Category Archives: Technology

Moving away from cable…slowly

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The cable companies must be deathly afraid of what people like myself are trying to do…slowly moving away from subscribing to Cable TV. While I cannot completely kill that bill (not until there is a reasonable option for live sports), I have begun to take baby steps in that direction.

The bedroom TV is literally used for two things: morning news and movies. That is it. In fact, even saying movies was kind of inaccurate since there wasn’t any DVD player in there. In the past, if I really wanted to watch a movie in there, I had to lug my PS3 into there and hook it up.

Not anymore. The HD Cable Box is unplugged and will be dropped off at Comcast shortly. The AppleTV plugged in, configured, and in use. Cable TV cord plugged directly into the TV so we can access the Clear QAM channels such as our local TV stations (all still in HD). Took less then 20 minutes to pull this off (plus the time to do a channel scan on the TV).

The setup is vastly easier to use. My wife always had trouble getting the cable box and TV to be turned on at the same time. That issue is gone. The AppleTV is always on or in standby, a simple button press on the spartan Apple Remote away from being active. Using just the TV remote for switching channels, inputs, and volume is much better.

Test streaming of Netflix and content from our laptop worked flawlessly without issues. Watched two Firefly episodes and really enjoyed it. Ripped DVD’s from our collection work perfectly and look remarkably good. Still have to get all of our movies ripped and encoded, but we are getting there.

Curious to see if we ever miss the cable box in there (based on our usage the past few months, I am almost certain we won’t miss it). I am also going to see how often in the living room we really watch a TV channel not available on Clear QAM. I suspect only when it comes to live sports.

Once Apple allows apps on AppleTV (it is a matter of time before that happens) and if the major sports remove blackout restrictions for local sports viewing, we will easily have enough content to officially cut out the TV part of our cable bill.

The plan to move to Gonyea.com

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A few months ago I acquired Gonyea.com from a domain squatter. I haven’t done much with the domain due to time restraints, but I am edging closer to at least begin working on moving over my online presence to it. Here are my initial plan:

I have signed up for Google Apps for the domain. The free version does everything I need, whether it is e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I do not need to worry about running a mail server and I can use Google Apps on any device I own.

In one sense, moving e-mail over to Google Apps would be easy. Setup a filter on Gmail to do all of the hard work and that is it. Yet it really isn’t that easy. The perfectionist in me would require that every online account I own be immediately switched over, which will take hours to do all of the updates. Then again, do I really want a bunch of web sites to know about my new e-mail address?

My calendar right now is just hosted on my home computer and isn’t synced in the cloud. I will use this opportunity to move everything over to Google Calendar.

I plan on configuring my iPhone and my iPad to both use Gmail & Google Calendar via the Google Sync feature. Instantly I will have over the air calendar and contact updates, plus push e-mail.

I am almost certain I will just 301 redirect chrisgonyea.com to chris.gonyea.com. I just have to setup the proper .htaaccess rules and setup WordPress on chris.gonyea.com.

Preparing an iPhone to be sold

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With my wife and I both upgrading to the new iPhone 4, we decided to sell both of our old iPhone 3G’s to Gazelle.com. No hassle and nothing to worry about with scammers.

This made me to wonder, what is the safe way to securely wipe an iPhone? I do not want any of my personal data on the old phone to get in the wrong hands.

EverythingiCafe.com has a great article on how to do this. It essentially boils down to doing a restore of the iPhone and then using the “Erase All Content and Settings” setting on the newly restored iPhone to securely erase all of the data on it.

New AT&T data plans

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Last week there was certainly lots of talk about AT&T’s new data plans across the Internet. The reaction seemed to fall into two camps from what I could see: 1) heavy data users that absolutely hated the plans or 2) people who would save money and appreciated the plans. After doing some comparisons, I think I fall under #2. Here is my thought process behind it.

A quick look at my data usage shows that my wife and I could easily live with the 200MB data plan. Below is my data usage:

The next is my wife’s data usage:

The closest I ever got to the max that a 200MB plan would allow is 170MB. Closest my wife got was 143MB in one month and usually averages below 100MB.

We now have three options here:

  1. My wife and I could both drop down to the 200MB plan. Our phone bill drops about $30, which results in a $360 savings over the course of a year.
  2. My wife drops down to the 200MB plan, I use the new 2GB plan with the tethering option selected (for work and traveling reasons, it would be very nice to have). Her drop to the 200MB plan saves $15 a month, plus my drop to the 2GB plan saves $5 a month for a total of $20 savings. Then with tethering for me costing $20, we break about even with what we pay now.
  3. Keep our current “unlimited” data plans.

I am leaning towards option #2 here. I am not losing anything, since I never went near the “unlimited” data plan’s max of 5GB a month. I am gaining tethering and end up paying about the same monthly bill.

The backup strategy

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For the past few years, I have been using an Apple Time Capsule to have an complete backup updated hourly of my Macbook. It has worked very well and has saved me several times when I deleted files by accident. Luckily I have not had to call upon it in the worst case scenarios such as hard drive death, fire, lost, stolen, etc. I needed a solution to have my backups offsite as well.

I initially thought I could do the old keep a hard drive off-site at all times with a whole backup. That however would require me to remember to do it, which I have proven time and time again I could not. After all, for years I had a hard drive on my desk, but never manually ran the backup.

I decided finally that I should give the online backup companies that have sprung up the past few years a chance. I haven’t heard any downright horror stories involving them. In fact, most reviews I have heard were very positive. Their prices are quite reasonable: $50-60 a year for unlimited backup per computer.

Right now I am trying out Backblaze, which seems to have gotten great reviews from what I can see, has great Mac support, and has a wonderful option of paying to have a hard drive shipped to you with your data. Mozy does not have this option outside of DVD’s (great a stack of 100 DVD’s should be fun to restore) and Carbonite doesn’t seem to have any option outside of download restores.

I am currently finishing up day two of the initial backup to Backblaze. So far so good, I have about 25GB of 99GB backed up, which works out to just about 12-13GB a day. At this pace, I should be backed up completely in about six more days. After that, from what I understand the service continuously backs up any file changes and only the parts of the files that actually change, so future backups should almost be instantaneous.

I will report my experiences with this service as time goes on and I get to use it. Hopefully I will never have to test how good the restore process is.