geek stuff – Page 3 – linsenbardt.net

January 21, 2012

Internet Bi-Partisanship

By now, surely you have read and/or heard plenty about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). These two bills were heading through the U.S. House and Senate (respectively) and seemed destined for passage as recently as last week, with the first votes coming up next week.

Also, as you probably know, a shutdown of Wikipedia, Reddit, and other popular websites (as well as a host of other “In Solidarity” messages on homepages across the web) managed to galvanize support against the bills that has never been seen before. In a single day, Google.com collected over 7 million signatures on an online petition. Rather than the English-version of the website, Wikipedia redirected you to a list of your Congressional representatives and senators so you could either phone or e-mail them (I sent e-mails to all of mine; heard back from two of them, so far).

I don’t want to belabor how bad the bills are (or now were). They were pretty bad. They were so vague as to allow for entire websites to be brought down, or at least to make it so cost-ineffective to host any interaction with users and consumers (for fear of copyrighted material being posted) that an entire industry of user-generated content would die. I highly suggest you watch the video above if you want to understand the issue fully. If you’re an internet user in any capacity, it’s an important 13 minutes for you to spend.

Mostly, I wanted to address how ridiculously cool it was to see the entire internet united, even if for only one day. For that 24 hr period, this is all anyone was talking about across social networking. For that 24 hr period, people were engaged in the politics of what was going on with an issue that applied to them directly. For that 24 hr period, it didn’t matter if you were a Democrat or a Republican posting on some message board: both political parties supported the bills, and both party’s voters were against it.

For that 24 hr period, the internet and its users had more political power than the lobbyists from the motion picture industry and the music industry. And that’s saying something.

We’ve seen something like this before, in the form of the Arab Spring nearly a year ago, where social networking and the internet helped spawn a revolution across the Arab world, in multiple countries, casting down dictators long thought to be invincible by their people. Their citizens got organized, coalesced behind a belief that they could make a difference in their lives, and decided to take action. And in some small way, the internet did the same thing for the people of the United States this week.

And I just think that’s kinda cool.

January 15, 2012

Trying Out A New Toy

brewday_1 — A little snow won't dissuade the determined brewer.

For mid-January, yesterday ended up being a pretty gorgeous day for brewing. The sun was shining (occasionally) and the temperature held in the mid-40s for most of the afternoon. Thus, with Brooke and Meg out of the house, I opted to make the Chinook IPA Mom and Dad got me for Christmas.

This time, however, I also got to try out one of our new immersion wort chillers, so I figured I’d take the time to explain what this thing does and how to use it. Generally, you boil your wort (i.e. unfermented beer) for about an hour, and you add hops and other components during that period. However, you can’t add the yeast until the beer has cooled to below 100 F, though preferably closer to 80 F. You need to cool it down as rapidly as possible, so you can hopefully get it into your sealed fermentation vessel as soon as possible, including yeast.

For previous batches, we’ve always just put that big 5 gal. pot in an ice bath, though we’d have to add additional ice and cold water throughout, frequently taking well over an hour to cool down. Here’s where a wort chiller comes in: you run cold water through its copper tubing to act as a heat exchanger, removing heat from the wort quickly as cold water takes it away.

As this was my first time using said device, I had to do a few things first, namely, clean it.

brewday_2 — Wort chiller, bathing in diluted white vinegar.

In the process of manufacturing, the copper tubing tends to have coatings of various oils and oxidized gunk that you don’t really want in your beer. Reading from John Palmer’s “How To Brew,” I found that before you use the chiller for the first time, you need to clean it with some kind of industrial copper cleaner, or alternatively, just use distilled white vinegar. The oils and oxidation products tend to come off the tubing in acidic solutions, and as beer is slightly acidic, all that stuff would end up in the beer. Thus, bathing the chiller in diluted vinegar (the stuff from the store is 5% acetic acid) shines it up nicely.

After soaking for maybe 20 min in vinegar, I rinsed it off well and let it air dry while the beer was boiling. When there’s about 10 min left in the boil, I then put the chiller in the brew pot, so the act of boiling would help sanitize the chiller. Though I’d just cleaned it in vinegar, there could still be some “bugs” on the outside of the tubing, so the boiling should take care of it.

