How about a little love for OTA DVR gear?

I cut cable TV long ago, and the vast majority of my TV time is fed by streaming services at this point (primarily, in no particular order, Netflix, HBO Now, CrunchyRoll, and Funimation).  However, there's still the odd something I like to grab from over-the-air broadcasts... problem being, watching broadcast TV requires watching on a schedule, and who does that these days?  If only somebody made a cheap-but-solid DVR, that would be the way to go.

Of course, nothing's ever that simple... most DVRs I've run across either don't support over-the-air broadcasts at all, or are saddled with obscene subscription fees.  Some years back, I thought I had found an answer with the first round of Simple.TV hardware, but not so much (here's their story, frankly I'm surprised they're still around in any way, shape, or form).  Then, the folks at Microsoft released an over-the-air tuner for their XBox One, with a promise of DVR functionality "coming soon"... I bought a tuner on release day, and have been patiently waiting, keeping track of what little news I could find.  Heck, as recently as March, I had news that the feature was in testing, stoking my hopes that it would finally come soon.

Yeah, you'd think I would have learned by now, but a promise by a corporation isn't worth the paper it's not written on.  I don't know if it's because of some major bugaboo that cropped up in testing, or maybe some back-room deal with... who?  At any rate, development is officially "on hold" now, while the resources on that project are redistributed to other XBox and Windows 10 projects... and if you think that "on hold" means anything other than the project is dead for this generation of hardware, I wish I had a bridge to sell you.

Goodbye CenturyLink, Virgin Mobile, hello Project Fi

If I haven't made it clear elsewhere in this blog, I'm a bit of a cheap bastard.  That said, one place I've spent needless amounts of cash is my phone services... which is to say, I kept a land line for far too many years.  Mind you, I did get some entertainment value out of it, giving it out as my phone number (technically true) to a great many businesses and getting to listen to it ring, and there is some security benefit to a hard line, but, even stripped down as far as I could get it, that land line still cost me about $33 per month.  Combine that with about $39/month for cell service through Virgin Mobile, and that's much too much, especially for phones, which I don't much care for to begin with.

Enter Google's latest tentacly arm of world domination, Project Fi, a cell service that piggybacks on Sprint, T-Mobile, and Wi-Fi.  Only downside is you have to use a Google Nexus phone, but, as part of their open-to-the-public deal, I could get that for $150 cheaper than usual... and get a fully up-to-date phone that actually gets security patches and the like in the process.  Oh, and, in my case, service comes in at no more than about $35/month, thanks to my limited mobile data usage... but, whatever you pay for data, any unused data, they give you credit for.  Not, mind you, "rollover" data or anything like that, but actual money credit against your next bill.  If it sounds at all interesting, you should check the link above, I'm sure Google will do a much better job of selling you than I can.

Of course, getting new phone service isn't a hard thing to do, but, in this age of "customer retention specialists", getting rid of your old service can be a pain.  Of the two, I expected CenturyLink to be the harder to get away from, so, for that and other reasons, I decided to try for the fait accompli, get that number transferred over to Project Fi, and follow up to handle any remaining issues thereafter.  For anybody that wants to try that themselves, it was fairly straightforward... just use the account number listed on your statement, without any spaces or dashes, and your PIN should default to the last 4 of your SSN.  In my case (once I got the account number right), it took 2 business days to transfer the phone number, and they automatically scheduled the disconnect for 2 days after that.  I don't expect any further issues with CenturyLink at this point, but I'll be sure to update this post if I do.  Likewise, I don't expect any major issues with canceling my Virgin Mobile service when I'm ready to do so (it's prepaid, after all), but I'll post again if that turns into anything messy too.

Update:  Three weeks on, and it's so far, so good... CenturyLink disconnected as expected, my final bill was a negative balance, and I received a check for that amount recently, so I think that's pretty well wrapped up.  Virgin Mobile is still a bit in the air at the moment... their website and automated phone support don't have an option to outright cancel, so I used their "contact us" tool to let them know I intended to cancel on April 18th, and got an email reply from someone who, well, English wasn't their first language, saying they'd have a specialist contact me.  Got a callback on the 20th, from somebody who got bad info as to what they were calling for... once we got that straightened out, they told me that, since my credit card was no longer on the account, it would just expire after 60 days... so, we'll see what the story is once a payment doesn't hit their service.

