A guide to choosing the right live streaming service
A growing number of TV watchers are convinced that it is time to join cord cutters, and lose the pay TV subscription, but what, of the growing number of packages, is the right one? CNET has provided a great service to to wanna be cord cutters, and listed the top 100 most watched channels and shown if and how they are included into streaming bundles.
dis-rup-shun: This handy guide is one of the best comparisons of services, and reading down the list of what my household consumes, YouTube TV’s basic package will be a perfect replacement for AT&T DirecTV — plus I won’t get 5 channels of continuous hawking of the Shark Vacuum or Cindy Crawford’s Makeup Secrets — things for which I have been paying heartily to receive.
Next Ring doorbell records what happened before an alert
Ring has joined competitor Arlo in adding the ability to view footage seconds before motion was detected. This feature will be available on the upcoming Ring Doorbell 3 version. Engadget
dis-rup-shun: If you have used a doorbell camera, you know that all too often, you don’t get a good view, in the few seconds that something or someone happens upon your front porch, and the images are not adequate to identify people or animals. The pre-roll feature should make the device far more useful in understanding the action that leads up to a motion activation event.
Congress pushes FCC to implement ban on robocalls
After inaction on the part of the FCC, Congress has exerted enough pressure to mandate application of a technology called STIR/SHAKEN by June 30, 2021.The technology, in short, will make it difficult for third parties to spoof phony caller IDs, and a certificate must be generated by a trusted token provider in order for the party being called to receive caller ID.TechCrunch
dis-rup-shun: It is refreshing to see that Congress can agree to force the FCC to take definitive action against robocalls. Expect this small victory to embolden congressional leaders to make some real progress on data privacy protection laws, as the state of California’s recent laws are forcing the hand of the Feds to take some action.
New, New Year’s Resolution — Refresh my devices
Wired suggests that to keep devices, particularly computers, running well, we should wipe them each year, restoring the factory defaults and returning the devices to the state they were in when we first purchased them. That is easier to do now that Windows and MacOS provide utilities for doing so, and cloud storage options make it easier to back up our personal data to the cloud.
dis-rup-shun: Add to your annual restart rituals, in addition to losing 15 pounds and cleaning out the closet, resetting your computer. With so many of today’s compute tasks being performed in the cloud, hardware really can provide satisfactory performance for many years. PC parts don’t wear out quickly, and while software applications continue to get bigger and take advantage of more memory, PCs are often replaced because they get slower and less stable from all the junk we load onto them. Cleaning out a PC is like cleaning out a closet, but scarier, due to fears that we will lose important things that we have stored away, or that customizations will take hours, if not days, to recreate. Nonetheless, a day spent cleaning up a PC is likely less costly than having to replace a two year old machine which is just not performing like it used to.