Once I’d reached the end of the boil, I carried the pot and chiller down to the basement and hooked it up to a sink using an old washing machine hose.

Cold water going in and through the tube, then coming out the other end. I didn’t have a hose that fit that end of the tubing, so I just make sure to only keep the water pressure at something manageable, so it would stay within the sink.

The wort cooled down in about 20 min. Good deal!

Now that the chiller’s been cleaned before, I shouldn’t have to soak it in vinegar again, though forum posts on the interwebs will tell you that some people insist on cleaning it every time. In theory, all you should have to do is rinse it with water, then put it in the wort for 10 min while it’s boiling, then rinse it once you’re done.

All in all, it was remarkably easy and cut down on some of the total time spent brewing. Now, we’ll just have to wait another month or so to see how the beer turned out!

December 29, 2011

What’s a “blower motor resistor?”

Back in Iowa, we had a little issue with mice deciding to keep warm inside our cars. In the Sportage, they ended up chewing on the spark plug wires. In the Scion xA, a dead mouse was found in Brooke’s cabin filter (after it had been chewed through, in building a nest).

Around that time, though, her car’s fan stopped working at all the lower settings: it only worked on “high.” Since the fan still technically worked, and we didn’t want to pay some ridiculous amount of money to figure out what the problem was, we opted to let it go for awhile. We didn’t really need the car in the summer, so much, and if it was crazy hot (or crazy cold, as Iowa tended to be), then it could still be heated and cooled: just somewhat loudly.

Well, awhile back, Mallory started having a similar issue with her Jeep Grand Cherokee, so she and Mark started investigating and tracked it down to the blower motor resistor, which tend to be faulty in Jeeps. She ordered one and had Mark install it. As I happened to be in town, I helped (read: watched…) Mark put it in. In total, it was a relatively simple process, with the removal of the glove compartment being the most difficult part. Thus, I figured “heck, I could do that with Brooke’s car!” A new resistor is around $30, so it would save a ton of cash to do it this way, and I’d pretend to know something about auto repair in the process.

When this kind of thing happens to a car, it can either be due to the blower motor itself, or the resistor. Because the fan still worked on high, it was unlikely the fan motor was the problem. Conceptually, the idea of the resistor failing (the electronic unit responsible for applying a “resistance” to the speed of the fan, thus allowing for slower fan speeds) seemed to be likely.

Well, Brooke’s car, being a small, Scion xA, turned out to be a bit more complicated.

After I removed the glove compartment, it took me awhile to even find the resistor. It wasn’t in the same place as a Jeep, and things tend to be a bit more cramped in a small, Japanese car like ours. The internet wasn’t much help in locating it, either, though I found a few hints (and no pictures…so hopefully this will help some poor schmuck someday).

I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to remove the white panel pictured above, which houses the fan motor itself, as it seemed like the resistor was somehow a part of that assembly. I didn’t have much luck removing it, though. Beneath that panel was an engine relay assembly, and that was a bit easier to remove.

I was careful to write a few numbers on these wires, so I wouldn’t accidentally put them back in the wrong ports. Then, removed the assembly and…

….there it was…way the hell back up behind that white, plastic, fan motor assembly. And, believe you me, I had to contort myself in any number of ways to get into a position where I could even remove the thing. Only took two screws, but getting a screwdriver to fit back there was challenging. After a little maneuvering, I removed the resistor.

So yeah. Not supposed to look like that. Obviously. In general, electronic devices don’t like birds, mice, or nests being made upon them.

In the end, I was able to get the car re-assembled and the new resistor works. $30 fix from the O’Reilly Auto Parts up the street. Took me about 2 hours, though most of that time was spent trying to find the stupid thing in the far reaches of the void behind the glove compartment.

Regardless, I was pretty proud of myself. 🙂

December 13, 2011

The Value of Content

I watched “Page One: Inside The New York Times” on Netflix Sunday. It’s a documentary that focuses on the NYT as an institution in news reporting in the United States and the world, but also discusses the changing face of media (e.g. blogs, Twitter, etc.) and the ability of just about anyone to put out “unfiltered” news directly to the general public, as in the case of the WikiLeaks debacle from last year. The documentary is pretty interesting, though I think they “bounced around” a bit more than I would prefer without any good transitions.

