Late TV Bill Payment

Yup.. Tv tuner + kodi + nextpvr ftw.

Truth be told, there's hardly any content worth watching on tv these days anyway. I have mine set to record the news - I use the term lightly because most of it is just propaganda. When watching, generally skip forward to the weather segment, which depending on who's doing it can be upwards of 8 minutes long, so skip to the last 30 sec.

Not sure what I need a quad tuner for........ Also, assuming atsc 3.0 comes to fruition, this tuner will become obsolete and useless.

is a phone scammer's worst nightmare.

He doesn't work, and lives at home with his parents (I'm truly baffled how any relatives fall into this stereotypical category, but enablement comes to mind).

When they call, he either engages in a 30 min. circular conversation, or he tries to get a date with the person. A total nightmare for the caller.

In some sense, it's not funny, it's sad.

I was a relatively early adopter of DVR technology. Back in 2000, I purchased a Sony TiVo series 1 and was amazed at how well it worked for gathering shows and news that I was interested in watching. There was much less "friction" compared to taping shows with a VCR. "Streaming" wasn't yet a thing. In fact, the hopefully named "Netflix" was just getting started; and at the time might have been better named "DVDs by Mail".

I'm still using a 10 year old TiVo Premier w/ a lifetime subscription to record a few Over The Air broadcasts. And like zx1100e1, I mostly just occasionally have a quick look at the local news/weather. Much more of my media consumption these days comes via the Internet, mostly in the form of music and podcasts.

Having retired a while ago I have few responsibilities and very little discipline. Google calendar rules my life with it's occasional entry. Other than that time discipline comes only from TV news times and the highlight of my week: garbage day!

That sounds like something my Dad would have pulled.

Have it 2X per week provided by the township. Years ago they made it Wed/Fri, which kind of makes no sense being so close together.

We can barely fill a 13 gal trash bag as a 3 person family. It kills me when I see 5 45 or 50 gal cans lined up at a house. So obvious commercial trash entering the residential stream on our tax dime. So says the guy who pays to recycle a microwave lol

My son has a gift for stringing along scammers and telemarketers who call him as well. He's of the mindset that the longer you can keep the scammer on the line before the caller finally hangs up, the better. He was good enough at it even before his voice changed that I'd hand my phone to him when I got a call. There are lots of YouTube videos showing people pranking scammers for anyone who wants inspiration. Now my phone effectively blocks all these incoming spam calls; i haven't had one in a long time.

I wish I could still get TV for free with an antenna. Unfortunately I'm a little too far away from the nearest urban area with TV transmitters.

Back when covid started our municipality claimed they needed to start collecting fees for garbage pickup (2x/week) as more trash being generated by work at home folks. Fair enough.

Covid has been over for some time now and folks are back at the office. Fee remains.

Last year they decided to implement once a week pickup claiming there's not enough trash for 2x/week, ok maybe. But the same fee remains rather than cutting it in half.

That's progress!

On our land line, we normally just click click to open the line and hang up, but occasionally I engage the spammer by telling them hat Mr. Smith died and I am just cleaning out the house, so they might as well strike this number off the list.

Not sure it does any good, but represents minor entertainment for me.

I never give out my mobile number except to my doctors or other vital contacts, so I get about one spam call per month on my mobile.

Considering that spammers use robo diapers that dial every number in a block sequentially, the moment you activated your phone it became available for spammers. Obscurity is no gaurd.

…wanting me to pay my taxes that I didn’t pay or telling me that my SSN has been compromised or the one I really like is that an arrest warrant has or will issued for my arrest. I had a guy call one day asking for my SSN. I asked him which one of us is more stupid; him for thinking I would give it to him or me for giving it to him. He said that I was more stupid because I would give it to him . I said ‘Wrong’ and he hung up on me. I miss those days when I could mess with their minds. But I bought a Smart-block phone system last year and I no longer get calls from the dingbats. Silence is golden as the song says.

No sense trying logic with scammers or telling them what you do/don't have.

I just ask them to hold for someone who can answer them, then hand the phone to an eleven year old. He can tie up a scammer for an hour, and results are hilarious.

If you enjoy sparring with spammers, my advice is to go ahead and do it, as you are doing us all a service.

Remember the early 1990s when political fund-raising mail was a plague? That ground to a halt when the rate of donations fell too low to support the cost of the mailings.

If you are talking to a human spammer, somewhere, somehow, someone is figuring on making money from the average interaction. The more you tie up a human, the worse the cost/benefit calculation for the operation.

Sadly, quite a few of my spam calls involve no human. I'm afraid the costs of generating those are so low that sparring with the robot is not so clearly a socially useful endeavor.

i still get call's from scamers informing me about an Iphone i bought for $800 on sale from amazon i say no i didnt i bought 3 Iphones and none of them have been delivered yet and im not paying for them until i receive them and they hang up on me how rude !!
and there are times when i just ask them " does your mother know what you do for a living"

is hard to recognize imho because legit cos don't do all that much to ensure we recognize when they are legit.

