u/JustaJ0e

Just discovered that “The Beer Hog” has shut down.
It’s a shame. That place had a lot going for it.

On Tuesday nights, there is a program called “psychic Tuesday radio” on substrateradio.com.
It’s delightfully, eclectic and quirky and you never know what you will hear. It might be music from a Moroccan Orchestra followed by Dolly Parton followed by. They Might be Giants.
Tired of normal corporate radio? Give this a listen. What have you got to lose?

Went to get in the car today, turned it on, couldn’t get it to go into drive or reverse. Only park or neutral. Tried turning it off and on a couple times didn’t help.
This only turned out to be a big deal because I hadn’t allowed myself time to troubleshoot the car and was in a hurry. Googling the problem later I saw it is something called “zombie mode“.

It probably happened because I didn’t have enough pressure pushed on the brake when I hit the on button. When I got home from my appointment and was able to look into it, seems the solution was simply to turn the car off and let it sit a few moments and then, with my foot firmly on the break, turn it back on again. I’ll pay more attention to that in the future and hopefully it won’t happen again.

Well it has been a long and fun ride.
As of a few days ago, I am no longer able to get Mediacom’s TV signal through my TiVo.
Mediacom is apparently forcing us to switch over to a new cable box and according to the technician I talked with, the only interface that box has is either Wi-Fi or ethernet. If that is actually the case, I don’t see any way to hook it up to my TiVo Series 3. I’m hoping someone out there can tell me that this is not correct and there IS a way to keep using it (other than using OTA because there is only one channel available in my area), but I think my looonng TiVo era has come to an end.
:(

I have actually tried several other DVR over the years and found their interfaces clunky and not very well thought out. I’ve also tried cloud based DVR’s which were also clunky, responded poorly to a remote, didn’t have the TiVo features, and ultimately when the Internet went down (as it’s so often does in my area) you couldn’t watch any of your recorded shows. There was nothing out there that really did what TiVo does, certainly not as well.
And I know this isn’t the end of TV. There’s YTTV and other options that are all just “fine“. But it’s sad to give up ”Great” for “fine“, just so the media providers can find new ways to charge you for content.
There have been few products in my lifetime that have lived up to their promises and just consistently performed well for me again and again. TiVo is one of those few products. Even when I ran a few of them to their hard drive death, with the help of weakknees I was able to get them quickly back up and running again. I never went into the “modern” TiVos and always stuck with my premiere and series 3 units but I’ll have to say the TiVo engineers who designed and made that hardware and especially the software should take a bow.
Thanks for decades of 30 sec skips!

I had Mediacom cable providing TV and Internet. As an ISP, it was never terribly reliable.
Finally ATT ran fibre down our street and I had it run directly to my house.

As some may know, with this service you don’t exactly get “TV”. They have a streaming decoder that I believe is Direct TV but your billing was still ATT.

When we got the fiber service hooked up, I didn’t cancel the Mediacom because I wanted to run the two, side-by-side to give an actual comparison. If I was watching one and the TV picture froze or went out, at the push of the input button I could switch to the other service and see if the problem was with the network itself or with the actual provider. Same with Internet. If my Internet slowed or stopped on one provider, I could switch and check to the other. After running this experiment for a year, here’s what I can report:

As far as TV goes, Mediacom/cable has the edge. This was because of two factors.

1. Mediacom would work with my TiVo. The DIRECTV service did not.
   I realize DVR‘s are a whole other rabbit hole, but if you’ve ever had TiVo you know.
2. live sports broadcast are CLEARLY a better image over Mediacom cable than over digital fiber (gone through who knows how many compression cycles before it finally ends up on your TV). I could switch TV inputs and compare a football or basketball game from the same network coming over the two different services and cable was clearly better, clearer image.

Then there is internet.
The ATT Fibre was much more reliable than Mediacom. I listen to a lot of streaming music during the day and that is an easy test. The amount of rebuffering and drop out from Mediacom was clearly more than ATT.

What about streaming movies?
While ATT is not “bulletin proof” over the duration of a 90 minute movie … it is far less annoying than trying to stream over Mediacom.

Hardware note: we have underground utilities in our neighborhood and due to intense downpours, at least a handful of times a year those utilities go underwater for a brief period of time. Usually less than 5 to 10 minutes. Between my house and the main trunk line there is at least one connection and it has had to be changed at least twice over about four years. It was explained to me by the text that it had become “corroded“ from having been underwater. I expect what really happened is slowly muddy water coated the end of the fiber.