One of the recurring themes in the documentary was the battle currently being waged between “Old Media” and “New Media.” For example, you can go to practically any news blog now for your news as many people do, but practically all of them just re-word and re-post the same information that was originally presented in the NYT. Thus, the regular consumer of news gets their information for free without every having to visit the NYT website or pick up a paper, and therefore, the NYT never gets any ad revenue or subscriber fees from the reader.

Which leads to the central question of the documentary: how long will this be sustainable? Or, re-worded, how long can the New York Times, and institutions like it, survive in a “digital world” using their traditional economic models?

I heard a related story on NPR last week talking about Amazon and Apple (but mostly Amazon) and how the European Union is investigating them for antitrust violations with regards to e-book prices on their respective stores. These two companies essentially dictate to the publisher how much money they will sell their books (typically around $10), while the publishing companies used to be able to charge quite a bit more than that for a hardcover new release (let alone the fact that they set the price, not the distributor).

Now, in the case of the Times, I’m not really sure what the solution is. They have already taken steps to increase revenue by charging for their website, and I think that’s helping. At the very least, they’re making an attempt to survive the transition into digital media. Likely, as tablets broaden their reach to consumers, they will be able to charge for their app, or access to stories, effectively turning tablets into digital NYT readers. There is certainly money to be had if you produce a good app, and the NYT has a pretty decent one. It’s unfortunate that a lot of people out there don’t understand where news comes from and that most of these blogs a). don’t actually investigate their own news (they just re-post it from other sources), and b). frequently have some kind of agenda, so it may not be as objective as it should be to be considered capital-J “Journalism.” There is a value in actual news and people are willing to pay for it: the NYT just needs to figure out how to sustain the same standard of Journalism while operating under realistic expectations of what the public will pay for it.

In the case of book, movie, and music publishers, though, I think they need to adjust their model quickly. For example, if one considers a new-release book at Barnes and Noble, it’s likely it would cost you $20 or more. It simply doesn’t make sense to charge $20 for a digital copy (as publishers would love to do). The same thing goes for movies: I’m not going to spend the Bluray price of a movie for the digital version.

Now, those full prices don’t typically occur for movies and books because of the digital systems that have grown up to deliver the content for you. For a new movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you’ll spend $22.99 for the Bluray and you’ll spend $14.99 for the digital version, so there’s some premium for the physical copy and some discount for the digital copy. In video games, this typically isn’t the case, however. When the newest Call of Duty game came out on PC, it was $60, regardless of whether you got a physical disc in a box or if you downloaded it. With games, though, there has been something of a “relationship” developed between the publishers of games and the retailers (e.g. Gamestop, Wal-Mart, etc), where the publisher could offer a discount on a digital version, but in order to appease the brick-and-mortar retailer, they keep it the same price so you still may go into their store.

Ultimately, “Old Media” needs to realize that they can’t support the distribution systems that they used for the past few decades. This is starting to happen with books, where locations like Borders went bankrupt because they couldn’t make the transition to a digital age. Companies like Gamestop are starting to make the transition, offering a digital streaming service not unlike Netflix Instant. Companies like Wal-Mart will probably just stop offering games and movies, eventually, but they’ll survive because they sell other things (among other reasons).

But the publishers still have much to worry about. Their teams of editors, binders, layout people, and so on and so forth. Teams of people that were needed in order to lay out print for publication or to set up distribution chains for each product. Or that were needed to design the inside of game manuals. Or to design the cases that your DVD or Bluray came in. These are all things that just aren’t (as) necessary in a fully digital world. You don’t need to worry about distribution when you can just sell it on the internet to everyone. However, publishers are still trying to charge additional money on the digital side in order to support these folks on the physical side of their product.

Now, my solution to this problem is to increase the cost of the physical media and further decrease the cost of the digital one. If there’s anything apps on the iPhone or Android have shown developers, it’s that selling your product for $1 means that you’ll sell to additional people, and you’ll make your money back on volume. I mean, if you could just buy a new release movie for $5, would you do it? Would you even think about the purchase? Would you care if you only watched it one time? That’s cheaper than a single ticket to go see the movie in theaters. If new movies, digitally distributed, without any special features were $5, I think they’d sell more.

