fredleblanc

To be fair, the Wii U had these — arguably better versions of all the sports — and that wasn't a large draw for that.

That makes sense, and as the article points out, that's sort of the gambit that HBO's run. (And it's worth mentioning, is how we consume HBO. Let the shows have their run, and then binge all the shows in 1-2 months per year for $30/year instead of $180.)

I guess my pitch isn't even abolishing cable packaging all together. If people like it and want it, then let them do it. But there's a lot of room between a cable subscription and wanting one or two channels. If ESPN makes $6/mo off subscriptions, and I don't have cable but want ESPN, $6/mo becomes a lot more enticing than $25-40/mo.

Again, it's sort of how HBO works. You can get it with your cable or get it on its own. And I'm sure it's a contract thing, but at this point it just feels like more money than what they're already getting; that they may find they gain more subscribers in the transition than they lose, or at least find more eyeballs that are actually watching versus those inflated subscription numbers from "people that have cable with ESPN attached" numbers.

I'd argue that the idea got into my head because that's how it's being marketed upon purchase. For Sling at least, "$25 gets you all of these channels, or $35-ish gets you these, or just do $40 for EVERYTHING!" The marketing pitches value based upon quantity first, quality second.

I guess I _was_ just hoping that the coming revolution was something like a "pay per channel" thing, where channels set what they believe is a fair value to charge monthly and I can decide a la cart which ones I want. I get that the cost per channel would be higher, but with the ability to pick and choose, with no obligation into buying into the bigger picture, I feel like there's at least be more pressure for the networks to produce quality content. I know that's probably small-town thinking, but it's a hope.

The numbers in this article of "ESPN subscribers" is not equal to "people that watch ESPN," and I get why switching to a "only selling to people who are genuinely interested" model is absolutely terrifying — because the numbers inflate when subsidized across the entire subscription populace. That's the insurance model, and I don't see cable/Sling as entertainment insurance.

Not sayin' you're wrong, I'm just saying I wish there was another option that wasn't buying shows on iTunes if I just want one channel's programming.

This article has an interesting point buried deep down in the middle of it (that really isn't the point of the article), in that all of the new-ish things, like Sling or Vue or YouTube TV or otherwise look suspiciously like cable packages on the Internet. And that's something I can't quite get over.

I've used Sling in the past, it can be a good bridge if you've cut the cable and want to hop back in because you miss it, but besides the delivery mechanism — I can bring my own device and it streams over the Internet — I don't see that much of a differentiator from cable. With either package of Sling, I'm still getting a bunch of channels I have no interest in, and while the price may be less per month than cable, it still _feels_ like 70% of the money I'm paying is going towards channels I have absolutely no interest in. Not to mention all the commercials I have to watch with it, not just in live viewings (because that's part of the stream, I get that), but even in on-demand things.

I ask this honestly: is there something I'm missing here? People that I know that haven't cut cable because they would miss this or that laud these products as "the thing that may finally get them to cut cable," but this feels like cable just over streaming.

While CSS Tricks certainly is a lot more thorough, I've always found the "throw stuff at the wall" ordering of content (a la Pinterest) to be confusing for things where I probably need to find something specific, or want to read things in order. I think that's where this resource can come in handy.

It only took 5 minutes to get through this game, but it was an infuriating 5 minutes nonetheless — a perfect analog of what it sounds like is happening at airports right now.

This is some great art. Bravo!

I'm in the USA, so my mileage varies.

As it turns out, areas without decent cell signal — not even LTE, just a signal in general — is much more prevalent than I assumed. We just moved, only 15 minutes from where we lived, and we went from 4 constant bars of LTE to sometimes we get 1 bar of 3G.

I'm still not used to this, and there are many times where I get in my car, plug in my phone, start driving, then realize I didn't download anything for the ride. So I switch back to FM radio. Up here, sports talk stations are on FM, music is on FM, etc. As much as I hate commercials, the serendipity of a one-way broadcast can be exciting.

Second case: my wife's phone "connects" to her car, but only for phone calls. She doesn't listen to music through her phone really, and still relies fully on music from FM in her car. I don't think that's that weird.

Third case: both of my parents still drive, and neither do these sorts of things with their phones. When my dad is working in his garden, he's got the radio on (FM, generally talk or sports channels). My mom will turn on the radio in the car to listen to while she drives.

So I guess the car is the biggest case I see, and though for me it's mostly a reliable plan b, there's an older generation that still listens to a decent amount of FM (or AM) radio out there.

Nice to see The Networks by Gil Hova on this list.

I've been working on developing a couple board games for a couple of years now, and at the start of that campaign, I ran into Gil Hova's Bad Medicine on Kickstarter. On a whim, I sent him an email through his website asking for some advice about creating board games, not really expecting much of a response.

What I got was a 4-page email of well-thought-through answers to all of my questions, and a bunch of additional pointers furthermore. I met Gil at the Boston Festival of Indie Games in 2015. Super nice guy.

I have The Networks in my collection, but haven't got it to the table yet, but I eagerly await my first play-through.

