Jim Willis

Hulu recently announced they would be raising their prices come December. We had the Live TV option with Ads and it would be jumping from $45/mo to $55/mo. I was just about to upgrade to the “no ads” plan before they made this announcement.

But this has been a busy week for streaming services so I did some back of the envelope calculations and here’s what we’ve landed on:

Yes, we are giving up live tv. But I think in all the time we had hulu Live TV since this summer, I’ve watched a live show exactly 1 time. So not really getting our money’s worth there. (That said, we have an antenna hooked up to our basement TV if we want to watch football on network television).

Note that by default the Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle for $12.99 doesn’t give you ad free Hulu, but if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu using the same email you use for your Disney account, Disney refunds $4.99/month to your account. One of the upsides of synergy, yay!

But…Disney?

I’ve been talking to a friend of mine about Disney and what they’ve done to entertainment. I agree that it is a bit dystopian. Not just that a single massive corporation owns Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars but that they also own both Disney streaming AND Hulu streaming. That is an insane amount of media assets under one umbrella.

The quick downside is that I’m sure we will very soon see some kind of price gouging from Disney. It is inevitable. How long before I’m paying $55 a month for the same bundle with Hulu and ESPN?

But the larger, long term problem with opening the door to the Disney universe is my implicit support of their dilution of entertainment down to a lowest-common-denominator formula.

A lot of Disney’s offerings (everything they touch, from Disney cartoons to the Marvel and Star Wars universes) seem to have some sort of diversity punch list that needs to be completed before the picture is released. I’m not arguing against the need for inclusion or diversity in entertainment, but when inclusion becomes predictably formulaic, it makes it more and more difficult to enter that bewitched state of being absorbed into something you know is not real—the very reason we turn to entertainment.

When creators need to hit some kind of punch list of inclusion metrics, the contrived inclusion pierces the illusion of the entertainment and breaks the spell.

And I think Disney is just going to get worse and worse with this and contaminate everything they touch with their inclusivity punch lists.

The Independent Web is the answer.

But there is a huge upside to this consolidation and watering down of entertainment: there will always be some creators who will rebel against overly-homogenized entertainment.

The more powerful Disney gets, the more fuel and energy there will be around creating alternatives to that entertainment. And so long as the internet remains free and open (and that’s never guaranteed), this is perhaps the best time in history for creators who want to put something out there and find an audience that is sick of homogenized pablum.

So, I’ll keep paying my $30 a month, watch some letterboxed Simpson’s but make sure to keep my RSS reader pointed in the direction of the independent web creators who, just like they have for the past 20 years, will help me find the really great stuff on the internet that would never pass through Disney’s homogenizing filters.

Real bummer but no one was able to figure out what was going on with my 2015 13” MacBook Pro. I suspect it was the I/O board because using the trackpad would cause the WIFI to drop intermittently.

Rather than shell out the ~$500 to have the MacBook fixed I am trading it in for $650. Hopefully I get that much. I’m really ambivalent about not getting it fixed. I don’t think Apple makes anything as good/useful as this MacBook.

In the meantime, I am using the iPad Pro as my primary device and it is absolutely useable for 95% of things. That said, I really miss being able to ‘cat’ files from my terminal window. I do a bit of Medicare billing and electronically submitting claims results in a lot of text and XML files being dumped to show the status of submitted claims.

This AM I downloaded some of those status files and still can not figure out how to read them. iOS won’t open the files (even though they’re just plain text) and I have no shell I can drop to so that I can interrogate those files. I need to find a tool to allow me to look at arbitrary non-binary file contents.

Anyway, I expect that I will use my MacBook trade-in credit to buy another machine in the coming months and have been looking at the iMac, Mac Mini and holding my breath that by the time I’m fed up with the iPad and ready to pull the trigger on new hardware Apple will have figured out how to make a useful MacBook Pro.

My meditation practice has been pretty consistent for the past several months. The payoff is that I am more frequently aware of when I am aware of what I am thinking vs. lost in thought.

Being lost in thought isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But if ever there was a “dose is the poison” example, it’s being lost in thought. A little is absolutely necessary, especially if you create things. But too much can leave you feeling empty and irritable.

Being lost in thought doesn’t necessarily mean that you are not thinking about anything. At it’s heart I think lost in thought just means that you are not aware of what you are thinking and, importantly, lost in thought means you almost certainly didn’t choose what you are thinking about.

That’s where these little technology devices can really drive us to being miserable. So much of what shows up on the screen of these devices is displayed for the very purpose of hijacking your thoughts. By design, these devices really make it challenging to choose what you are thinking about while you use them.

