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Comment A few at various levels of know-how. (Score 1) 370

My first experience with programming was QBASIC and TI-85 BASIC. I use SQL, ColdFusion, HTML, and XML in my day job which is rewriting 30+ year old COBOL in to âwebâ(TM) apps for reporting and db read/writes. For hobbies I dabble a bit with C++ (at the level of copy/paste/replace for âcoinâ(TM) software), TCL/Perl (also at copy/paste/replace for IRC), and BASH which I donâ(TM)t really consider a âlanguage,â(TM) but use it to automate a lot of processes on both Linux and MacOS.

Comment Re:So don't buy shit electronics. (Score 1) 566

Adding a Bluetooth dongle to an existing radio is pretty trivial now-a-days. You can pick one up that will sit in your 12v (ciggie) adapter for about $8 at ***Mart stores with the 3.5" standard aux plug. Usually these little guys have a USB port for charging too so you can add two features her older model might not have in one quick go. Not as clean as replacing the deck (sub $100 could get you Bluetooth, USB, SiriusXM, MP3/WMA, etc) but if you want to stay easy going, they work great.

Comment Sling (Score 1) 218

We use a NUC with Windows 10 as our TV box. We ditched Netflix+Prime for $20 Sling 'Blue' about a year ago, then about 4 months back added $10 to that to get Sling 'Orange' + Lifestyle Bundle which ended up taking the original 40ish channels to 70ish channels. Comparable DirecTV would be about $90 a month after the fees and taxes, cable locally would be about $75. These are nearly all live, main-line cable channels with only about 10% of filler channels (Bloomberg, TheBlaze, Afro, etc). They also include replays and on-demand of about 75% of what airs available. Including the price of Internet in there--$100 a month for gigabit service with a 1TB cap, we're still under $140 including taxes and fees total for Internet+TV. The Internet/TV bundle would be about the $160ish ($150+taxes and fees) but wouldn't be gigabit and would have a lower cap (100mb + 500gb cap).

Comment Macmini + WD Cloud Duo NAS (Score 1) 226

I've got a Macmini running OSX, Kodi, and a 4TB WD Cloud Duo something something NAS using DNLA. It works perfectly with a mouse, sometimes the remote works, sometimes it doesn't, and I blame that on the lousy IR support in recent versions of OSX. No such worries, just use the mouse from the couch. Bonus, all TV providers "flash" and HTML5 video works from their websites, I can torrent from the Macmini directly, and it sleeps/wakes quickly without any HDMI oddities. Our LG Tv (Circa 2012ish) has Netflix/Youtube/Pandora and can stream things "thrown" to it from the phone/iPad.

Comment Re:No shit (Score 1) 120

This is my experience too...my 2007 MacBook Pro seldom had (past tense, it finally died last year) issues with any Wifi points. My 2011 MacBook Air though, seems to have issues every time the OSX updates to a newer point release. Mountain Lion was the worst of these upgrades--the Air wouldn't stay connected to my home router (WRT54G) reliably at all. I ended up replacing that router with a Netgear 300N and the connection improved greatly until Mavericks came along and it started all over again. Interestingly, my 2012 iMac has never had any issues with either router or any OSX updates...

Comment iMac (Score 1) 592

I've got a 2013 i7 iMac and have for the last two months been running it with Windows 8.1 via Bootcamp to play some games I was given for my birthday. I spent an afternoon (2-3 hoursish) installing Windows, an IRC client, a Torrent client, and a pair of web browsers--guess what? All the same versions I have on the OSX side. I prefer OSX's look and polish--especially the fonts; and PuTTY isn't as nice as having the native terminal It speaks the the hardware that either OS works "enough."

Comment Re:My phone isn't this crippled (Score 3, Insightful) 190

I agree here, the cost of the Chromebook's savings will be negated by the "custom solutions" required to get it to do routine mundane tasks. Get him either a cheap Windows 8 device (HP has a couple in the CB's price range) or if the walled-garden/appstore is more his thing, an iDevice(TM).

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