The Price of Cable

Ever since I’ve lived on my own, I haven’t paid for cable. Instead, I’ve relied on internet services to provide the video content I desire1.

The other day, I was re-evaluating my subscriptions to see if there are any I should be cancelling. Note that for my budgeting purposes2, a subscription is, broadly speaking, any regularly occurring expense outside of utilities and rent, including online video services. Here are my current subscriptions (all converted to per month cost):

  • $9.00 - Amazon Prime
  • $7.92 - Backblaze online backup
  • $2.08 - Flickr
  • $15.00 - HBO Now
  • $3.75 - Hover (3 domain names)
  • $12.50 - Linode VPS
  • $6.00 - MotorTrend on Demand
  • $9.00 - Netflix
  • $3.33 - Plex Pass
  • $5.00 - PO Box (USPS)
  • $3.33 - Washington Trails Association
  • $13.00 - YouTube Red

Total subscription cost per month: $89.91.

Looking at that amount, I realized many people pay that much (or more) for cable alone. Taking just the services I’m subscribed to that provide streamed video content (marked with bold above), I’m paying $52.

Of course, it’s fuzzier than that. I originally subscribed to Amazon Prime for the savings on shipping; from my perspective, the video content is free. I pay for YouTube Red to get rid of the advertisements in front of otherwise free videos, not for original content produced by YouTube. Totaling up the services that I pay for actual video content - Netflix, MotorTrend on Demand and HBO Now - I’m only paying $30 per month.

Compared to cable, that seems like a pretty good deal to me. However, there are additional benefits. I can watch shows:

  • on my own schedule, without the hassle and restrictions of DVR.
  • without being interrupted by advertisements.
  • on any device I own.
  • offline with many of the services.

If you live in the United States, there isn’t a better time to drop cable and save some money. If you’re in another country, things are moving in the right direction, albeit at a slower rate. If you can’t switch now, give it some time and I expect things will continue to improve as many of the video services produce their own content, which they are making available around the world.


  1. Technically I paid for cable as part of a bundle with my internet for a while, but I disconnected my cable box shortly after setting it up. ↩︎

  2. One day I hope to blog about my budgeting system, but that’s for another time. ↩︎

We Shall Sail Together - Sea of Thieves Tavern Tune

It’s official, folks: Rare has posted the official version of We Shall Sail Together as a Tavern Tune on their YouTube channel. Listen to it below.

I mentioned in my previous post on We Shall Sail together that this was coming. Now that it’s here, please excuse me while I listen to this on repeat for a while.

Star Shield 6

A previous coworker has moved into independent game development and has released a new game: Star Shield 6.

I’ve had it on my phone for over a month now and it’s a lot of fun. It requires more thought than first meets the eye, yet games are fast enough to play on the go. It’s even free!

Go get it on your phone.

Plex Ships Version 1.0

Huge congratulations to the Plex team for shipping version 1.0 of the Plex Media Server:

One could argue (quite successfully, I think), that the Plex Media Server should have reached v1.0 a long time ago. Millions of people are using it, it’s generally stable, and we release regular updates. We’ve improved our QA process, increased the size of our team, and done lots of growing up in general around our software processes. So without further ado, I’ll skip to the end and let you all know that—with an extreme sense of pride and just a hint of a tear in my eye—we’re incredibly happy to be releasing v1.0 of the Plex Media Server to you today.

I personally use Plex for hosting my music, photos and various videos. In fact, I’m streaming music from Plex as I type this post. Keep up the outstanding work, Plex team; I look forward to seeing what the path to version 2.0 brings!

We Shall Sail Together

Update: The official version has been released!

In my last post I mentioned how much I loved the sea shanty that accompanied the E3 trailer for Sea of Thieves, but I wanted to know more. I did a bit of searching in the Sea of Thieves forums and sure enough there is already a thread about it. Turns out I’m not the only one clamoring to buy the song.

In the thread, a Rare employee reveals the name of the song as We Shall Sail Together, and implicitly confirms it was composed and recorded specifically for Sea of Thieves. They don’t have intentions to sell it, but have released a clean version on their YouTube channel. will be releasing a clean version (no guns or explosions and full length) through their YouTube channel sometime next week**.**

Until the clean version is released, we get to listen to a live version recorded on the floor at E3. Brilliant shanty, and a great live performance considering they were missing instruments and it seemed quite impromptu.

