So while my Mac is out of commission, I’m using my Windows computer as my main computer. Honestly I could really use any operating system, 99% of what I do is in the cloud. My one dilemma was a podcasting client. For audio podcasts, phone apps have them covered. There are lots of good podcast downloading apps for phones. I however watch a ton of video podcasts on my computer too. All of the desktop podcast clients all seem to be old, outdated, and buggy. I couldn’t find any decent ones for Windows. Am I the only one still downloading podcast to a computer?

I found a great solution though. Since everything I do is in the cloud, why not use a cloud client? There are a bunch of them, but I settled with Pocket Casts web version. It’s pretty slick. I don’t know why I never though of a cloud client before. Now I can watch my video podcasts on any computer, and everything is kept in sync. Podcast apps sure have come a long way since 2004.

On Saturday something got corrupted on my Mac’s boot drive. It wouldn’t run ten minutes without crashing. It’s no big deal, I got backups, I just have to reinstall the OS. I was booting off an external SSD because the internal hard drive on Mac Minis are slow as hell. SSDs have really come down in price, so I’m going to use this opportunity to upgrade the internal drive to a 1TB SSD. Surgery day is scheduled for Friday. It’ll be a pain in the ass, but I’ve upgraded cell phone batteries, so this shouldn’t be a problem either.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been saving links into Pinboard since 2010. Thanks to IFTTT I have a nice system going where all I have to do it add a link to Pinboard and it will then be Tweeted and posted to my blog. I also have a few dozen other IFTTT recipes that make life a lot easier. Now that IFTTT is getting more popular they are changing a little bit the way they work and because of this Pinboard will no longer work. The creator of Pinboard explains it all.

I took Maciej’s advice and moved my Pinboard IFTTT recipes to Zapier, and I really like Zapier so far. It’s just like IFTTT, but I found it easier to setup and use. I wish I could move totally over to Zapier, but they aren’t totally free. I don’t have a problem paying for a service like this, but Zapier’s lowest tier is $20 a month. That’s a little more than I want to pay, so for now Zapier will just be for my Pinboard automations.

I hope Maciej is correct and more IFTTT type of sites pop up. Maybe the perfect one for me isn’t here yet.

My favorite photo managing software is Picasa. I’ve been using it since before Google bought it. Now of course Google is shutting it down and no longer updating it. I love Google, but it’s getting annoying the way they shut products down. They are really making me second guessing about using any of their new products. With the loss of Picasa, I’m starting to learn Lightroom. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but in the end I’ll probably be better off. It’s a pretty powerful program.

I have a coworker who is one of those people that is afraid of Google. He thinks I’m crazy to use Gmail. He think they read all the emails. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t people reading your mail, but just a computer scanning it to block your spam, and maybe show you some ads. Big deal. Every email service that fights spam does it. To be online you have to trust some companies with your personal data. There really is no practical way around it. Why be worried about Google? Your ISP knows even more. I guess some people are just more paranoid than others. I’m more worried about my passwords. I use long ass passwords that are randomly generated, so I don’t even know them. I never answer those stupid security questions correctly, and use two factor authentication on every site that has it. So even if you were to get my password, you would also have to get my phone to get into my email. Good luck with that.

So last year at this time I was in the process of backing up all my files to OneDrive. At the time they were offering unlimited storage with Office 365. So I thought what the hell, I’d have an affordable place for my online backups and get office thrown in for free. I guess too many people had a similar idea and late last year Microsoft took away their unlimited storage.

So a couple months ago I switched to Amazon Cloud Drive. Their unlimited everything plan is $60 a year. They had some sales going on, and I got a year free from a purchase I made. Uploading all my files was way faster too. It only took my Synology NAS a month or so to back up 1.5 TB to Amazon.

So in the end I can thank Microsoft. Switching to Amazon saved me money and has faster uploads. I don’t get Office, but I never use it anyway.

So when Spotify first came to the US I signed up right away. While I liked it, I didn’t love it enough to keep paying for it. It’s been a while now, so this month I thought I would give it another shot, and so far I love many of the improvements they have made over the years. Spotify’s improvements along with Apple making iTunes and the Music app worse with each update, there is a good chance that I will be paying for Spotify for quite some time.

Spotify isn’t going to be stoping me from buying music though. I have a massive music collection, and I’m going to keep on buying it to keep it growing. I don’t want any company controlling what I can listen to. That been said, I love Spotify on my phone. I love how easy they make it to download the songs to your device. I’m pretty much using it to replace my Music app. Any album that I want to listen to I just download it to my phone. One of my favorite features though are the user created playlists. I’ve downloaded a few 800ish song playlists that other people have created. They pretty much act as a radio station except for the fact that they have variety and I can skip a song if I don’t like it. It pretty much blows Sirius out of the water. So while Spotify is a steaming service, most of the time I’m just playing songs off my devices because of Verizon data caps, but hey it works.

I have just two more weeks left of my “overage punishment plan” through Cableone. I so can’t wait for Midco. I’m in my third month paying $140 for my internet because I went over their stupid cap, and their system is to slow to warn you until it’s too late. So for the last three months I’ve been watching my usage like it’s 1993 and I’m on AOL.