Disgaea PC, Rocket League, and related things

So, over 3 months since my last post?  Best get back into it by writing about what I know - games!

First, the catch-up bits... I know I mentioned Rocket League in passing, as part of my Steam Link and Steam Controller write-up, but that's hardly sufficient at this point.  First off, the Steam Link has improved with the addition of hardware video encoding support for all the major graphics manufacturers, all but eliminating the lag I reported on earlier.  Past that, though, Rocket League is so much fun that, having gotten it for free as part of my Steam Link purchase, I ponied up the cash for it when it launched on the XBox One, for the better-for-the-task controller and my social circle there.  If you don't know anything about it, think "spastic monkey rocket jump car soccer", and you'll be pretty close.  It's not a deep game, but it is a load of fun, and I heartily recommend it.

On the other hand, there's Disgaea PC, a port of a port of an old PlayStation 2 game.  I'm a fan of the series, and would desperately like all of them brought to PC.  When I saw the news that the first one was slated to come out, I was thrilled... but then, I saw the push for pre-orders, and got that sinking feeling.  Launch day came yesterday, and, as I feared, the reports started pouring in of weird performance issues from all corners... but, initial reports seemed to indicate that it was mostly people with nVidia graphics cards seeing the worst problems (I have an AMD card), and the producers were quick to accept that there were issues they missed in testing and promising to get things fixed.  So, I paid my dues, took my spin of the wheel, and... well, as-is, it seems to be playable, so long as I turn off anything "improved" from the original version, and for my definition of playable (it's slower than it should be, but not intolerably slow).  I wish I could tell everyone to go and get it right now... but, I just can't.  Hopefully, the developers work out the kinks, and this is just a momentary stumble on the road to getting good, working copies of all the games on PC.

Update:  Wow, the Disgaea folks (Nippon Ichi Software America, or NISA) are taking care of business like no other company that I can think of in recent history.  Two patches later in the course of a week or so, and the game's gone from "barely playable" to "working mostly as intended, with a glitch or two".  Hopefully, NISA has learned the value of a beta or early access stage to their PC releases from this little debacle, but it looks like they're well on their way to cleaning up this mess, at least.  As for the game itself, I'd say it's worth buying at this point... my main issues with it at this point are design choices that later games in the series improved on, but it's still a nice little game itself.

Windstorm 2015

File this under "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"... Tuesday afternoon, we had a freak windstorm come through Spokane, knocking out power to the vast majority of residences and businesses in the area, including my house.  Wednesday morning was a little chilly in the house, but work still had power, and all the amenities I might want, so I figured no big deal... until power dropped at work on Wednesday morning.

Bereft of modern conveniences, I resorted to pulling out my old Sony Walkman for its radio, and fired up my 3DS for a little entertainment.  That first night wasn't so bad.

Thursday morning was cold enough to convince me that, cat warmth or no, I should be getting my full winter bedding set out and set up.  Didn't have to hang around the house for long, since power was restored at work, but that just meant a brief opportunity to recharge phone and 3DS, while handling any server issues that cropped up.

Thursday night was a little unpleasant... I have a fireplace in my house, and I tried burning some DuraFlame logs to combat the chill.  That was just enough to keep the temperature in the house from falling further, while the fireplace was lit.  Of course, that was in the living room... getting into bed was actually briefly painful, before body heat and good bedding took hold.  That, and having cats snugged up so close as to cut of circulation in one of my legs, well, let's just say it wasn't a good night.

Friday morning, the house was down into the 40s, convincing me to take up an offer for some free firewood for the night's fire.  The day itself was pretty crappy for the most part, between coworkers equally grumpy from their own power troubles and out-of-area employees perturbed by the loss of services from our power outage... did manage to get a shower in at work (in what I'm pretty sure is the smallest shower I've ever seen, including in my Navy days), so it wasn't a total wash (so to speak).

Friday night, I relearned the ways of wood fires, using the DuraFlame logs as fire-starters.  I couldn't make a really big fire (visions of chimney fires and the house burning down and all that), but at least I gained a few degrees back in the living room, where I set up my bedding on the couch for a not-very-restful night... it was warmer by the fireplace (while the fire continued to burn), but lack of mobility and cats maneuvering for space atop me limited my sleep greatly.