I have been trying to give some shape to the various ways I use technology and one of the ways I’m trying to give shape to those ways is to try to know exactly what it is I’m doing with my device whenever I look at it and to try to hold on to that sense of purpose regardless of how hard it works to hijack that purpose.

I picked up one of these dingus dongles at Best Buy this AM (same price as Amazon, $79) so that I could turn my iPad Pro into a little recording studio device/multitrack recorder in my office. Specifically so I could turn my aging by serviceable Zoom H4n into an external microphone for GarageBand.

HyperDrive USB C Hub, Type C Adapter for MacBook Pro, Laptop USB-C Devices, Ultimate 11-in-1 Surface PC Docking Station w Power Delivery Charging, USBC 5Gbps Data, 4K HDMI, 3xUSB 3.1 Ports, VGA, etc

It does everything it is supposed to, or well, almost everything. My iPad gives me a “not charging” message even though the wall charger is plugged into the available USB C port on this thing. I am thinking that the default 18w charger that apple ships with the iPad Pro is not quite enough to power the hub and charge up the iPad. Maybe a bigger charger?

Who knows, my voice gave out before the iPad battery.

BestBuy has an early Black Friday special up today, $200 for the Apple HomePod.

One of these is nice, but a stereo pair is a very listenable alternative to a full-blown stereo system. I’ve got a pair in our living room and I love them. A pair is about 10x better than a single HomePod so for this price you can get a pair for near what apple was charging when they first came out ($349 if I’m not mistaken).

I’ve noticed, annoyingly, that when I send a message on my iPad it’s not always showing up on my phone and vice versa (especially when sending to non-iPhone users). This, despite the fact that in Settings->Messages both devices are using the same Apple user account.

Turns out the problem is that both devices also need to store Messages in iCloud.

You can do this under Settings->select your name/Apple ID->iCloud and make sure that Messages are turned on. They weren’t on my iPad even though they were on my iPhone.

Man, those annoying video loops that Spotify added are distracting as hell. Annoying to the point that I turn off my screen whenever they appear.

Just figured out how to disable them. The feature to disable is called “Canvas.” Instructions here.

It’s been a couple of weeks now with the iPad Pro and I’m still struggling to understand gestures.

I never use my iPad without an external keyboard and have quickly become adept at most of the useful key combinations to navigate iOS. And to be clear, iOS is pretty keyboard accessible. As someone who has mostly lived in terminal windows and emacs, being able to navigate around using keyboard shortcuts (some of which come directly from emacs like ctrl-a/e for beginning/end of line, etc.) is really wonderful.

But there’s no mouse at all with this setup. Which at times leaves me with no option but to actually touch the iPad screen. And every time i reach out to the screen I recognize that I do not know what the hell i’m doing. Every time I touch the surface of my iPad i realize I am barely scratching the surface of what I can do with gestures.

Kirk McElhearn has a great suggestion today that iOS should have something like the buried trackpad gesture videos in System preferences that exist on MacOS.
The closest thing to actual help I can find on the Apple website is this guide to using multi-tasking gestures. And I still can’t get them to work right consistently.

My Spotify account got hacked the other day. I was using a really insecure password that was identical to that of another login I used from a site that had been compromised.

So either someone guessed it or “acquired” it.

Either way, I know it got hacked because at 5:15AM yesterday morning I was listening to a Mozart concerto and then all of a sudden my HomePod started playing some crazy noises that I would have never queued up.

Groggily looking at my play history in the early morning hours, it was clear that someone else was simultaneously logged into my account. I didn’t jump to action on it but figure I’d deal with it later.

Then, later in the evening all the family accounts associated with my membership stopped working. The natives grew restless and I needed to deal with the situation.

So I changed the password and thought things would be fine.

But this other party was still logged in!

Simply changing your Spotify password doesn’t log out all the other instances of the app. So this time I changed the password and found the button on the Spotify page for “logout All devices.” Additional help here on dealing with compromised Spotify accounts.

This seemed to do the trick. But got me thinking, man, what other accounts have I used that password for?

My MacBook is out of order for a bit so I’m exclusively on iOS 13 and had no idea how to edit the keychain data on my iPad.

Turns out, not only is it pretty easy but Apple does a really decent job of alerting you to:

• When you’ve stored an insecure/short/easily guesable password
• When you’ve used the same password on multiple sites

Simply go to:

Settings->Passwords & Accounts->Websites & App Passwords

There you’ll see all of your saved passwords.

If you look for entries that contain a little warning sign like this with the little triangle:

You can click through to those entries and iOS will tell you that the password is either insecure (too easy) or used in multiple locations (a bad practice).

I still have some warnings on mine, but I’ve changed all the passwords that matched the one of the account that was compromised, so that’s a step in the right direction.

Anyway, hope this helps.