I’m have to limit myself to 10 GBs a day, and it’s not that easy. I had to switch all my video podcast to the lowest crappy quality, and actually unsubscribed from a few that weren’t worth the data. I now sneakernet my cloud backups to work and use their internet to backup. I try to download my audio podcasts when I’m out and about and can find free wifi. I haven’t watched much Netflix in the last three months either, yet, I’m just under my 10 GB/day limit. It’s really annoying, and greatly diminishes the otherwise good quality service I’m getting.

I’ll be on vacation in Hawaii when I’ll be eligible to switch plans, and you bet I’m going to be taking time out of my vacation to do it. According to Mico’s site, I’ll hopefully be able to get their service sometime this year, and I don’t believe they have any caps. At least I couldn’t find that in the small print. The day I can switch I will. Stupid me for believeing that Cableone’s “no overage fees” ment no caps.

Yesterday I blogged about blogging dying. RSS is another of my loves that seems to be dying. I’ve read about so many people that have given up on RSS for Twitter or Facebook. While I get their point, RSS is like an email inbox that is always filling up, I don’t think I could ever give it up. I’ve tried doing it a day here and a day there, but I alway fear I’m going to miss something in my feeds. I need my RSS feeds, and it sucks that they are dying a little.

I’m finding more and more sites don’t have RSS feeds anymore. YouTube is one example. I subscribe to a bunch of YouTube channels in my feed reader, while older channel’s feeds seem to work fine, new channels don’t seem to have feeds. It sucks because YouTube’s subscription management is a mess. I hope this isn’t another sign of Google giving up on RSS.

Is there anybody that doesn’t hate their cable company?

Our local cable monopoly is owned by Cableone. I left them for cable TV as soon as I could, but have been stuck with them for my internet for 13 of the past 14 years. I left them for DSL for one year when the fastest uncapped speeds I could get was 5 Mbps.

Recently they supposedly lifted their data caps, so I went back. Before I signed up I searched all over their site to make sure there were no caps. I couldn’t find anything that mentioned caps, and they were advertising no “overage fees”, so I thought I was good.

They have been great all year. I’ve been enjoying nice fast speeds with very minimal downtime. No problems whatsoever.

Then Microsoft started offering unlimited data on their One Drive accounts. I thought cool, finally, there is a cloud service that will allow me to store all my backups. So I canceled my CrashPlan account and started syncing with One Drive.

Then a few weeks ago I got an email from Cableone stating that I went over my data “guideline” of 300 GBs for two months is a row and this is my second? warning. I never got a first warning, and by the time I got the second warning I was already over my data “guideline” for the third month. So by the time I got MY first warning I was already screwed. I had no chance to watch my data usage.

So there are no “overage” fees, but they force you to upgrade.

I was pissed, but I thought well hey, I would just upgrade to their Ultra, 70 Mbps down, 6 Mbps up plan for a few months until my backups are done. My Internet fee would go from $53 to $100, but I would also get faster speeds and my backups would go a little faster.

BUT NO!

Since I used more than 500 GB last month, I can’t get that plan because it has a 500 GB cap. I told them I would stay below the cap now that I know there are caps, but no. I have to get a business plan with slower speeds, 60 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up, but a higher cap for $130 a month. And I have to keep it for three months to prove I can stay below the 500 GB cap. So my internet is going up in price by nearly $80 because of a cap I didn’t know about, and wasn’t warned about soon enough. What a joke.

I have to pay for this higher cap, but if I want to get off this craptacular plan, I can’t use the extra data I’m paying for? WTF? And we wonder why we hate our cable companies so much?

I’ll stay below the 500 GB cap this month, and hopefully they will let me downgrade next month. *fingers crossed*

Luckily we soon will have another cable company in town. Hopefully more competition will make for better plans and less of the stupid caps and pretending that using more data actually costs them more. It doesn’t.

I’m not holding my breath though. I’ve never met a phone or cable company that I liked.

So some time today my new Mac should be here. My 2009 iMac is getting a little long in the tooth. I actually think Yosemite sped it up a bit, but it’s still pretty slow.

I’m upgrading to a Mac Mini. I wish they were a little more powerful, but I guess it’ll be good enough for me. A Mini just fits better with my other computers at my desk.

My plan was actually to get it on Friday so I would have the weekend to get it setup. I checked the Best Buy website and it said they had them in stock. So I went to pick one up along with an ssd drive that I am going to setup as the boot drive. The guy at Best Buy said they only had the old ones. Yeah, it’s 2014, I’m not buying a computer built in 2012. Are they trying to get rid of old stock to people that don’t know any better?

Fuck Best Buy!

I put the ssd drive back and went home and ordered everything I needed. So much easier. I don’t know why I even bothered to try to buy anything local. It’s such a hassle.

I’ve always hated Best Buy, but I thought maybe they had gotten better. Their prices are actually comparable to online finally, but it’ll still be a while before I shop there again. The online experience is just so much better.