Honest Review of Playstation Vue

Cable companies suck. They have an introductory offer that is really cheap, that eventually runs out. And that is where I am at. 2 years after my introductory offer and now I am looking down the barrel of a $200+ cable bill. I thought that there had to be an alternative. It is 2016. As luck should have it, I see a commercial from my favorite gaming system company SONY. There is this magical new product called PlayStation Vue and they have a 7 day free trial (credit card required). Alright, let's give it a go.

(Note: I am not being paid by nor do I work for, or have any affiliation with PlayStation aside from the fact that I bought a few of their products. This is just my honest review. If some information is wrong, welll that sucks and I am sorry. Enjoy reading)

The channels - 10/10

 

PlayStation Vue has all of the channels I want. What were my requirements?

• Must have NBCSN (and be able to login to NBCSN extra time. Love my Liverpool FC)
•  Must have Fox Sports (and be able to login to Fox Sports GO... LFC are still in the Europa League)
• I love NatGeo, Science, Discovery, and IFC.
• My girlfriend watches HGTV and Food Network.

I decided to go with the Core package. This met all of my requirements as well as having BEin Sports (maybe I can watch a Napoli SSC game every now and then). Not sure what other channels you could possibly want, but they most likely have it (ABC, CBS, Fox, ESPN 1-The Ocho, TNT, TBS, TruTV, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Disney, and many many more). You can't beat the channels.

 

Device Support - 8/10

 

Internet connected devices. The bringer of all services from, well... the Internet.  This is my gripe with PlayStation Vue. PlayStation Vue supports PS4 (I have one of those), PS3 (I had one of those DAMN YLOD), Amazon Fire TV or TV Stick (I bought one specifically for PS Vue, more on this later), Chromecast, and iPhone and iPad (I don't purchase Apple products).

 

PlayStation 4

 

Honestly, I don't watch TV on the TV that my PlayStation 4 is on much, but I do sometimes. The PS4 is the first device I used to watch Vue. It didn't seem to special. It was relatively intuitive and it wasn't difficult to navigate. Since I haven't used my PS4 for Vue much yet, I am going to skip telling any more, but it wasn't a bad experience.

 

Amazon Fire TV Stick

 

This is the device I used to watch most of my TV with Vue. Great little device. I had a few issues with my initial update, but after about 5 minutes everything went smoothly. Finding the Vue app proved for me to be a little tricky. PlayStation Vue was not in the "Search" section for whatever reason. Most likely because it is an "Amazon App" however, I really am not too certain.

After installing the app, everything went smoothly and I was watching SpongeBob in no time. My major issue with this is that I now need two remotes. One for my TV to control the volume and power, and one for the Amazon Fire TV Stick to change the channels. I am sure I can find a remote that does both, but for now I am stuck with two.

 

PlayStation Vue App - 9/10

 

Now let's get in to the app itself. In my opinion, it is great! I have no problems with it. However, there are some things you must understand. THIS IS NOT CABLE TV. Pages and searches may not load instantly, there may be some drop in video quality, and there may just be downright outages. I haven't experienced much of this, however I only have had this product for a few days now.

Let's talk about getting used to not having a traditional TV remote. You can no longer go to channel 83 to watch IFC. You must now go to (paraphrasing) Menu -> Channels -> IFC.  This may take a second. It is something to get used to, but is definitely not a deal breaker in my opinion.

The PlayStation Vue app may not be the focal point. What I mean by this is; with your cable TV, your cable TV IS IT. Yes, it may have some apps if you go to channel 678089, but on whichever device you are using the PS Vue, it is just another app. It is not the main focus. Whether it be on your PS4, it is just an app within your PS4, or your Amazon Fire Stick; just another app. When you press the HOME button, you will be taken to the DEVICE home, not the app home. So that is something you must also get used to as well. While being in PS Vue all day, it is easy to forget that.

 

Conclusion

 

The PS Vue is great for those wanting to cut the cord. After all said and done for me I will be saving between 40-50 dollars a month (I still need to buy internet from the cable company). I really love the price point, and the channels, and I believe the experience of having a TV that is essentially now a computer (since you either need to use a PS4, Amazon Fire TV Stick or iCrap) will be one that many can appreciate. My only suggestion to Sony would be for them to create their own Microcomputer specifically for the PlayStation Vue. I think that would be successful and be able to provide a more unified experience between software and hardware.

Google Music Power Hour Using GreaseMonkey

Hey Everyone,

A few months ago I went to Atlantic City for my brother in-laws birthday party. This occurs every year and we drink a lot of alcohol. We decided to go "easy" with the pregame this year and do a Power Hour since last year ended pretty badly when we took shots of hard alcohol.

For those of you who don't know what a "Power Hour" is, a Power Hour is "An hour in which you drink 60 beer shots, one per minute." (Urban Dictionary). Usually this game is played with music, where the songs are changed every 60 seconds to sign that a minute has passed. There are various apps on the phone that may help to do this, but I am not sure if they have any that pair up with Google Music, but I could be wrong since I haven't checked in a few months. Regardless! Let's get to how this works.

There are some per-requisites for this script to work.
     1. You need a laptop, computer, or anything that has a browser that can install GreaseMonkey
     2. You need a Google account and use Google Music
     3. You need to install GreaseMonkey. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/)
     4. You need my fancy script installed into GreaseMonkey.

To get this working:
    Install GreaseMonkey into your browser. I have the url for Firefox pasted above.
    Click on the link for my fancy script  , on the top of your browser it should say "This is a GreaseMonkey script, do you want to install (then probably a scary warning message)", now click install, or show script source if you want to check out what it does.

