So what do you think about the changes they made this year?

Dave:

Has the new MLB.com At Bat come out? From what I saw in the iOS App Store, the 2011 version is still there.

I haven’t looked at the 2011 version in a while. I suppose I check it out while I prepare for bed tonight.

Stephen:

The 2012 version is due out in a week or so. I think they’re all free now and you only need to pay for the MLB subscription, which is $125 this year. There’s a discount if you were a subscriber last year.

Dave:

I’m going to be looking for a new way to keep up with the Cardinals and Indians this season! There is no way in this lifetime that I am going to be paying $125 for MLB.com At Bat ’12!

MLB claims that the app was the top app for 2011. Guess what MLB! The 2012 version is NOT going to be the top app!

What advantage does buying the package give you that watching the game on Live TV not? If the game is blacked out, it’s blacked out in the app and probably on the AppleTV! So no new advantages to going to MLB.com At Bat ’12.

Chris and I are wondering if the website will not allow audio unless the subscription has been paid.

As a cord cutter, I try to avoid spending huge amounts of money, not the other way around!

I also love the fact that they think a $15 discount for people that bought the subscription last year is a great deal!

I have Yahoo’s Sportacular app. I guess I’m going to have to promote that app to my first home screen!

Damn!

Stephen:

I’ve always paid that to see the season on Direct TV. The nice thing about that set up was that if the Rangers were playing X and were blacked out, I could watch on X’s channel and still see the game. I doubt I’ll be able to do this with this new set up.

But I can still watch the Yankees.

I could never convince myself that an extra $15 or whatever for the app was worth it. So for me, this is kind of cool news.

Dave:

That’s kind of maddening really. It’s the same argument I have with people that pirate $5 apps after paying over $2,000 for an iPhone and the 2 year service contract. I just don’t get the complaint of having to pay $5 for an app or an update to an app after paying that much for the phone, or even $500 for the iPad.

You paid $125 to get the videos of the games, yet you are unhappy about having to pay $15 (just under 10x less) for the app? or $30 if you want the app on both iPhone and iPad?

I didn’t have any problems at all paying the $30 for both apps and $15 for the Game Day Audio.

As I said in my blog post and comment (on one of the blogs I read about this), the $125 subscription caters more to folks who follow a team that doesn’t play in the city they live in. For example, my wife. For me, I just don’t see the advantage. I can’t watch ANY locally played Cardinals game (~81 games), where Chris could watch well over 150+ games (the Indians are playing some games here this season).

This really bums me out, because MLB.com At Bat has been a great app for following the sport.

Stephen:

It wasn’t even videos. It was so I could watch the games live.

And I didn’t say my thinking was logical. It was just what I did. I can be off-the-wall like that.

But yeah, I’ll be paying the $125 agin. And I’ll be watching games from my office or wherever I happen to be.

I’m hoping MLB at Bat will eventually lead the MLB to rethink the blackout rules. It’s stupid that I live over 6 hours away from Rangers Stadium and the game is still blacked out. Guess what, MLB? You’re not losing any sales because I’m not driving 6 hours to see a Wednesday night game. You are however losing advertising revenue because I’m not watching the ads.

Stephen:

Blackouts should not extend beyond a 2-hour one-way drive. That’s a good rule-of-thumb in my book.

Dave:

Sorry, I meant watching the games live vrs. Game Day Audio.

Hell, even if someone lives 2 feet away from the stadium, there is a really good chance they won’t be paying for tickets to a game they are watching while working. Evening and weekend games as well as weekday games all cost to much for normal Joe’s to be getting tickets to each and every game they play in town.

I was watching a Leocast (:)) a while back and they were interviewing Scott Sigler. They were talking about how he figures he makes more money by giving away free audio podcasts of his books than he would had he stuck to the old publishing model.

The same pretty much applies to MLB games on TV. If I can watch all the games my team has when ever I want, the likelihood that I will buy tickets to a game are much greater than if I can only watch when there isn’t a blackout. I’m more engrossed in the team and very likely will want to go to a few. Where now, I don’t feel like I really want to go to any. I’ll just check the results on the web when I get a chance.

