Minimizing Home Entertainment and Communication Costs

In the last year or two, it has become an increasing easy task to save money on home entertainment and communications. A few years back MagicJack came along, which charges about 1/10 of what the phone company does for a land line phone...considering land line phones are of increasingly less value since more people have cell phones, this is a viable alternative.

The other issue that needs consideration is cable television. Everybody has some likes and dislikes on cable. Fortunately for my family, most of our likes are on basic cable, so we really have only had any premium channels when a cable provider had some special deal giving really cheap, or free...otherwise, we just couldn't bother.

There are a multitude of options available to help toward a remedy of this situation. First and most obvious, Netflix has a pay for streaming service, $8 a month (at the time of this writing) with a pretty wide, though quickly disappointing, list of available movies. Add to that Hulu, which has a very large selection of TV shows, some movies and more, available for streaming, pay $8 and you can get more shows, more movies and streams up to 720p HD versions. For other random videos, there is always YouTube and a lot of stations keep archives of their own broadcasts for later watching.

For easy access to everything (or a lot anyway) look to playon.tv for a single resource to log in to and cruise thru the menu of channels and shows available. I just started my free trial and thus far I am seeing pros and cons, try it out and judge for yourself.

With these tools, we have the ability to get by with only a high speed internet connection and a few, low dollar subscriptions to get everything we got with a high priced bundle package from our local communications company.

Chrome OS Handles Multiple Logins Better

My place of employment uses Google Apps, my personal domain I have on Google Apps, I have a Gmail account that predates both, and many clients that I occasionally need to log in to are on Google Apps. Now, Google launches a "multiple login" feature, which I assume was done in part to facilitate Google+ to some extent, but, regardless of the reason, they did it.

Their challenge is that once Google Apps is released they can have a username@hosteddomain.com registered in their system, but, there can also be a username@gmail.com also registered. Additionally, you can have a guy like me who may have a few logins, and have each login using various logins. Most of my Google product usage is under my gmail account login, but a couple random things are under my personal domain...so now the multiple login feature is supposed to facilitate handling that.

So, today, I login in to my domain email, then need to go into AdSense, I need to switch accounts, when I do, I am logged out of my domain email and into Gmail, not what I want. Toss my work email into the mix and I am vastly more annoyed.

One thing I noticed, as working on my Google ChromeBook, is that the Chrome OS seems to handle this much better, as I login to the ChromeBook as my gmail account and it retains that login everywhere, and I can still login to my hosted domain email at the same time, it's worked great, or, better, at least, than non-Chrome OS based surfing.

I am going to GooglePlex in September for a conference, and plan on bending some ears over this poor multiple account handling, there has got to be a better way to support parallel logins.

Rant concluded.