Saturday morning was the coldest yet, with the house at a balmy 44 degrees, effectively laughing at my prior attempts to heat using the fireplace.  No matter... this day, without work to distract me, I could concentrate on fire management, maybe get the living room up to the mid-50s before all was said and done.  Then, a couple of utility trucks passed in front of my house, and I dared to hope... and a little before noon, power came back, and with it the furnace (which did more in a half-hour to heat the house than I had managed all morning) and all the other amenities, including the Internet.

So, now, I do the laundry that's piled up, in preparation for taking a proper shower, and catch up on what I can of what's passed over the past week.  I don't know that "thankful" is the right word for what I feel for modern amenities at the moment, but I sure know it's a damn sight better than the alternative.

Yet another no-buy brand: Vizio

OK guys, I know, consumer electronics is a cut-throat business, but it wasn't that long ago that I held up LG as a no-buy... so, why, Vizio, why are you so intent on one-upping their crappiness?  I mean, bad enough you're also "opting in" people to your spying schemes without their consent, but analyzing displayed content, regardless of source, to better feed advertisers, and tying that information to the IP address where the TV is in use, the better to let advertisers use that info to shape ads for other devices in the house... "intrusive" doesn't begin to describe it.

At this point, I almost hope more manufacturers take this track, if only to create sufficient market for a "dumb" TV to flourish again.

Steam Link and Steam Controller

If you haven't guessed from my other posts, I'm a big fan of computer games and video games, back from the days of the Atari 2600 on one side, and my friend's PC with the "turbo" button that raised the clock speed from 8 to 14 MHz (as memory serves) on the other.  However, for all their similarities, they've always been separate categories to me, what with one side's performance leapfrogging the others over the years, and the spaces they've been designed to occupy (living room and office) have been fairly well separated as well.  Certainly, they've grown closer over the years, first with things like laptops, and then with common digital interfaces, but they're each still pretty much their own thing... that is, possibly, until now, with this pair of devices.

Steam Link

The dream for many a computer gamer over the years has been to be able to set aside the desk, table or wherever they usually use their computer, for the comforts of a den or living room.  To date, the best answers for that would be a laptop (where you sacrifice screen size and possibly get burned in uncomfortable places by the heat they produce), or connecting a PC directly to your TV (which has aesthetic issues, including fan noise, plus the need to connect input devices to the PC reliably, no small feat with some wireless keyboards/mice).  Now, the Steam Link provides another inexpensive ($50) option, in the form of a small box you connect to your TV, with three USB inputs for whatever devices you want to hook up to it.  Using your PC's Steam client, it then connects to your PC over your network, letting you see and control the games you run on your PC at your TV, while your PC's fans howl in another room entirely, if you so desire.

That's not to say this is a perfect solution, by any means... no matter how fast your network, there is still a very small element of lag involved.  That lag wasn't noticeable to me in most games, but in some "twitch" titles, it's very noticeable... for example, when I played Rocket League, it threw my timing off enough that I had more problems than usual connecting with the ball on anything other than a driving-straight-at-it course.  On the other hand, things like Borderlands 2 worked quite well, once I turned off hardware stream encoding (apparently, there's an issue with AMD hardware drivers at the moment)... it might be worth trying higher-speed games once hardware encoding is working reliably again, but, as of this writing, that's the real limitation.

So, for this device, if you want to play your computer games on your TV, but don't want a PC cluttering up your living room, this is an excellent choice, especially at the price.

Steam Controller

Of course, whether you've got a PC hooked up to your TV, or you're using a Steam Link, you're still, by default, stuck with wrangling a keyboard and mouse (or trackpad or whatever) on your couch, and maybe a game controller as well, depending on the kind of games you like to play.  Compared to the spartan simplicity of a game console's controller, that's a mess of hardware to have to handle (and keep clear of the snacks/beverage of your choice,  in most cases).  The Steam Controller is an attempt to answer that problem.