Cool. Now you should have it installed. Next, go to music.google.com, or google.com/music.
Let it load and wait about 4 seconds. You should see a button saying "Play Power Hour!" And some text saying "JA Power Hour You Are On Song: 0". THIS IS GOOD!

The next step is very important, pick a playlist that you want to play. You can actually select anything. If you have 60 songs by an artist you love, then you can select that artist too, or just songs on random. After you select a playlist or the artist you like, or All Songs the PLAY BUTTON should now be active (I.E. you can click it and a song will play). Now you click the "Play Power Hour" button. Some magic will happen, music will play and it will say "You are on song 1". After 60 seconds the next button will be clicked and the next song will start, and the text will progress to Song 2 and so on and so forth.

I don't imply that this is guaranteed to work and this is distributed "As Is" and I am not liable for anything you do to screw up your computer using this script! (However if you do break something please let me know because this script is really elementary). The worst thing that can happen is it will skip the song a couple times when it shouldn't have or the count might be  messed up.

ANYWAY! Let me know what you think.

Living Simulation Android App

Hey Everyone,
This past Spring I took my Senior Project class. This class was fairly straightforward and easy. All you had to do was start a project and finish it. For my project, I decided to create an Android application called Living Simulation (which can be found Here).

If you ever played the game The Sims, the concept may seem to be fairly familiar.
In Living Simulation the objective of the game is to live life to the fullest in accordance with the rules of the game.

In Living Simulation there are a few important components you need to be aware of.

First important factor is the scoring components. There are two types of scoring, there is a short term scoring and long term scoring. The short term scoring is what is called Life Levels. There are seven Life Levels in Living Simulation which are hygiene, social, fun, energy, fitness, work (or school), and hunger. You start off with 100% full Live Levels. As the day goes on, your Life Levels begin to decrease. As your Life Levels begin to decrease, you must log your daily activities to increase your Life Levels. For example: your hunger Life Level may decrease by 1 point every hour, after 4 hours your Life Level will be down to 5 Life Level points. To increase your points back up to 100%, you must log that you ate food.Once you have logged this activity, your Life Levels will increase back to 100%.

At the end of the day, your Energy Life Level will be down to a very low amount. At this point, it is time for you to log the activity of sleeping. Once you log this activity, your Life Levels will be frozen and at this point of the day, this is where your long term (Lifetime) points will be calculated. Lifetime points are given based on how many Life Levels you have in the green and how many Life Levels you have in the red. The more Life Levels you have in the green, the more Lifetime Points you will receive. Lifetime points can be used to buy items for your avatar (such as change their hair, change their shirt, shoes, pants).

Living Simulation is fully customizable to your lifestyle. If you eat more and exercise less, then you can decrease the amount of points those specific Life Levels decrease. If you exercise more and eat less, you can change the amount of points those specific Life Levels decrease.

The activities that are logged can also be edited and added to. If you would like a more difficult experience, you may add negative Life Levels to certain activities. For example: if you work out, you may want to increase your fitness, but decrease your hygiene and your hunger (after I work out I am usually starving, and smelly).

Living Simulation also allows Facebook updates straight from the application. This way you can let your friends know what your doing as you increase your Life Levels.

Download my app on your Android phone and let me know what you think.

Android Simple Stop Watch

Hey Guys,
I wrote some code for a simple class that calculates a start time to a stop a time. It's nothing very difficult but for those of you who want a simple class to use for a stop watch program or a counter program or something or other you can use this snippet of code.. This will probably work with Java programs, but for my purpose, I just used it for Android.. What I did was create a class called stopwatch and inserted the code shown below. To start the stop watch just use stopwatch.startTime(); . To get the current time passed just use long times[] = stopwatch.getTimePassed();  which will return the seconds, minutes, and hours in an array [0], [1], [2].. To stop the timer just use long times[] = stopwatch.stopTime(); .. Their is also a way to get just theseconds that is in their. Juse use long seconds = stopwatch.getSeconds();.. Let me know what you think..

public class stopwatch {
    //declares and initializes variables
    static long start = 0;
    static long stop = 0;
   
    public static void startTime()
    {
        //gets the current system time in Nano seconds
        start = System.nanoTime();
    }
   
    public static long[] stopTime()
    {
        stop = System.nanoTime();
        //gets the difference between the start time and stop time and gets the seconds
        long timeSecs = (stop - start)/1000000000;
       
        long[] times = {0, 0, 0};
       
        //times[0] is SECONDS. times[1] is MINUTES. times[2] is HOURS.
       
        //times[1] is minutes. seconds / 60 = minutes
        times[1] = timeSecs / 60;
        //times[0] is seconds. gets the remainder of 60
        times[0] = timeSecs % 60;
        //times[2] is hours. minutes / 60 = hours
        times[2] = times[2] / 60;
        //times[1] is minutes. gets the remainder of 60 minutes
        times[1] = times[1] % 60;
       
        return times;
    }
   
    public static long[] getTimePassed()
    {
        long newstop = System.nanoTime();
        long timeSecs = (newstop - start)/1000000000;
       
        long[] times = {0, 0, 0};
       
        //times[1] is minutes. seconds / 60 = minutes
        times[1] = timeSecs / 60;
        //times[0] is seconds. gets the remainder of 60
        times[0] = timeSecs % 60;
        //times[2] is hours. minutes / 60 = hours
        times[2] = times[2] / 60;
        //times[1] is minutes. gets the remainder of 60 minutes
        times[1] = times[1] % 60;
       
        return times;
    }
   
    public static long getSeconds()
    {
        long newstop = System.nanoTime();
        long seconds = (newstop - start)/1000000000;
        return seconds;
    }
   
}