Category: science kits

08:18 – Yesterday, I unplugged the Roku box and left it unplugged for an hour or two. When I powered it back up, the problem seemed to have resolved itself. We watched a couple of streaming episodes last nigh with no apparent problems.

Speaking of television, Barbara and I saw in the paper that our local NBC affiliate, WXII, is no longer on Time-Warner Cable as a result of a money dispute. We hadn’t even noticed. TWC replaced the WXII feed with a feed from an NBC affiliate in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, so no one would miss NBC network feeds. It still strikes me as bizarre that local TV affiliates can charge cable systems to carry their signal. That charge is of course passed on to cable subscribers in their bills, so they are being charged for something that they could watch over-the-air for free. It seems to me that the local affiliates benefit hugely from being on the cable systems; their ad revenues must be many times what they would be if only their OTA viewership was counted. So I think the cable systems should take a hard line: tell the local affiliate that the cable system won’t pay them a cent for carrying their signals, and if the local affiliates don’t like it, the cable system won’t carry their signals at all.

In reality, as I’ve said many times before, local network affiliates are an obsolete holdover from the days when networks needed local affiliates to put their signals on the air. With cable and satellite universally available, there’s no longer any need for local affiliates. The networks should simply provide their signals to the cable and satellite systems. The huge benefit to eliminating local affiliates is that it would free up a massive amount of RF spectrum that could be used for cell phones, wireless data, and so on. And, as I’ve also said repeatedly, the networks themselves are also obsolete. They’re middlemen, and the Internet has eliminated the need for them.

I’ve allocated today to making up solutions and filling bottles and doing some label redesign.

10:42 – We’ve been screwed again by Roku. After we ran the Ethernet cable from the den to the router, everything worked fine. No delays, very good picture quality, and no drop-outs for re-buffering. Then, yesterday, I fired up the Roku box to watch some Netflix streaming. Roh-roh. The first indication of a problem was the time needed to buffer. Ordinarily, I see the buffering bar for maybe 10 or 15 seconds, and then the program starts playing in HD. This time, it took literally two or three minutes to buffer. I then got about three seconds of HD before it dropped the signal and started re-buffering. This time, it took three or four minutes to buffer, and the video quality was showing two balls rather than the usual four balls + HD. The program then ran for about two minutes before it blew up again and started re-buffering.

My first thought was that we might be having network problems with TWC, so I went to my office and ran some network tests. Our download speed was between 13 and 14 Mbps (HD streaming takes only 5 Mbps), and the latency looked fine. So I figured Netflix might be having problems and called their tech support. The guy told me there were no problems on their end, and then said, “Oh, wait a minute. You’re using a Roku box.” As it turns out, Roku pushed down a firmware upgrade earlier that day, and the Netflix support guy said it had “buried” them. He said there were two things that would solve the problem. He suggested first powering down the Roku box and our router, waiting a minute, and powering up the router and then the Roku box. If that didn’t work, he said to deactivate the Roku box and then reactivate it. He said that would solve the problem.

I did the power-down thing. No joy. It was still taking three minutes to buffer and then dropping the signal. So I took a deep breath and started the de-activate/reactivate procedure. (When I first set up the Roku box, that “five-minute” job took four hours, much of which was spent on the phone with Roku tech support, who speak only extremely Chinese-accented English.) I de-activated Netflix, did a factory reset on the Roku, and went through the procedure to re-activate. This time, it indeed took only a few minutes. But… No joy. Three minutes of buffering, followed by 2-ball video quality and frequent drops.

So I called Netflix tech support again, and told the woman who answered what I’d done. She said that one or the other of the things I’d done should have solved the problem, but said they did have a list of four or five other things I could try. She emailed that to me, and all of them had to do with wireless problems. So at this point I’m stuck. Netflix doesn’t know what else to tell me, and suggests the problem must be with my broadband connection. I’ve tested that, and it’s fine. It would be an amazing coincidence if this problem, which started when Roku pushed their damned firmware upgrade, wasn’t related to that upgrade. But there’s no way I’m going to call Roku tech support, which is as abominable as any tech support operation I’ve ever spoken to.

Talk about just-in-time inventory. UPS showed up late yesterday afternoon with a bunch of boxes from one of my wholesalers. Among them somewhere is a crate of 144 250 mL beakers, which is all I lacked to make up the batch of 30 chemistry kits that’s sitting waiting for beakers, as well as the new batch of 60 that’s currently in progress. And we’d better start thinking about making up more biology kits, too. We have less than 20 finished biology kits in stock and components to assemble 30 more. Sometime in the next few days, I’ll run 60 sets of labels for the biology kits and get Barbara started on labeling bottles.