Sea of Thieves

At E3 2016, the game studio Rare announced a new game they are working on, Sea of Thieves:

Simply put, Sea of Thieves is a game about being a pirate, and everything that comes with that – and it’s a shared-world game where you’ll encounter other crews of players.

Let’s be honest: I don’t know too many people who haven’t wanted to experience the life of a pirate at least some point in their life. This is awesome.

I recommend watching the hilarious E3 gameplay video shared by the team. To say the least, it looks like a ton of fun and I’m looking forward to the release. Unfortunately, there isn’t a release date yet, but I’ll be getting it right away when it comes out.

Also, that intro video and music sets the tone perfectly. I don’t know if the music was custom recorded or not, but I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Update: I found out more information about the trailer music.

RSS Feeds Live On

If I want to follow a website, I subscribe to their RSS feed with my RSS reader. This lets me easily track which articles I’ve read, sync that read status across devices and have a consistent reading experience regardless of the site.

If you aren’t a power user and have never heard of RSS, you’d be forgiven. You see, when I first started following blogs about 5 years ago, RSS was heartily promoted by most sites as a way to subscribe. Since then, with the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter, prominent RSS links have often gone away.

Fortunately, even if no link is provided, most blogging engines still publish an RSS feed by default. Any blog powered by WordPress, for example, will have a feed provided at a default path of /feed/, unless the site owner has explicitly disabled it.

As long as RSS feeds continue to be published, I’m OK with the status quo of many sites not advertising it. At this point, the market has decided that RSS won’t be a mass-market success as a consumer-facing feature1 — it’s just too fiddly for the average user — but the power users out there that love it, like myself, can continue to use it at no cost to the site owner.

However, on this site, there’s a link to the RSS feed in the sidebar, prominently visible. RSS feeds live on.


  1. Of course, as a backbone format, RSS isn’t going anywhere anytime soon↩︎

Desperate for Cable Subscribers

Every 6 months or so I remember that I’m paying Comcast for both cable and internet service. This is despite my cable box having sat, unplugged, in my closet for well over a year.

(The only thing I use from my cable subscription is HBO Go, but I would happily pay directly for HBO Now.)

Every 6 months or so I call Comcast to attempt to reduce my bill by cutting my cable service. Here’s the crazy part: cancelling my cable would cost me more money per month for worse internet speeds. Here’s how it lays out:

  • Current: Cable + 105Mbps download + 10Mbps upload, $65/month
  • Internet Only #1: 75Mbps download + 5Mbps upload, $70/month
  • Internet Only #2: 25Mbps download + 5Mbps upload, $60/month

To cut my cable and save any money, I would have to cut my internet download speed by 76%.

There is some nuance happening. I’m holding onto a legacy bundle I got when I first joined Comcast, and the internet-only prices are without any deals. Regardless, that is a massive performance difference for what is effectively the same price.

It fascinates me that Comcast is so desperate to hold onto cable subscribers, even if it means giving them significantly better internet speeds than their prices would normally dictate.

BadUSB, a USB drive that turns into a keyboard

BadUSB is a hack announced at Black Hat USA in 2014, that is both ingenious and terrifying. A standard USB drive is re-programmed so that shortly after being plugged in, it changes its device type to a keyboard. From there, it can quickly enter keystrokes to install malware onto the host machine.

See the demo and full technical explanation in the video. The demo starts at the 1 minute mark.

First Homemade Hololens Videos

The embargo was officially lifted for Microsoft employees so they can now post videos made at home with their HoloLens There are some really good ones out there, with a Twitter hashtag bringing more in every day. Here are a few of my favorites so far.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, though I have not been involved with HoloLens development.

A Baby

While not the most practical, the video in this tweet is adorable. The tweet’s text, however, is powerful. Just like computers have always existed in my world, the babies of  today will never know a world without holograms.

Holograms will have always existed in Hannah’s world. I’m proud to help make this technology real #MadeWithHoloLens pic.twitter.com/S1atqu0Dgr

— Brad Sarsfield (@bradoop) December 1, 2015

Watching YouTube

At first glance this is another marketing-focused vision video for the HoloLens. In reality it is a real person, using a real HoloLens, in their real house to watch a YouTube video.

Corny? Possibly. Cool? Incredibly.

Streaming Halo 5

This is a great demonstration of how powerful HoloLens is. HoloLens is completely wireless, so the ability to stream a game is quite impressive as there doesn’t appear to be ghosting or other visual artifacts. It will be interesting to see what the input delay is, as that is what will determine how practical this is for gaming.

Update: NUIWorld has more HoloLens videos.