But again, publishers should still hang on to their “physical media” production scheme, as there will still be people that want an actual Bluray disc. And I definitely know that there will be people that want a physical book, rather than an e-reader form. But wouldn’t more people buy books if they were $5 for a new one, rather than $20? Sure, pay the premium if you want a nice, hardcover, bound, indestructible copy of a book for your collection, but don’t make people that just want to read the book help finance other people’s need for a physical copy.

There’s a somewhat longstanding psychological “principle” in gaming related to the $100 price point. Once any gaming console hits $100, then many consumers won’t even think about the price. It’ll become an impulse buy. A similar phenomenon happened with the Wii when it released, and it cost $250. But at that price, it was cheap enough as an impulse buy for many people just to play Wii Sports.

“Old Media” publishers need to find the “impulse buy” price for their products. In the case of movies and books, I think $10 is a fair price to charge, but $5 is the “impulse buy” price. Once publishers start selling their wares down there for a digital form, I think they’ll make their money back on volume, and only then will they survive.

Edit: I read this article from Slate today, discussing Amazon and its tactics that end up hurting brick and mortar bookstores. I particularly liked this line:

But say you don’t care about local cultural experiences. Say you just care about books. Well, then it’s easy: The lower the price, the more books people will buy, and the more books people buy, the more they’ll read.

Yup.

November 8, 2011

Jolicloud

I’ve mentioned previously that we’ve got a Dell Mini 10 netbook. To be honest, it doesn’t get as much use as it did a few years ago when we lived in St. Louis and our desktop computer(s) were on a different floor. Once we moved to Swisher, and now back to St. Louis again, the desktop is only a room away from the living room, so there isn’t much of a need to have a laptop constantly running…let alone the fact that we both have Android smartphones now, where it’s even faster to look something up quickly if it’s needed.

Thus, I get to “play” with the netbook a bit more than I used to. I find Windows XP to be extremely slow on the system: slow to boot, slow to open programs, slow to do just about anything. Therefore, I’ve toyed with a few different alternative operating systems. Because Ubuntu 11.10 appears to have some serious issues with the graphics chip on the netbook, I decided to give Jolicloud a try.

Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu, incidentally, but runs quite a bit differently. It’s designed to do everything within a browser as much as possible, though it is capable of having stand-alone programs installed as well. In the desktop screen pictured above, most of those programs are opened within the Chromium web browser. You can listen to music, edit documents, use maps, check your status updates, and browse the internet just as you can from any other computer. The benefit here, though, is that the netbook is much more responsive because all it’s effectively doing is loading a web browser.

I guess the main downside is that it really requires an internet connection of some type, so if you aren’t on wifi anywhere, you can’t use the OS (to do anything productive, at least). But hey, where does that happen anymore, anyway?

I’ve referred to cloud computing in the past. Like many things, I think it works remarkably well, but you just have to know what you’re getting into before you boot the system. Know what the strengths and weaknesses are before even trying to go that route. You can’t expect to run Photoshop using low-powered devices that are designed to only operate within a web browser. At the same time, though, you can get away with cheaper hardware with remarkably fast boot times and functionality. So yes, a trade-off.

I’m enjoying it for now, though. It’s always fun to install a new operating system and see what it can or can’t do. At the very least, it gets me to use the netbook more often. Still a good piece of hardware that has a few more years left in it due to software like Jolicloud.

November 6, 2011

“Khaaaaaaan!”

Kristen came and visited this weekend. Now that we live in St. Louis again, it’s a much more reasonable drive for her to come visit her niece, whom she hadn’t seen since last May. Around the time we figured out that she’d be coming in, I was also made aware of a new Star Trek exhibition being displayed at the St. Louis Science Center. The exhibition will be there until May, so there wasn’t really a huge rush…but, on the first Friday of each month, they run a special deal where they cut the cost of the exhibit in the evening and they show a movie in the Omnimax theater. And the movie this month?

“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Largely considered the best “Star Trek” movie. As Khan said, “In my estimation, you simply have no alternative.”