Oh man, The Shaggs are something else.

And it just so happens that I live two towns from Fremont, NH, where they're from.

The melody is all over the place, and the rhythm is hard to tap a foot to, but one thing is certain: it's absolutely convinced that Christmas trees get decorated with flowers. Lots and lots and lots of them.

I think it depends on what you're making through it. For board/card/tabletop games, it's quite possibly the most popular way to get initial funding to make your game. But a game is not a business, it's the start of a product — a massive pre-order system if all goes well. Many that get into the game self-publishing game aren't doing it to make money, they're doing it to make a thing and get it into people's hands. Kickstarter is a nice way to raise money and have a central micro-social-network of sorts for your game.

Social media will do its thing, but most of the games that I've kickstarted are ones that I've seen at conventions, I've tried them myself or watched a demo live, found myself interested, signed up for a newsletter at the booth, then got an email about the kickstarter. And lucky me, I'm batting 1.000 with actually getting a game from the things I back.

(Source: I've been working on a tabletop game for a couple years now, and have been doing a lot of board-game-based research on kickstarter.)

I feel like I've saved a couple thousand dollars on machines not destroyed from being yanked across the room by accident.

But for me, the worst bit of hardware Apple has ever made is the MagSafe-to-MagSafe 2 adapter. _That_ is where the flakiness happens for me. If I'm plugging "native" plugs straight in, never a problem, but that darn little adapter — that can sometimes be 10 minutes of my morning getting it to connect.

I just recently switched to vim full time, maybe 4 months ago, after my existing IDE switched to a subscription model following two updates that made the software more and more buggy. I don't have definitive answers, just experiences:

1. The first two weeks were hell. It felt like learning to use a keyboard all over again. I've tried to get started with vim multiple times, leaving because I needed something faster. This time, I just happened to catch a break in work where there was no one breathing down my neck to get stuff out the door yesterday.

After two weeks or so, you start to learn the vim mindset. It's hard to explain, but vim is both a language (via movements and interacting) and a way of thinking (via modes). I'm still adjusting to all of those, but it's gotten to the point where I think of a task, attempt it with the shortcuts I know (the "language"), and 2/3 of the time, it just works.

2. Is there speed over previous IDEs and text editors? It's about the same for me, with the added benefit that I'm no longer tied to a system I have to pay for, it's cross-platform, and pretty available in most sports.

For Mac at least, there are things like MacVIM where I believe they let you use your mouse to click around. I did all of my learning from the Laracasts vim series, and I really like his approach of doing what works for you. MacVIM adds shortcuts like command-S to save instead of :w and stuff. If it works for you, cool. I took the approach that I want to learn the base system (plus plugins) because that is a more common cross-platform interface.

From using an IDE, I don't know if I'm saving time by not using the mouse or not, but I know that I can more quickly get places within the code if I know where I'm going. I assume the benefit of not reaching over to use the mouse is helping, but I can't really tell.

For me, there were other reasons, but I don't regret the switch at all. I'm still quite the novice, but I've switched to using it nearly exclusively for projects. (If I just need to quickly open a file from the Mac Finder, I double-click and something non-vim opens. I'm OK with that, I'm no purist.)

The only place it bites you is when you use vim for a while and then go back to something like Code or SublimeText and you're typing vim commands into the screen as characters. Make sure you double-check your work so that you're not pushing ":w"'s up to production. :)

If you're looking for something similar but more in the style of Zelda games, check out http://www.solarus-games.org/ — cross-platform, Lua-based, and has a lot of stuff baked in (either from the core set or the Zelda "Link to the Past" asset set) that gets you up and running pretty quick. Also, there are tutorials on YouTube in both French and English that do a pretty good job explaining things.

I just did exactly this myself. So many people say that you'll make so much more in the market, but 1% guaranteed feels so much better than maybe something more.

And we got a new house in the end!

I hate when I go back and things change. I went back for a reason!

But I'm also of the school that wants View Source to view the source that was just downloaded, not re-download a new copy of the source.

Here seems to be the fruit of Robert Green's labor: http://www.typespec.co.uk/doves-type/

At the end, there was a slide about the Apple iPhone upgrade program for $32/mo. That's just about $1 a day.

Watch the video, it's great. This is truly art to me: the intersection of technology and cleverness in a fun, clean little package.

I don't have the know how to do all of this, but I wish I could get my hands on one of these already made.

Unlimited vacation isn't necessarily a scam, but I've rarely seen it work well. The one is exception is one of my current clients. In the four years I've been working with them, I've seen people come in late, leave early, and disappear for a week or two at a time, and I've never heard _anyone_ ever complain about it. It works for them.

But, in Massachusetts at least, when you leave your job, any vacation time that you've accrued is owed to you in dollars. With unlimited vacation, that means that you get nothing (since unlimited isn't something you accrue, it just exists).

In my experience with a couple of web jobs, even with non-unlimited vacation I've always been met with resistance trying to take time off. It was worse in companies where we "weren't a company, we were a family" type places. Guilt trips about saddling others with works, etc., when really it was poor scheduling and planning for 100% efficiency.

