The country, and what most will accept is much different now than during Watergate. I doubt we will ever see a Republican tell Trump he should resign as he is sure to be impeached.
I’ve been trying out Any.do as my list manager because it runs on all the platforms that I use. However, I’ve found it doesn’t support iOS 13 split screen or slide over, with no indication of when it will. Thus I will likely look for another app. The app I want must run well on iOS, Android and web, preferred to also run on Linux and Windows.
Why Everything You Know About the Nativity is Probably Wrong by Sarah Bessey
The incarnation is the miracle: it’s not Jesus' otherness but his us-ness, his human-ness, his full experience as fully human and fully God together that is the miracle.
The Grumpy Economist: Free market health care
My first question is why did they write down that goofy number of $100,000 on the bill, even though the insurance company only pays [$13,000]? …
Read to learn the answer. Health care is not a free market, it is gamed and all participants play it well.
I spent countless hours of my youth typing in programs and games from magazines in to my computer, which back then was the only way to get “free” software. Consequently, I find Code The Classics from Raspberry Pi appealing, so much so that I actually considering buying the printed version.
Happy Winter solstice
I’ve never had the ability to post pictures directly from my phone to my blog before, so now that I can, you will see more pictures here. You are warned. 😆
It is awesome outside, with 47 degrees four days before Christmas.
It’s About The Thing, Stupid - Writing By Frank McPherson
It seems to me the only way to change a thing is to find new people who are just focused on the thing and not on how to get rich from the thing. If you look back at Amazon, Twitter, Google, they were built by people not focused initially on making money but on changing shopping, keeping in touch with friends, or finding information all the while ignoring the naysayers who asked how Amazon, Twitter were going to make money.
I wrote the above last year, I’ve recently learned about Simon Sinek’s application of game theory to business and think what I wrote aligns to the infinite game.
Today is my last work day of the year, and I just finished my last meeting!
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
#quote
If you work in IT get yourself over to Amazon and grab a copy of The Phoenix Project, the Kindle version is free today, December 19, 2019.
I can now post pictures from Android, yipee! Thanks to Vincent Ritter for developing Gluon, which is a micro.blog app for Android that now includes the ability to upload and post pictures. This is an important feature for me as it enables me to easily share pictures that I take from my phone on this blog rather than relying on Instagram or Facebook.
CNN: The one question to ask yourself about impeachment:
Do you think American presidents should ask foreign powers to investigate domestic political rivals?
I see a circular argument. Schiff says the right things and makes the right point, but doesn’t matter because Trump thinks his Power as President is unlimited and as such it is impossible for a President to abuse his power. I really don’t think he says a difference from the Presidency and a dictatorship, and frankly that’s not too surprising because both parties have been edging the Presidency towards dictatorship.
Comcast Data Cap Is Not High Enough
Comcast’s 1024 GB (1 TB) monthly data plan (data cap) does not provide enough data for an increasing number of people. The main reason is that an increasing number of services, like Netflix, are streaming video at 4K quality, and in the case of Netflix, it default is to stream at the highest quality. Comcast and I fundamentally disagree, in that Comcast says few people will actually be affected by the data cap.
Last week I was shocked when I received an email notice from Comcast that we had consumed 90% of our 1024 data for the month. Why does Comcast default the notification to 90% rather than 50%? The higher data consumption appears to coincide with an automatic and “free” increase of our bandwidth to 100 Mbps last month. Comcast says an increase in bandwidth does not automatically lead to increase data usage, but given that Netflix, and I assume other apps, default to the highest quality video I suspect we ended up viewing more 4K video this month than we have in the past.
Ever since receiving the email notification I have been closely monitoring our data usage, comparing network traffic stats to Comcast’s usage meter, and I think the usage meter is accurate, unlike an issue that occurred in October where the meter was wrongly indicating drastically higher consumption. In general, I think Comcast’s usage meter is insufficient in that it only shows a monthly total. If you have a cap and will automatically charge overages, I think you must at least provide daily stats. The worst part is that home owners don’t have a good or easy to use tools of their own to confirm Comcast’s data, leaving consumers at a disadvantage when trying to dispute Comcast’s data.
Comcast’s Usage Estimate calculator says a HD stream consumes 1.7 GB of data per hour, where as Netflix says that 1 hour of HD consumes 3 GB. Comcast and Netflix agree that one hour of 4K video consumes around 8 GB per hour. Using Netflix’s rate that HD consumes 3 GB per hour, Comcast’s claim that you can stream 21 GB per day of HD video is not correct. At 3 GB per hour, that’s 11 hours per day for 1024 GB per month.
Last night I watched 1 hour of CW Seed on my Apple TV that consumed 6 GB of data, suggesting to me that stream is UHD quality rather than HD and I don’t see a way to control the quality in the CW Seed app.
If you only have one video stream in a house, 11 hours is probably enough, but if you increase that to two streams, you are down to 5 hours per day per stream and that is not hard to exceed, particularly if you unknowingly watch some video in 4K. If you stream all video at 4K you can only watch a little over 4 hours per day, which is tight for one stream, and impossible for two.
You can control the quality of the video streams for some services, but you have to do so per application/service. For example, you can configure Netflix to only stream at Standard quality, but who wants to do that if they spent money on a HD TV? And, if you use more than one app, as many do with say Disney+ or Amazon Prime, you might not be able to change the video quality or you will have to spend a lot of time changing settings in indivdiual apps. And again… you spent good money on a high quality TV, you rightly expect to be able to see the best video!
Comcast does provide an unlimited plan for an additional $50 per month. The current cap appears intended to drive more, if not most, home owners to pay that $50 more per month. (I personally don’t do online gaming, but I bet that can consume a significant amount of data per month). In my case, Comcast kindly increased our bandwidth to 100 Mbps at no additional cost…. but that’s not entirely true since I now appear to be in the position of having to pay $50 more per month!
Roam is an interesting app in that it is a mashup of an outliner and wiki. I see some concepts from Dave Winer’s work in the app, but I don’t know of that is coincidence. I’ve got questions about data security, portability, and the business plan to answer before deciding whether it is worth the investment of my time.
Blowing Past The Comcast Cap
I continue to monitor my home Internet data usage closely since receiving notice from Comcast that we are near the 1024 GB monthly cap. I enabled Traffic Stats on my home router so that I can compare that to Comcast’s usage meter. Traffic stats is an approximation because it doesn’t only show traffic coming in from the Internet but also traffic within my home network, but I think it can give me an indication of whether Comcast’s usage meter is accurate. (If caps are going to be a thing, Home Routers need a feature that shows download and upload traffic to the Internet.)
After the first day, it seems the Comcast usage meter is accurate. If that is true, somehow we doubled our Internet data usage and the only thing I know changed is that our bandwidth jumped to 100 Mbps in the last month. The usage meter only shows data going back to June, so it looks to me like Comcast just started enforcing this data cap in our area, probably coinciding with the increase to 100 Mbps. Something doesn’t feel right, my usage as around 775 GB per month and with no other change other than the bandwidth increase I don’t know what we have been doing differently. It’s as if Netflix detected I have more bandwidth and decided on its own to use it and I don’t see an option to throttle it back to 1080 or 720.
The data cap is annoying, and frankly I think the lack in detail in Comcast’s reporting is a problem that needs to be addressed by regulation. If you have a cap you can’t just report a monthly total, I think you have to at least show daily usage. Given that increase in streaming providers supporting 4K video, 1024 GB (1 TB) per month is really not enough.
Comcast will be happy to remove the cap if I pay them $50 more per month. I will probably end up paying that for the benefit of not needing to constantly monitor data usage.