We went to the exhibition after dinner and after we dropped Brooke and Meg off at home. The exhibit itself was pretty neat, though I would have preferred fewer “replica” props. Sure, they had actual uniforms worn by the various cast members throughout the series. They had uniforms from each of the members of the crew from the newest movie, Spock’s robe from “Star Trek IV,” General Chang’s uniform from “Star Trek VI,” and representative uniforms from all of the captains across all of the series.

There were a few ship models and some of the original props, but there were quite a few of the aforementioned replicas, mostly in the realm of communicators, badges, phasers, etc. They definitely had some real ones and, to be honest, I’m sure the difference between the replicas and the real thing (which were only props, never truly “real”…) is minuscule. Still, seeing more actual props that were used on the various properties would have been nice. They did have scale models of a transporter and the Enterprise-D bridge from “The Next Generation,” mostly so they could take a picture of you and charge a ridiculous amount of money. Still, it was cool to sit on the bridge of the Enterprise.

In the end, however, the real attraction for me was seeing “Star Trek II” in the theater. It came out in 1982, the year I was born, so I’ve never actually seen this movie in a theater setting. To be fair, it wasn’t ideal because they were projecting what looked like the DVD version of the movie up on a screen that is meant to wrap around you. So, the image was kinda “curved,” and projected a bit higher than I would have liked. The contrast was a bit “off,” as well, especially when the crew was shown on the bridge in very dark lighting. But hey, when you’ve seen the movie countless times, you can forgive such things.

What I can’t forgive, however, is the omission of certain, key scenes. Specifically, those regarding Scotty’s nephew. As in, we see the kid, but certain lines of dialog that establish his relation to Scotty (as opposed to him being Random Engineering Cadette #7) are completely missing. It’s just really weird as it’s been in every other version of the movie I’ve seen, so I just wonder where the heck they found this one.

However, seeing the movie with a crowd of people for the first time just brings an extra “magic” to a movie I’ve seen more times than I can count. Once you’ve seen a movie you love enough times, there isn’t much else you can do to bring anything fresh to the viewing experience. However, watching it with 200 other fans, some of which dressed as Starfleet crew or Klingons, is definitely unique. Hearing cheers and jeers throughout was somewhat distracting, but still pretty great.

Overall, I think we had a good time. Glad I got to see some bits of “Star Trek” history, and that I got to share it with my sister. In the end, we came, we saw, we lived long and prospered. It’s all I can ask.

October 3, 2011

Nostalgia

Ah, it’s like I said: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

— Quark, speaking the final line of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

The third Star Trek series, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” is now on Netflix Instant Queue. I don’t want to dwell on the series or the franchise as a whole, but I do want to say that I’m looking forward to re-watching the series. I have seen all of “Next Generation” and all of “Voyager” twice (or more…) when they’ve been in re-runs over the years, but “DS9,” for some reason, hasn’t been re-played as often since it left television 12 years ago. At the time, I didn’t like “DS9” as much because, especially in the latter half of the series, they moved to more of a “serial plotline” structure where each episode tied into subsequent episodes. Back then, I didn’t like it, but now, in the wake of excellent shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” I think I may appreciate “DS9” more than I did. Today, it seems like practically every drama on television is doing it. As my Mom always says, “everything goes back to Star Trek”…

Nay, the real reason this post exists is because we visited St. Louis this past weekend. As has been mentioned before, Brooke has been living down there four days a week while Meg and I have been in Iowa, only seeing each other on weekends. This past Thursday, however, I went down to speak with a potential employer at Washington University. No details to write on that front yet, but hopefully it’ll pan out in the near future.

As part of the visit, I decided to stay down there through Sunday (with Meg, of course), getting a chance to see some people that I haven’t seen in awhile. Meg and I went by SLU on Friday morning, then I went out to lunch with some friends from there. We went apple picking on Friday afternoon (more on that in another post) with other friends, and then had dinner with them Friday night. We checked out a potential place to live (assuming I get this job soon…) on Saturday, then went out to dinner with Brooke’s family on Saturday night. And finally, we went to our old church, Webster Hills, on Sunday morning.

