Wanna-be cable cutter: Part 3

I think this is the week we get rid of cable! Its scary. But it has to be done. The bills are getting out of hand!  I have to get myself to make the call and get this done. Its tough. I've been thinking about it everyday for weeks now, but I just cant get myself to do it. Theres no reason for this fear since we've been doing pretty good not watching cable for a few weeks now. This is what I have done so far:

 - Got an over-the-air HD antenna. I picked it up for a song from Monoprice.com. It was only about $23 bucks and we are able to pull in about 35+ channels. A lot of them are weird ones, but almost all of the regular channels we watch come in perfectly. Best part is, because we are in the city, we dont have to have this thing outside. We have it hidden under a bunch of deer antlers on the floor, out of the way! I wonder how many more channels we could pull in if it were outside. My guess is not much more. And really, do we need more? The only one I was disappointed about not getting was WLIW. But it's not like we would watch it all that much anyway, so whatever.

- Upgraded our internetz with Boost. Its not much faster then the regular cable internet, but at least it's more consistant. I do feel a bit ripped off for having it, but if it gives us a slight advantage over regular cable, I'm happy. And so far it's been pretty decent. We also had a new cable modem installed and that seemed to help a lot. Our old modem was at least 6 years old. It was time for an upgrade on that, if nothing else. I havent had too much issues with latency since, so thats a nice bonus for all the time I spend on the Xbox :D

- And finally, I got some Xmas money and we bought us a Mac Mini! For me this was the Holy Grail of getting rid of cable.  We previously had an Asus eeeBox, which was fine and all, but just couldnt handle Flash content. It was a nightmare to even try. And since a lot of the stuff we would watch is Flash video, it was holding us back. The Mac Mini made all our troubles go away. I opted for the newest model because the old ones on eBay were going for as much if not more then the new ones. (the last batch of Minis before these new ones are still much faster then the new ones.) Also, the HDMI is a dream. Not that muddy picture you get with DVI or VGA. This was the best choice. Also the Wifi is better. I think it was a good choice. Not to mention the Disc Drive. The eeeBox didnt have one of those. And since we dont have a DVD player it was a pain in the ass to plug in another computer, every time we wanted to watch something on disk. It got to the point where, i just gave up, and ripped whatever we had on disc coz I didnt want to deal with plugging in another machine to the TV.

So we are more then ready for this. I just need a good swift kick in the pants! Wish me luck!

Wanna-be Cable Cutter pt. 2

Before boost, test to the UK

After Boost, local test

Got "Boost" internet tonight. For the extra $15 bucks, Im not impressed. Thankfully I have a month to decide if I want to keep it (and the 1st month is free). If it stays consistently above 5Mbs, and they dont cap me, I'll keep it.

We had really REALLY bad service tonight, less then 1Mps, which is what prompted me to finally sign up for Boost. Locally its as fast as advertised 30Mbs/5Mps Really nice, but if I test with anything outside of the tri-state area, its pretty much the same. Of course its different from day to night, hour to hour, so we'll see. But the old service was going to be impossible to watch any streaming content without being constantly frustrated by the poor and inconsistent connection. Let's hope for all our sakes that this service will be more stable then regular internet. Also, being the conspericy theorist that I am, I suspect that once my 1st month trial is over, it'll be just as jittery and lame as it was before. I guess only time will tell.

To be continued...

After Boost test to LA

pings around the world

Wanna-be Cable Cutter

So cable TV pretty much sucks, theres never anything on, and when there is, we're not usually around for it. On top of that, we pay up the wahzoo for it! Well, I think enough is enough. For years now, I have fantasized about cutting the cord. But with the amount we would have to for internet along is just as painful. So, I stuck with it. All the while, trying different things (hardware) and ways (downloading, streaming, etc.) to get my content.

I think I'm finally at the point where I just need to bite the bullet and do it. I cant afford the $100 a month for stupid TV anymore. Especially when we watch 90% of our TV through the computer. My only concern is the stuff that my girlfriend enjoys watching. Which isnt available online, at least night right away. But she has reassured me that it doesnt matter. And it's probably not the worst thing in the world that she doesnt get to watch them anymore anyway, so I think we're gonna do it. I have it in my head that we're gonna do this in January. We'll see if it really happens. But with my current financial situation, I pretty much have no choice. Honestly, I'm hoping for a financial reprieve. This is gonna me hard! Its almost like I'm trying to quit smoking. I mean, how do you just give up something youve had everyday for 20 years?! I guess we'll find out...

I've pretty much planned it all out in my head and started getting the provisions we need to have a smooth transition. Unfortunately I'm doing this on a budget. If I could I would get a sweet HTPC (home theater PC) setup and be done with it. But I cant so I am doing this with, more or less, just bits and pieces of what we already have. We currently already have many iterations of HTPC set ups. none of them really do the trick. But I think I have been able to muster up a good transitional machine that will get us by for at least a few months, then we'll see where we're at.

To be continued.