It’s time to announce the winner of the Mohu Leaf that I reviewed last week. I was pleasantly surprised by not just the number, but the quality of the comments. Many giveaways lead to quick comments, that are almost borderline spam. However, nearly everyone wrote about their situation or their set-up. They offered some great suggestions too.
Let’s get all the drama out the way. There can only be one winner. The virtual ping pong balls ended on Mike with the comment of
“I’ve gone with OTA for almost 10 months. Initially it was tough to cut back to only the local channels, but not having to pay that $75 a month is worth it. I’m using an antenna that came with the house, but it is not getting all the channels so I’d like to try a new antenna. Also, I’m using a Hauppauge 2250 TV tuner card in an PC as my DVR. No cable bill, no DVR fee, and I can still watch one show and record another.”
I’m thinking of looking into that Hauppauge tuner card myself as it is one of the few that has two tuners. As Mike points out that is necessary to watch one show and record another. Going to a single tuner solution would be a downgrade that wouldn’t sit well with my wife.
Congrats, Mike. You have an email in your in-box. If you get me back your name and address, I’ll be putting one of these in the mail for you.
More WordPress Cloud
My experiment with hosting this site on Amazon Web Services EC2 continues. I have been extremely happy with the performance for the price about 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time, I’m wishing I had access to a Linux server guru who could do a little audit and tell me what I can do to prevent segmentation faults and the like. I may go searching for some such person.
The other thing that I’ve come to realize is that there are a ton of things out there to improve the performance of a WordPress blog. Sure there are the standard tips, and most everyone knows them. However, there were a lot of small things like not loading Jquery javascript library by default that I could cut out. I was able to cut the load time of some of my pages from 14 seconds to 4 seconds. My hope is that gives some of you the incentive to click around the site a little more.
One of the more difficult things to solve was email since many spammers have tainted the Amazon cloud (like all cloud services). I’ve got a patch in place that seems to be working well with Gmail’s SMTP server, but I may need to upgrade to something a little more robust, the cost of which should be minimal.
And if you didn’t understand that last paragraph, because you are not a webmaster, don’t feel bad. I’ve got links, lots of links:
Money Writers:
- Brip Blap presents 10 tips to avoid money worries.
- Digerati Life on how to protect your information with these types of paper shredders.
- Frugal Dad offers ideas to trim (or slash) vacation costs.
- Generation X Finances posts signs you may be a victim of tax-related fraud.
- Million Dollar Journey goes over buying foreclosures in Canada – the process.
- Money Smart Life on wanting what you’ve got.
- My Dollar Plan wonders what are your options when you owe the IRS money?
- The Sun’s Financial Diary asks leaving your job? Take your retirement plan with you!
Top PF Posts:
- The Smarter Wallet says to double check your credit card statements!
- My Journey to Millions asks can small businesses teach blue chip corporations something about paying profits?
- Enough Wealth wonders is $7 million enough wealth?
- DINKS Finance blogs the 6 most ridiculous lawsuits I’ve ever seen.
- One Money Design talk about how to split rent with roommates.
- Accumulating Money shares 15 things people forget to budget for.
- Pop Economics on why we’re going to stop caring about the unemployed.
- Savvy Saving Bytes presents the 20 most profitable small businesses in USA.
- The Economic Collapse offers up 14 reasons why the economic collapse of Japan has begun.
- Mighty Bargain Hunter says your home mortgage debt is not an asset.
- Hope to Prosper says freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Also look into the HDHomerun from Silconedust.com .
http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun/atsc/
Good note, Paul.
I’m on the waiting list for the HD Homerun Prime that should be coming out in a couple of months. If I’m not able to get rid of cable, at least moving the box rental and DVR functionality to my media center would be a good cost savings.
I hope to write more about this later this week.
I bought a Mohu Leaf after reading this article. I bought it even though I already had an HDTV antenna….we cut our cable last year. We live about 15-20 miles from the bulk of the broadcasting stations and my previous antenna (bought at Best Buy for a pretty penny) only picked up about half of the channels. I’m happy to say that after installing the Mohu Leaf, we now get about 40% more channels….almost every channel available OTA. I think this is a great product, and I’m not easy to please.
If you’re using Windows Media Center with that Hauppauge 2250, you can also watch that second channel via a networked Media Center extender, such as the Xbox 360. That’s my setup and it works great.
Not fair
I wish I could cut out the satellite bill…not sure if the wife and kids would go for it, though. It’s probably worth $40/month for the peace it gives me. I can always wish, though, right?
I’m in the same boat as Craig. If I cut out the satelite, my wife and kids would go nuts. My wife is home all day, so it would be the worst on her. I’m just going to continue to pay the bill for now and look for alternatives in the future.