And that brings us to the apropos quote from above: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Things at SLU had definitely changed a bit. Some new construction, some new faces. Dr. Westfall will be retiring sometime late next year, so more changes are definitely in store for my old department. New progress on research that has carried on in my absence, which is the way of things.

Oh, and in news where change isn’t so good, it seems like every light on Kingshighway now has a “Photo Enforced” sign on it. Very bad. I’ll be doing my best to avoid those shenanigans.

At church on Sunday, though, in many ways, it’s like we’d never left. They did an acoustic “service in the round” where all the folks in the congregation were in a circle surrounding the altar area (this was our idea a few years ago, for the record). The music was mostly stuff we knew, but there was a newer one we hadn’t heard before. They also interspersed Bible verse readings between the verses of some of the songs: a nice addition. There weren’t many new faces there, but there were quite a few people there we hadn’t seen in a long time, so that was excellent. Basically, being there felt like “home” again.

I guess this separation of our family is just getting to me. While I don’t mind moving forward with life, getting to do “bigger and better things,” in many ways, I just want to go back to the life we had when we lived in St. Louis: just with a baby along this time. We ate out on the patio in Soulard on Friday for lunch and all I could think of was how I missed living down there. It was a spectacular day, after all, and with the leaves starting to change color, it made me wish I could walk home rather than have to drive 5 hours to get to my real house.

It will be interesting to look back on our time in Iowa in 12 years like I’m looking back on “DS9,” whether I will dislike it because of our most recent experience(s), or whether I will grow to appreciate it more. Right now, though, to continue the analogy, I just want to go back to “The Next Generation:” I was happy with it.

September 20, 2011

Top 5 Google+ Features

I’m not one to do “Top #” lists, but after today’s announcement that Google+ is now available to any and all, I thought it would be useful to recount a few of the features that I’ve been using on a nearly daily basis (well…some things…not everything, of course).

1). House Hunting – When we moved up here, I came up alone and brought along our Flip Video camera so Brooke could get a “feel” for the different options, at least in some virtual sense. This time around, Brooke is taking pictures with her phone, then allowing the Google+ app to automatically upload the pictures to her profile so she can share them with me. Then, I can comment on each picture and she can answer all my questions. This is done without anyone else having to see the conversation(s) or the pictures.

google1 — Here's a picture of a living room for a place we're considering

2). Gaming Communication – In the past, we have used Skype to make VOIP calls between Josh, Ryan and Mike so we can voice chat while playing whatever game we’re on at the time. Skype works well, but one person hosts the call and then has to call each person once they’re ready (much like a telephone). Now, with Google+ Hangouts, you can simply “Open A Hangout,” which is basically an open invitation with whatever group you want that can join in at any time. So, if one of us isn’t ready, they can join in whenever they want. Much more convenient, and the voice quality is nice, too.

3). Selective Sharing – I post a lot of stuff on Facebook. A lot of stuff. Google+ makes it easy with their Circles function, allowing me to share with people from Columbia, or people from Truman, or people from St. Louis, or all of them all at once. This is done really easily, both from the web interface and from within the Google+ Android app. Facebook has started adding in some of this functionality, but it’s nowhere near as helpful. It’s obvious it’s a “stop gap” measure to provide some of the same functionality, but is very much “tacked on” to their existing, convoluted infrastructure. Circles is just easier to use.

google2 — Photos taken with the camera are geo-tagged and dated. Select the ones you want, and then click the green "Share" button!

4). Full Integration with Picasa – I already use Picasa to post pictures online, partially for display on this very website. Because of the integration between Google+ and Picasa, any pictures from my phone are automatically uploaded, and then I can share them on Google+ with whoever I want. But also, they are made available under Picasa, so I can copy them into any albums I want, and either keep them private or share them. In short: it’s free cloud storage and organization for any picture I take with my phone (though, you can still manually upload them from a camera if you want).

google3 — Here's what the main screen looks like.