Don’t you feel that if you had the ability to watch all your Ranger games, you might feel more likely to go to a game or two, even though they are so far away?

Hopefully, the people that make these kinds of decisions will finally get their heads out of their asses and see the light…

Stephen:

It’s the old school thinking. Eventually it’ll crumble away, maybe even in our lifetimes.

Hell, I always try to see a live game at least once per year. I didn’t last year because we were moving, but I’m already making plans to go see the Rangers at least once this year.

The age of blackouts, like the age of “European-only” releases for albums, will die. And they’ll see revenues rise. And not understand why.

This conversation is making me stabby.

Stephen:

The increase in advertising revenue, especially when you consider all the mobile devices and the $125 per year, has to offset lost ticket sales.

Blackouts are stupid.

And make me want to stab someone.

Dave:

The stabby thing made me lol. My wife says that every so often too.

The problem with the advertising thing is that the channels are expecting X amount of eyeballs on the channel while the game is playing. If thousands and thousands of people start paying the $125 for all 162 games, the channels can’t charge as much for ad time and that means that either MLB asks less for the rights to air games or advertisers will stop advertising during games. What a mess.

Basically, until blackouts go away for whatever reason, MLB should not “black users out” of being able to use their app without subscriptions.

Enough said on this subject!

Stephen:

Last thing: I assumed MLB at Bat included ads during the game. I guess that’s not true. Blackouts have nothing to do with ads. It’s seen as an inducement to buy tickets and see the game live. MLB thinks it increases ticket sales. Advertisers would, I assume, love to see blackouts end because that’s more eyeballs on their wiener ads.

Balls and wiener in the same non-sexual sentence. Your move.

Dammit all. We never get the good discussions on MAAM. I always forget or remember too late. We suck.

And now I’ve thrown “suck” in for good measure.

Dave:

OK, so I put our conversation on the blog. It’s not all that difficult, but I really need to find a web service or app that will convert a conversation compressed email into something like this.

Yeah, I got blackouts mixed up. Football games have blackouts on TV.

MLB.com At Bat ’12 blackout’s still feel like they are ad based because why else would they blackout local games? I can watch a local game on TV. It’s not blacked out on local TV, just the MLB.com app. So, why would MLB.com blackout the local game if it can be watched on local TV?

I’m not going to buy a ticket to a game just because I can’t watch it on MLB.com or the app.

The other problem is that there are no ads when watching on MLB.com or the app. Now, they could put ads in, but there are way less eyeballs on the MLB.com/app than the televised game.

Using an alternative like DuckDuckGo is OK, but lets face it, there really isn’t a “great” alternative to Google. We have all grown used to using the search engine and have our little tips and tricks for getting the results out of it we expect.

I offer an alternative to using a Google alternative…

Modern browsers these days allow you to access the Internet “privately”.

Safari has an option in it’s menus to set “Private Browsing…”:

Resulting in:

Chrome has “New Incognito Window…” in the Wrench menu:

Resulting in:

Firefox has “Start Private Browsing” in it’s Tools menu:

Resulting in:

Opera has “New Private Window” in it’s File menu:

Resulting in:

There are, of course, many other browsers out there. I suspect most have similar abilities to turn on private browsing.

I ran a little test with both Chrome (in normal mode) and Safari (in private mode) doing a search in Google for “Stephen Hargrove”. Sorry Steve, I wanted to make that the browsers were not pulling up any cache data.

This is Chrome’s normal access results:

Here is Safari’s Private access results:

You can see, there are some pretty significant differences in the results. In Chrome’s results, you can see that in Google’s instant search box, there is data from Google+ because Steve is in one of my Circles. It also has a couple of search result hits, one from Google+ and another that Steve might have shared on Google+. Those extra’s don’t show up in Safari’s Private browsing search results.

It’s interesting however, that in both results, Google knew my location. I took a closer look at that value by clicking on “Change Location”, then clicking on “Auto-detected.” The resulting page describes how they get location from an IP Address. There isn’t much you can do about that other than spoof your address or use a Proxy Server.

