My Life as a Cable Cutter

Today is my first day living as a cable cutter. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about taking the cable cutting challenge. The goal is to live off of OTA TV, Netflix, and Hulu for a year. There may be a couple other odd and end services mixed in, but the point is to watch TV for less than $30/mo. So far, I'm at $18/mo with Hulu and Netflix. I plan to probably add MLBtv next year. That will be around $120 for the season, but probably will only add $10 to my average monthly bill. I'm good with that, for now. That's still under the $30 mark.

My kids like some shows we won't be able to access through our TV, like Regular Show and Adventure Time on the Cartoon Network. Most of the episodes are available through the website, though and we can watch those on a computer. I'm not getting a DVR of any kind right now, like Tivo or something similar. I don't have the need.

Sunday is my first football season without Cable or Satellite. The good news is that since they have always been on Fox and CBS, they will still be there. And I can watch some football this Sunday. Last week I was able to pickup the network games, so I have no doubt it will be the same this week.

Good bye,  DirecTV. I see you have some awesome packages on your site and are even including NFL Sunday Ticket for free! It's for new customers only, though, because I asked about lowering my bill. I'm as low as I can go at $70+/mo, while new customers get a deal that's almost half that cost and with more channels than I have. Are you offering the super special deals, because people are abandoning ship and realizing they can get along without you? Hmmm.... I know you will never admit it, even if it's true. I wonder what the landscape will look like in 5 years.

An Update: I just got a call from someone high up in Customer Service at DirecTV. They were verifying that I wanted to cancel my service and asked why? I explained it was a cost issue. They were willing to increase my channel package and cut my current payment by at least half! What a deal! I was already at the lowest package and they were going to bump me up and cut my cost by half. That would have put me at about $40/mo. It's a great deal, but still not $20/mo. I declined the offer. I'm sure I would have had to sign another 2 year contract and lose the cost benefits over that time and eventually climb back up to the current payment levels. I'm not playing that game anymore.

Out of all the times I called before to work with DirecTV, why do I have to go through the process to cancel my service to get attention from them? Why do they have to be faced with the prospect of a customer committing to dropping service. When I commit to doing something like that, I've made up my mind and I'm done. It would take a lot to get me to change my mind. Even if I do, I probably wouldn't be going back to that company because they let the relationship sour to the point of termination.

One Week Left to Live with DirecTV

This coming week is my last week on DirecTV. I will be cutting the cord this week. No cable or satellite service for one year is the challenge. In preparation I have purchased a Western Digital Live TV media player and a Mohu Leaf HD Antenna to receive OTA TV channels. I have done testing with each of those with good success. Sunday, I watched some football using my Mohu Leaf and the signal was flawless.

This weekend I will have some work to do. I am cleaning up wires and moving some equipment around the house. Since the DirecTV box will be moved out the Cable modem and wireless router are getting moved to the front of the house and new cable management is being put in.

I am excited about taking on the cable cutter challenge. I'm also somewhat apprehensive as I have not been without cable or satellite TV service since sometime around 1996. I haven't been without a DVR for at least 8 years. It's been a dependent relationship that I choose to longer be a participant. The biggest complaints could potentially come from the kids. They've never known TV without a DVR. They think everyone can pause and rewind live TV. I'm about take my kids to the stone age with a 46-inch HD TV, high speed Internet, laptops in the house with Netflix, a couple hundred DVD movies available on demand from the network movie library, and no ability to pause or rewind live TV. Poor things. They're going to have such a rough time with this.

Update Outlook Safe Sender List via GPO

I had a client with the need to update the Outlook Safe Sender list in Outlook's Junk Email settings across about 100 end users. The list had only a couple of addresses and we did not want to overwrite whatever list was already in place for each end user. They have an Active Directory environment and have a couple of sites. They also use Outlook 2007 and 2010. So the question became, how can this be done through Group Policy? Do we have to run an MSP package or can we just use Administrative templates to set the information?

I found the Office 2007 and Office 2010 Administrative GPOs on Microsoft's site. I downloaded them and placed them in the correct location. These GPOs are for Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 Active Directory environments. Don't forget to copy the ADML files in, too. You will get errors when attempting to modify a GPO with the Office ADMX Administrative templates.

I made the appropraite changes in the Outlook GPO. The Junk Mail filter is located under User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office Outlook (version here) > Tools | Options > Preferences > Junk E-mail. I enabled the list setting and pointed to the location of the list and allowed the list to be updated, instead of overwritten, among a few other options. I attempted to have the GPO push to my test computers and only a couple of the settings took effect. The list did not take effect. I researched the issue and found this is a common problem.

I found this Technet thread -

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sr-Latn-CS/outlook/thread/0ddcf321-9158-4078-ac83-45b33ef98266 - and discovered my problem. The registry keys were not getting created through the GPO and therefore, no list was being applied. I created the keys using the Group Policy Preferences for the user and successfully pushed the list to the test computers.

 

The following registry keys are required for Outlook Safe Sender lists to be populated inside:

 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\14.0\outlook\options\mail

"JunkMailImportAppend" DWORD = 1 NOTE: This is DWORD value. “1” is for Appending. “0” is for Overwrite.
"JunkMailSafeSendersFile" SZ = "C:\SafeSenders.txt" NOTE: String value is set to filepath of txt file
“JunkMailImportLists" DWORD = 1 NOTE: 1 = Enabled 0 = Disabled

 

Upon import of the list the JunkMailImportLists value will automatically change to 0. If this registry entry is set to 1 from Group Policy it will continue to import the list at each logon. Rest assured, it will not create duplicate addresses for each subsequent logon. If you are using Outlook 2007, simply replace the 14.0 with 12.0 in the registry path. The same values work for Office 2007

 

I used the option to append to the current list so that if anyone has a specific sender in their list, my imports won't affect their individual settings. This is important to note, as some end users can create a rather long list of acceptable safe senders, especially if they subscribe to mailing lists. Many times these can get caught in Outlook's Junk Mail. Overwriting that list may cause more headaches. The best to avoid that pitfall is understanding the needs of the end users affected by the anticipated changes.

 

The other option available mentioned in the thread is to update the Exchange Server with a few cmdlets. My customer uses a hosted Exchange environment, so this was not an option for us. Implementing the registry settings was simple enough and can be maintained easily.

 

Credit goes to Jahawk at Microsoft for showing this information in the Technet thread.