Conclusion.
I have no good conclusion. I was hoping for one clear winner between these two and didn’t get it.
In the end, I think it really comes down to what’s important to you. If you mostly watch a lot of live sports and that’s important to you, I’d go with the cable. If you enjoy the solid user experience of TiVo and your cable provider will still support those, then I’d go with cable.
If instead, you do a lot of streaming services and don’t care much about the “eccentricities“ of YouTube TV then that’s probably the route to go for you.

Sadly for me, I think Mediacom is about to make the decision for me. They’ve issued new Internet gateways that have to be connected to each TV and I don’t think these boxes play at all with TiVo. If I can’t use my TiVo, then I’m gonna say goodbye to them.

My prognostication of where it’s all going in the future is that fiber and streaming is going to win out.
For one, it allows the media corporations more ways to monitor everything you watch and figure out new ways to charge you for it.
Just as important though, we now have a generation of “20 somethings” that have NEVER known the visual joy of watching a high-end, digital cable signal broadcast over a large, Sony Trinitron color TV (that weighed about as much as a Humvee). They like the convenience and since they don’t know what they’ve given up for that, they don’t miss it.

I have been un-able to figure out how to get my display to default to a specific menu.
What I would like is for the screen to automatically come on in the
RADIO - FM - FAVORITES
Screen.

At the moment, when I turn the car on I have to hit “media” (sometimes I have to press this button a few times), next I sometimes have to wrestle control away from Bluetooth or CarPlay which I wasn’t using anyway. Then you hit the RADIO option then you have to hit FAVORITES.

Maybe if I only had to do this once a day it would only be annoying but if I am out running errands, making several brief stops, having to do this every time I get back in the vehicle is making me …grumpy.

Is there anyway to tell the car to just default to FM - Favorites ?
Thanks

I have held on to my Mediacom cable account for years longer than I should (we now have AT&T fiber directly to the house) almost solely because MC works with my TiVo Series 3 and ATT does not.
Now Mediacom is forcing their users to switch to these new gateway boxes that have to be used with each tv and seem to only be connected with HDMI.

I have not yet tried to hook it up because I have been in “Home Remodel hell” for three months now and my TV/TiVo are in a temporarily displaced and rigged setup and I haven’t had the mental bandwidth to deal with it.

Have any MC users been able to get this new set-up to work with their TiVo?
Thanks.

Is there anyone here who has ever experienced (or perhaps anyone here who has worked as a leasing agent) a car dealer that was willing to negotiate when it came time for the lease to end?

I am 1 year into a three year lease and I really really like my car. But already the blue book value is very much below the buyout cost. When it comes time for the lease to end if I’m able to show the dealer there are identical used cars for sale just above the bluebook value, would the dealer be willing to come down on their buyout price?
I have been told that dealers often sell a leased car to a jober or auction house or someone like Carmax. In that case, the dealer is going to get less than bluebook value because the resaler needs to make a profit. It seems if I was willing to offer them blue book plus a percentage over that, they could stand to make a lot more money than if they just let me walk away.

I like the car enough that I am willing to take a bit of a depreciation hit but the current imbalance is just not a responsible choice and given the availability of comparable cars there is no way they would get that price from anyone.
Anybody ever had a dealer who was willing to deal on a buyout?

Edit - I appreciate the constructive input and personal experiences! Because there seems to be some interest I’ll add the following details.

1. I had planned on buying this car at the time but the lease deal was just too insanely good. Effectively, even if I have to eat the depreciation, leasing and then buying out will get me this car $7000 cheaper than I had bought it new at the time!

2)Why worry about it now? Because if I’m going to walk away, I need to start looking for my new ride. I’m stupidly picky.

3. Why buy out if I can buy a comparable, same model at blue book? I am willing to pay a bit more than blue book because I already know the history of this car and how it was maintained/treated. There’s a certain “comfort level” to that. I just have to decide what dollar value I’m going to put on that comfort.

Thanks again for the input.👍

For those of you with 3D printers ... or even better, a buddy with a 3D printer ... here is a custom charger plug holder for your Ioniq N. For free. Enjoy!

Edit: I'd add a photo here but I haven't figured out how. :(