A bit of background: I was, up until two months ago, a cable subscriber. I paid $30 a month to start out, and the price almost immediately went up, bit by bit. For the last 12 months, I've paid $71 a month for 250 cable TV channels, 10 of which I watched. I didn't feel as though I was getting my money's worth (most stuff on TV is absolute garbage now anyways).  

So, my wife and I decided to cut the cord. With internet and broadcast TV offerings, the only real risk that I was running was not being able to watch football in the fall. Fortunately for me, my sister who lives 45 minutes away will have every Alabama game (RTR). 

Sports was really the only thing holding me back. ESPN specifically. But even for that, I can get ESPN 3 on my Xbox and get some limited football coverage. Even some full games. 

The other big deal was shows for my son. He's barely two but enjoys shows such as Peter Rabbit, Bubble Guppies, and WonderPets.  

When researching the different streaming services we were going to sign up for, we saw many advantages. One is cost. Amazon Instant Video (coupled with Amazon Prime which is free two-day shipping on most items) is $79 a year, which works out to $6.60/month. We also wanted some shows and movies that were on Netflix but not AIV, which was $8/month.  

So if you do the math, that's $175/year with streaming, $852/year with cable.  

Now, we could use the Xbox to stream all these, but the Xbox is a power hog, it's loud (we have the older 360), and it takes a little too long to start up and get to what we want to do. Plus, all Xbox apps (AIV, Netflix, whatever) must first go through Xbox Live servers before getting to you. That makes the connection much slower, and sometimes your videos are in poor quality.  

Enter the Roku. You may have never heard of it before, but basically it's a tiny internet box that hooks up to your TV via HDMI. It allows you to stream AVI, Netflix, and a ton of other content from other providers such as HBO, PBS, ABC, NBC, and CBS.  

And it's $99.  

With no monthly subscription fee except for the services you use. 

You can even use your phone or tablet as a remote and also stream videos, music, or pictures directly to your TV through Roku's official app.  

There's a nifty remote coupled with the Roku 3 that also allows you to plug up earbuds and listen to your music or shows wirelessly. Talk about convenient.  

Why the Roku and not the Apple TV? Don't get me wrong, I'm the Apple fanboy of all fanboys, but Apple doesn't offer Amazon Instant Video. Which was a dealbreaker. Probably because Amazon and Apple are big competitors.  

To be honest, the only thing my wife miss is being able to record and pause and rewind live broadcast TV. But we can deal without that. We get over 5 local channels in crystal clear HD and about 15 others in SD. And we live at least 50 miles from TV stations in both Nashville and Huntsville. This antenna helped things out. 

Not only did I not watch my cable TV, most of it was available online and the other stuff I didn't need to watch anyways.  

So what say you? Have you cut the cord yet?  

The Roku size as compared to come keys. It's quite small. 

The main Roku interface. You can also customize this with channels and different themes.  

The nifty remote with wireless earbuds. 

Google Reader announced in March that they would be shutting down the RSS service, effectively opening the whole internet and RSS back up. The big shutdown is Monday, so I'd make it a goal to move your data out of there this weekend.

Here's what I did:

1) Downloaded my data from Google Takeout. This handy service (although a bit clunky) will let you download your data in an OPML file compressed as a Zip. If all else fails, it's good to have a backup of your data as most services will offer OPML import. 

2) Synced with Feedly. Feedly was nearly the first to jump on the Reader shutdown and they have supported importing and syncing your Reader feeds from the get-go. I did this weeks ago, but went back to check that my feeds are fine. You can continue to use Feedly as a Google Reader replacement even after the shutdown. They have apps for all major platforms. Feedly is free. 

3) Synced with Digg. Yes, you read that correctly, Digg. Like Feedly, Digg has smartly built an entire backend for importing your feeds to their Reader service. App updates in the last 24 hours will let you even do it from your phone. Digg is also free. 

There are many other paid services such as Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, and Fever that I'd love to check out, but for now I just want to make sure my data is intact after 6+ years or reading articles on Google Reader. Additionally, you can listen to the Mac Power Users podcast episode 143 that's all about the big shutdown.  

If you download your data and import it to a few services that will work once Google Reader is shut down, I'd say you're in pretty good shape come Monday.  

My confidence and trust in free services is at an all time low. Like many other geeks and early adopters, I’m focused on using services that I’ve paid for and for whom I am the customer and not the commodity... So in the arena of read-it-later services, I’ve been thinking about options where I would be considered the customer.

I realized that one company that I do trust, for whom I am the customer, offers such a service. But it’s one I never gave any consideration since it launched, I suppose because I was already enjoying some other service at the time. This company is Apple and the tool is Reading List.

Great writeup from Chris Bowler on Safari's Reading List, a service that no one uses (yet), but is right under Apple users' noses. ​

People are being very critical of Google right now, and some of their decisions that they see going against the 'Open Web' policy. Laurent Eschenauer:​

We are developers, and hacking the future is what we do best. So, time to wake up and start building alternatives.

Laurent is writing to Google's dropping support for XMPP in Hangouts and eventually RSS in Chrome and SMTP ​in Gmail. 

 ​He's right though - there are plenty of developers out there with plenty of great ideas, better ideas than Google. We need to remember that Google talks a good talk but in the end, they are a company out to make money. And we are not Google's customers, we are the product. 

There were two big updates to two big apps that I use everyday released in the last 24 hours. ​

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The first is an update to Textastic, a great text editor for OSX. They have added tab support so now instead of having multiple windows open with my text floating around, I can have them in one big, unified window. Although I love this feature, I wish they would enable the hiding of tabs if there's just one file open in the window. Otherwise, a great update. ​

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The second is an update to Drafts, now version 3.0. The two most notable additions to this already-wonderful do-anything text app are the addition of Actions Backup and tabbed tasks. 

Actions Backup is exactly what it says it is - ​it adds the ability to make a manual backup of all your actions so you can restore them to any other device running Drafts. For instance, I have lots of different lists that I append to, and I don't want to have to manually add those on my iPad. Enter Actions Backup. I just back up the actions on my iPhone, then go to my iPad and Restore from Actions Backup over there. Viola, they're all there, safe and sound. 

The second is tabbed grouping of tasks. Very simple interface - when I hit the share button, I now have little Roman numbered tabs for my task groups. You can arrange how you want them in Settings. For example, all actions in Tab I ​I have all my Dropbox actions. Tab II houses all my searching actions, Tab III all my email and messaging, and Tab IV is for Evernote actions. 

Overall, a great update for these two apps. If you're not using either, you should give them a try. They're both fantastic and have changed my Youth Minister workflow for the better. ​