I may be wrong here and with Steve being the security expert, I wonder if there are any repercussions from just opening a “Private” browsing window separate from what you normally use and search Google with that window instead of a normal browsing window…

My question is what do we have in the way of alternatives to searching the web? Sure there’s Bing, but I have to believe that Microsoft is doing the same thing. Yahoo is also powered by Bing. Is there a decent alternative?

There is DuckDuckGo, but I don’t really know how good it is. Does anyone know of any other alternatives?

• Sams – Teach Yourself PERL in 24 Hours
• Learning Perl (6th Edition)

I feel like I’m really making progress… I downloaded a theme for Bowtie (a free desktop accessory that allows you to see and control either iTunes or Spotify) called Lux by Ryan Christensen. I was really getting off on how it pulls images from Last.FM to fill the background of the theme.

I opened the theme file to see how it was written and saw a relatively simple call to Last.FM’s API. So, now I had to give it a try.

As you know, this isn’t just as easy as calling the method. There is a lot of setup, so I went over to cpan.org and did a search for ‘Last.FM’. Sure enough, I found: Net::LastFM. I downloaded the file, but found it had prerequisites.

So I cracked open the books (virtually, thank heaven for PDF’s and the ability to search them!) and searched for Perl Modules. I found a great little Perl script called ‘cpanm‘ which will painlessly install Perl Modules.

So I installed ‘cpanm’ with a little head scratching since it needed:

--sudo

added to the

perl - --self-upgrade

part of the

curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --self-upgrade

Once I got past that part, I was golden. Net::LastFM was installed and I was ready to test.

I used a sample described in both the Sams book and the documentation of the module and created:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::LastFM;
use Data::Dumper;

my $lastfm = Net::LastFM->new(
      api_key    => '...',
      api_secret => '...',
  );
my $data = $lastfm->request_signed(
         method => 'artist.getImages',
         artist => 'Kate Bush',
          limit => '10',
    autocorrect => '1',
          order => 'popularity',
  );

print Dumper $data;

It doesn’t do much more than show the data returned from Last.FM, but that’s a start and I’m pretty excited that I was able to get that far without too many problems.

Now, if only there was a way to take the image I get and save it to disk.

I know, there is probably a Module that can do that. I’ll have to dig around a little bit more. Still…

“Chris Dodd’s recent statements complaining that congressmen who receive donations from the RIAA and MPAA should toe the line has spawned a firestorm of anger on the internet. Among the bits of fallout: a petition on the White Houses “We the People” site to investigate him, the RIAA, and the MPAA for bribery! This petition gained more than 5000 signatures in 24 hours and is still growing. When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity.”

via: Slashdot

Cmd-T will add a selected application to the Finder sidebar
Cmd-Shift-T will add the application to your Dock

Very nice tip from Finer Things in Mac.

So we decided that a “discussion” blog would be more interesting for us and possibly the readers. For a long time, we emailed each other with questions, or topics that we discussed at length in emails. Steve realized that those discussions might be interesting to more than just ourselves. As an example, one of our last email volleys was about how Steve was going to use Perl to automate putting his Twitter tweets into Day One. That led to me asking more about Perl and how to script in it. He pointed out some great sites to watch and so on…

This is more of an experiment than anything else. Will any great revelations come out of this site, probably not, but hopefully a spark of an idea might form for someone and that’s all we here can ever ask for.

When I first read this, I had a sinking feeling that my two Mac’s (MacBook 1st gen and Mac Pro 1st gen) would not support the new OS X Lion. Fortunately, reading the linked article near the end I was finally relieved to see:

“Meanwhile, the Preview notes show that Lion will require a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better. This orphans the first release of Macs with Intel chips during the first half of 2006, although customers may have purchased these machines throughout the rest of the year.”

I got my parents a MacMini back in 2006 and that machine doesn’t have a Core2 Duo processor in it, so they won’t be able to take advantage of the new OS. I’m not unhappy about this since I haven’t updated their Mac since Leopard came out. It doesn’t even have Snow Leopard on it.

Still, I’m a little concerned. I know that a future OS will drop support for Core2 Duo processors and I’ll be left behind. I suspect that my Mac Pro will finally bite the dust before that happens. Yet, it’s been functioning pretty well for these 4 1/2 years so far.

ScreenCastsOnline Markdown screencast is episode #284 and located here.