I was getting texts, "You have a new message from ACME Health Plan."

(made up the name because I wouldn't want to give them bad press as they build their new skyscraper due to unprecedented profits)

I would login to the app and see there are no messages nor notifications.

IGNORE.

But they kept coming so I said ok, I'll follow the link even though this smells like smishing.

It takes me to their webpage, looks legit, I login thinking even if I got hacked so what, it's a health plan, not like you can do stuff (oh s*** does it have my dob and SS, I don't think so).

A page pops up with tips on how to save them money:

Pause before you go to the emergency room (it says avoid long wait times and high costs, really)--ask yourself if you can set that broken bone yourself, or have a friend who can help

Now let me ask you something, it reminds me of when my windshield was broken and the lizard co. argued with me for 40 min telling me I don't need OE glass it costs more--how does it, I have a deductible, it costs them more.

If it costs $100 copay for me to go to emergency, or $100 for a hip replacement as the copay, what do I really care, about avoiding the trip or these services? And I get it, in theory, I should spend the insurance co's money as if it were my own, but this is the real world. They've denied us all along and when we need it, we need it.

Tell the 11 year someone called to give them a new Nintendo switch or something? I got sick and tired of being told, oh sorry for the short notice but you need to submit your 2023 individual development plan by 5 PM today, even though you're on PTO (last Friday). So I told my coworker one of my goals this year will be to advance 2 worlds and 7 levels in Super Mario bros. 2. When asked how I will accomplish that, I said I will focus on only one character this year, Luigi. I really said this and I'll probably be fired, but even at work people are like scammers lol

This company called every two or three days for months, finally I decided to waste a little of their time by listening with interest to their spiel since they wouldn't remove me from their phone list. After about 20 minutes he asks "exactly how much credit card debt do you have?" when I told him that I have no credit card debt, he abruptly hung up and hasn't and hasn't called back since! Wasting their time appears to be the most efficient method for getting removed from their phone lists.
Mark

of TIVO (and Channel Master) OTA DVR's for use with a rooftop Hi-Def rotary antenna. I have really good signal strength from both DC and Baltimore, and the high definition clarity of the playback on these DVR's far exceeds that of Fios or Xfinity, at least in my experience in the DC-Baltimore market.

Yeah almost everyone who has tried it in recent years agrees that the picture quality of over-the-air digital TV reception with an antenna whips the pants off anything coming through a coaxial cable or via internet streaming, and it's free once you have the hardware for it. But you have to live close enough to transmitters to get the signal, and I'm 75 miles away, so I'm stuck with cable TV and its obscene monthly "broadcast fees," covering what you get better for free, and streaming.

I used to be gung-ho for TiVo, but since the original company, founded to help viewers avoid advertising, sold out a few years ago to new owners that do whatever they can to make money from advertising, I wouldn't recommend TiVo to anyone who doesn't already have it--even though TiVo's DVRs are still better than the cable companies' lousy and overpriced DVRs. There's a disconnect there between the current owners and the long-time customers.

I agree with not recommending TiVo anymore.

At the start of the COVID lockdown, I purchased a TiVo BOLT OTA to gain some extra recording space for news programs. I was very disappointed to find that this newer model was actually *INSERTING* an advertisement before the start of each recorded program it played. I could view the same recording through my older TiVo Premier, and it showed the recording without the extra ad.

I'm quite happy with my old TiVo Premier (from a decade ago), but the newer TiVo has been unplugged and now sits unused.

Today's edition of the New York Times has a front-page major article on one set of five organizations which generated a substantial part of the nation's junk calls for donations in recent years. The calls generally requested donations for police, fireman, and veteran related causes, and had a strongly human sound.

Two points struck me:

1.They actually did make donations, but only amounting to about 1% of what they collected. They spent 90% on generating more calls (they hired companies to do the actually calling and collecting).

2. The reason the voices sounded so natural, but the pacing was odd, was that the calls relied on a Sound Board system. Pre-recorded snippets were available, and the workers generating the call pretty much pressed buttons to play the bits they wanted. But as the sound was pre-recorded, it would be of a US native speaker, and there would be no mass calling boiler-room background sound.

I'm pretty sure I've heard quite a few of these calls. More than once I've engaged a little, for example, saying something like "are you a robot?". The same natural voice from all the other speech said something flippant, on the order of "no I'm not a robot--do I sound that bad today?". But the big clue was that the phrase, and the sound of that phrase was exactly the same on separate calls.

I'm heartened by the fact they were spending nearly all their takings on generating the next batch of calls. Maybe if just enough fewer of us send them money, and just enough more of us stretch out the calls, their yield will drop below break-even and this particular type will quit.

When it comes to pranking telemarketers, Tom Mabe is the best. Here's one example of how he handles a call from a carpet cleaning service:

"There's blood all over the place. Can you come over now? Whatever you make this week, I'll double it!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohQCAFNrU60

That is hilarious, thanks! Well worth the three minutes.