The good thing about the Steam Controller, and its greatest weakness, is that it's designed to be reprogrammable, giving it a wide range of things it can do, without doing all of them particularly well.  In support of that goal, they replaced the d-pad and right analog stick with large touchpads (the left one with d-pad "grooves" for a little tactile feedback), and added grip controls and gyroscope functionality.  To use a tool analogy, if the standard XBox/PlayStation controllers were screwdrivers, the Steam Controller would be a Leatherman multitool... you can use it to turn that bolt or screw, but you'll never get the stability and torque you would get out of a basic screwdriver.  On the other hand, try using that screwdriver to cut, hold, file, saw, or open a can, and the Leatherman will outshine it handily.

So, enough analogy, here's what I found, playing briefly through a few types of games.  As far as emulating a game controller goes, it's mediocre at best.  Mapping a touchpad to act as a right analog stick is possible, but in anything that requires limited motion of that stick (think aiming your weapon in your favorite first-person shooter), it's pretty useless, due to no useful feedback as to how far off-center you are (and in what direction) beyond what the game shows you.  On the other hand, games like twin-stick shooters where you're using the stick at full travel could benefit, with a bit of practice, because the larger diameter of the touchpad makes for the potential for better resolution/aiming using the outer edge of the pad.  Then there's the d-pad emulation on the left touchpad... at least as shipped, the "click" feature of the pad is just too stiff to work well with the d-pad mapping, so using that in a fighting game is pretty well right out.  I actually found the left analog stick to work fairly well for my limited needs there... and I believe somebody could probably get pretty good setting up a "no-click" d-pad on that touchpad, but it would take a lot of practice that your average casual player wouldn't even attempt.

Outside of any "standard" controller setup, though, that's where this controller really starts to shine.  Sometimes, what you can do is limited by the game you're playing... in Skyrim, for example, you have to choose explicitly between game controller and keyboard/mouse input, and the right analog stick is near-useless for that, so you have to settle for keyboard movement controls mapped to your left analog stick if you want the precision/control of a "trackball" control on the right touchpad (which works surprisingly well, thanks to the haptic feedback clicks the controller gives you).  On the other hand, Borderlands 2 will happily let you run a left analog stick from a controller with a trackball-touchpad for aiming, giving you the best of both worlds (the only issue with which is that the game gives you prompts based on the last kind of control it sensed you using, but as long as you know the buttons to use for OK, Cancel, etc., it doesn't much matter what the game calls them at the moment).

Then, of course, there's all those games you couldn't play with a controller at all before, with mouse/keyboard controls involved.  I understand there may be some games that don't fare as well as with a "regular" mouse (real-time strategy games come to mind), but some of that may just come down to familiarity with the controller... I can't say, since I don't play that sort of game much.  But slower and turn-based games with mouse controls aren't any issue, from what I've seen... and, if you've got a game with more controls than you can/want to map to buttons on the controller, there is also a virtual keyboard available that uses the trackpads for input which, while not as good as a "real" keyboard, is quite sufficient for limited use.

My verdict, then... as another $50 toy, if you're looking to play games on your TV that aren't optimized for a "real" game controller, this is a pretty good choice, as long as you don't mind fiddling with different controller configurations.  If you don't want to deal with the fiddling, wait a few months... between community-shared configurations (I've even done a few myself) and "official" configurations put out by game developers (saw one from Firaxis for Civilization V last night, for example), the cream should rise to the top for most semi-popular games by then.  Of course, the real fun will be to see what new games support, now that this option exists... but don't let wondering about the future stop you from enjoying the now.

That took a while

I just put out the final version of my previous post... I expected that to take a month, maybe two, but certainly not the better part of four months to complete.  Apart from the regular suspects of "life in general", I specifically blame the Humble Bundle, which is a wonderful way to get games you have a passing interest in on the very cheap (and oh yeah, support charity while you're at it).  No, I'm not going to blog about all of those games I got... in fact, I may learn my lesson here and not do another "Steam sale booty" post in the future, and restrict myself to blogging about games that really grab my attention (for example, Rocket League is some good, stupid fun, if I haven't mentioned it before... multiplayer online rocket-car soccer!).

Not that I'll run out of things to post about... I expect to get my Steam Link and controller here in the next couple of days, which should help boost my PC game-time somewhat (cats in laps and keyboards/trackballs just don't work together all that well).