So: not a scam in a binary sense, in the way that the lottery actually will make you rich if you're lucky. I wouldn't count on it though.

I love PHP. It feels like a complete toolbox to me, whereas other languages like Python or Ruby feel like I'm buying an entire Home Depot for every project. Sometimes you need the whole store. Most times I don't.

I think the OP has some good points about reconsidering the standard answers that everyone gives to questions when asked. There are no silver bullets in web, but many things sure are treated like them.

Maybe there are projects where PHP isn't right. There are probably tons. But that doesn't mean that it's always wrong. PHP is what got me into making web things in the first place. I loved (and still love) how utilitarian it can be.

But perhaps that's where I differ from most people. I see myself as someone that makes web stuff. Most seem to see themselves as app creators or system builders. And they probably are. Sure, I do that too when the time comes, but if most of the time I'm building a front-end to a CMS, I'm hardly "engineering" anything. I'm mostly just trying to make specific art for other people.

Anyway, I don't understand why PHP would immediately be ruled out from this article. It feels like the JavaScript of the server-side world to me. Use as little or as much as you want. You can do awful things with it, but also wonderful things.

"Modern PHP" being one of the trigger words in the OP.

That said, in terms of timeline, PHP has gotten better as a whole since then.

Man I loved Spy vs. Spy. Anyone remember the official board game? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1686/spy-vs-spy

I really enjoy the original Apple Extended Keyboard II. I'll be honest that I haven't used an actual Model M, but it's got a wonderful feel and not so horribly loud that you'll disrupt the world.

Unfortunately I've found that I hit the key rollover limit while typing certain words. For the past year I've been using one of these: https://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=keyed_up_labs,te... — and while not perfect, I really do enjoy it.

I haven't, is that Dawn of Wonder?

I mean, he's even said it himself, the most recent Mistborn trilogy was not an attempt to further epic fantasy, but a different experiment all together. It's an exploration of different types of stories, but within a universe that was familiar.[0]

I think the jury on the Stormlight Archive series' care is still up in the air, considering what makes the original Mistborn Trilogy so great is how complete the story is, and we're only 1/5 of the way through SA's arc (with what, another 20 years left until they're done)?

I don't think stories need to be deep and epic to be fun and worthwhile. And while Rothfuss may write the most beautiful prose (and to me, he does), it turns out that I'd rather have quantity with above-average quality than a couple of masterpieces with supreme quality.

But hey, to each their own. At least we're reading things we find interesting. :)

[0]: http://theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1152#2

Ah, which two books did you read?

I've read through Kingkiller. And, like the rest of the world, am eagerly awaiting The Doors of Stone. That's the last time I'm taken by an unfinished series. :)

I love heists, so the first Mistborn book is my favorite — it's Ocean's Eleven meets fantasy. And, I thought that the whole trilogy (and beyond) was so cleverly pieced together that I re-read it each year. I like that everything has its place, even if it feels a bit too convenient now and then.

His Stormlight Archive series took me two tries to get into, but I'm so happy I did. The characters are well-thought-through, and each book (1,000+ pages) focuses on the backstory of one particular character.

And, I think the more impressive part of it is that almost all of his adult-fantasy books are connected, and that he's setting up a very, very large 36+ book arc that — for now — is only there if you look for it, but with each new book, the ties are coming together more and more.

I picked up the first Wheel of Time book and dug in. Wondering how many books there were I found myself on Amazon.

To find out that someone else finished the series. What!? Who was this guy? What has he done? So I searched for that. Mistborn, what's this?

The Robert Jordan situation is how I found Brandon Sanderson. I've since read all of his original novels (not Infinity Blade nor Wheel of Time — I still haven't gone back after finding Sanderson) and just started my fourth re-reading of the original Mistborn trilogy. I absolutely love it.

To me, the "Robert Jordan situation," though sad, has brought me many, many hours of joy.

That said, with the exception of Sanderson's Stormlight Archive (because he is an absolute writing machine), I'm done reading books in long series that haven't been finished yet. Besides, there's plenty of great stuff out there that's finished that's waiting for me to find.

I suppose this makes sense for the average person, as most people probably don't understand how to use emulators and what not. Oh well.

I've always found the virtual console a place where Nintendo could do better. I want to buy a license to a game and have it follow me as I upgrade to new (Nintendo-made) hardware.

For example, I have Kid Icarus via the Wii Virtual Console, and Mega Man on the 3DS Virtual Console. Why can't I play those in both places? Why do I have to pay _another_ $5 to play Mega Man on the Wii U? Especially now that Nintendo's online account stuff has shaped up to be pretty good. I'm not even sure if I can play the Wii-purchased Kid Icarus through my Wii U… or do I have to load up the Wii virtual console and then download it onto there? (That I haven't checked.)

I don't need all 700 games to be happy, but for $5 per game — for something that we know is basically just an emulator/ROM, I feel like I shouldn't get penalized for continuing up the upgrade path within the company.