5). Separated Streams – Right now, I have 287 people in my various circles on Google+. A lot of those folks are Gamers With Jobs people. There are times, however, I really just want to see the news updates from my Friends, rather than the GWJ crew. Thus, Google+ makes it easy to choose which Circle (or “news feed”) you want to view. Moreover, the Android App lets you set feeds so you just have to swipe from side to side on the screen to switch between feeds, making it much easier to follow the people you want without seeing updates from everyone else. Again, Facebook implemented something similar in recent weeks, and while their web interface works alright for this, the Android app just doesn’t have the same functionality. Believe you me, when you have over 500 people on your Facebook friends list, it’s a daunting task to scroll through everyone’s stuff every morning…

So now that Google+ is open to everyone, I hope more people check it out. Really, anyone that has a Google account for e-mail already has a Google+ account ready and waiting. It’ll get more integrated over the coming year, anyway, especially with Picasa (being renamed to “Google Photos”) and Reader. You may as well get used to it now!

Plus, you may find that you like it. 🙂

September 8, 2011

On Netflix

There has been a reasonable amount of vitriol on the interwebs with regards to Netflix in recent weeks. First, it was the price increase and separation of DVDs and Instant Queue into separate plans. Then, Starz pulls out of negotiations to keep their content on the streaming service, including Disney movies and TV shows, meaning that a lot of content will disappear in February. Finally, today, it comes out that Netflix will begin enforcing its rule to only allow streaming to a single device on an account at one time (or two devices if you have a two-DVD plan, and so on).

I’ll read comments from folks on blogs saying that they’re going to cancel their accounts over all this. That Netflix isn’t adding enough new content to justify their $8/mo. That they are screwing over their consumers.

Well, folks. Get used to it. The cost of doing business with Netflix will keep going up, and they aren’t alone.

Hulu famously created “Hulu Plus,” a separate entity that you pay $8/mo to use. Hulu carries shows from ABC, FOX and NBC, as well as many of their affiliates. Some shows appear the day after airing on TV. Other shows appear after 30 days. Hulu Plus gives you the ability to watch some of these shows on your television, but the nature of the deal that Hulu was able to work with The Powers That Be dictate that not all of Hulu’s content can be sent to your TV. They still want you to watch that content on a TV, through your cable provider, rather than do it through the internet.

Oh, and Hulu Plus still contains ads. You pay $8/mo extra for different content than you get through their website, and you still get ads. All just so you can watch it on your TV. Because an LCD TV is different than an LCD monitor, apparently.

The content providers in the motion picture and television industry want a large piece of the proverbial pie, and they have entrenched interests with the cable providers that have built and “maintained” that infrastructure for decades. They see upstarts like Netflix to be a threat. A company that provides a really nice service to their customers that the vast majority of people are happy with.

Netflix has almost single-handidly destroyed the DVD industry. In the early-2000s, I bought tons of DVDs, but now that I have Netflix, I have no need. I can order a DVD and have it the next day, any time I want to see a movie. Half the movies I own are on Netflix Streaming. I still prefer the video quality of popping the disc in rather than using the internet to watch it, but still: if I want to see it, I can with only the most minimal of planning. There was a time where I would rarely walk out of Wal-Mart without a DVD in town. Now, I can safely enter and browse DVDs without fear of actually buying one.

Thus, these companies will charge Netflix exorbitant amounts of money to license movies and TV shows. They will keep increasing the licensing costs, not because the content is actually worth that much, but because they want to destroy Netflix and keep their business model intact.

This is all aside from the fact that cable seems to have less and less that I want to watch. Whenever Brooke and I are at our respective parent’s houses, we’ll flip on the TV and see what’s on. Invariably, the answer is a resounding “nada.” The only thing I miss having is the occasional sporting event. So if I cared about sports more, we’d have to have cable. Other than that, we just don’t watch much on TV anymore, at least stuff that isn’t available digitally through Hulu or TV.com, or that will eventually be available through Netflix in some form or fashion. Part of me wants to get the basic “Family Package” of 30 channels when we move just so I don’t have to deal with bunny ears anymore, but thankfully, St. Louis gets a good number of channels over-the-air, so even that isn’t as big a deal.

Netflix provides me with a good service. I have almost no desire to return to cable. I can watch what I want and there’s plenty of material available, with new content arriving frequently. My Instant Queue has 63 items in it, and it should be longer except that I know I barely have enough time to watch what I already added.

Keep on going, Netflix. I’ll continue to support you. And I imagine most people will, too.