stored, when it gets to the first spot that’s a bad spot on the recording, it just hangs there forever, and finally gives up.
Interestingly, VLC player does a little better. Once it gets to the first trouble spot, I lose audio, but it skips over the trouble spots easily otherwise, and I can view the visuals of the episode, but not the audio from that moment onwards.
Oh well. Glad I only tried it as part of a free month. No daytime Olympics recordings for me. The one thing I could still try is that the antenna I have hooked up to my Xbox has a signal booster, so maybe I could try that signal booster with this little antenna that I have hooked up to my HDHomeRun box, and see if it makes for perfect recordings. I still doubt it. Not in the winter time.
ATSC can be pretty finicky and I had terrible luck until I bought this directional antenna:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024R4B5C/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
That was 4 years ago, maybe better ones now. I laid it out in my attic unmounted and pointed it off at NBC and forgot about it.
Of course, ymmv. These are very location dependent obviously.