Ted's Blog

For years now I have been using Xfinity internet. I stopped using them for cable in 2018, but they were generally less expensive for internet than AT&T who seem to have set a minimum cost of $50 for any service, whereas Xfinity had intro deals I was able to renew for $30 to $40 per month for their lowest speed, which is all I needed. Last year they wanted $45 (for 150 Mbps, 100 Mbps is now their lowest speed; it used to be 25 back in 2015), but I found out that T Mobile was doing home internet via 5G (no cable, just a receiver in your house that makes a wifi hotspot) which I could get for $35 per month. Xfinity then matched that, so I kept them. Then my internet connection started getting spotty this year and I wondered if I was at the end of my contract. I was and was now being charged $59. I don’t think it was related though. I think either my cable came loose outside or my modem, which I bought so I wouldn’t have to rent one from them, had stopped working correctly.

Good time to look at options and I found that my cell provider, Mint, who has always used the T Mobile network and was bought out by T Mobile in 2024, now offers home internet similar to T Mobile, where you put a 5G receiver in your house and it broadcasts wifi. Mint only charges me $15 per month for cell service (plus fees, so almost $20), but you have to pay for a year at a time to get the best rate. No problem since I have been with them for 8 years now. They do the internet the same way and offer it for $30 per month if you get a year at a time (this is a discount that requires you to also have cell service with them). And, in fact, it seems to just be T Mobile. Although the box it came in had Mint labeling, the device itself (pre-owned) says T Mobile on it. I figured I would give it a shot and then I wouldn’t have to haggle with Xfinity every year. You get to try it for 2 weeks and can return it for a refund if you don’t like it. Meanwhile I had no internet for a few days until it showed up and quickly burned through my 5 GB cell data allowance from Mint, so I paid $20 for 3 more GB this month. Eventually I realized that there was a public xfinitywifi hotspot out there somewhere that I could connect to using my Xfinity account and that helped a lot.

Continue reading “Minternet”

I have documented my highs and lows of buying blu-ray movies on Black Friday over the years and realized it was pretty much all over last year. Very few people are still buying physical media, mostly turning towards streaming, not even buying digital copies of movies. I try to keep streaming subscriptions to a minimum, but I did take advantage of an early Black Friday Disney/Hulu bundle deal for $5 per month.

Continue reading “A Little Bit of Black Friday”

In my search for a new place in the world to live, one criteria would be the murder rate. Generally this is the number of people murdered (Wikipedia calls this “intentional homicide”) per year per 100,000 people. In the United States, which is a pretty violent country, the number is 5.8. I was looking at moving to Chile, which has a pretty low crime rate (for Latin America) and a murder rate of 6.3, just a touch above the US. In lieu of Chile, I was thinking of Costa Rica, which comes in at 17.7, much, much higher. One place I wasn’t looking at, mostly because of crime, is Mexico, which had a rate of 24.8. The number for Costa Rica really gave me pause. Maybe instead, I could go to Spain, which has a rate of only 0.7, one of the safest countries in the world. Then I wondered what the rate for my home state of Georgia was. It is a little higher than the average for the US, at 8.2. It is harder to find numbers for Dekalb County, but one source says it is 9.3 and another said 13.7. Now Costa Rica doesn’t look quite as bad, but Spain is looking really, really good.

I started learning Spanish on Duolingo in January, so 8 months ago. I spend about an hour a day doing lessons on Duolingo, a little more at first when it was more fun, for a total now of 344 hours. CEFR has levels of language learning which are A for beginner, B for intermediate, and C for advanced. These levels can be subdivided, so right now I am on Duolingo level 79, which is right in the middle of level B1. Once you finish level 129, you have finished B2 and could start C1, but Duolingo doesn’t teach C1. C1 is basically fluent. I was happy to finish A2 (Duolingo level 60, so I had just reached B1, early intermediate) just as I was going to Santiago, Chile for a visit, but discovered that I had a pretty hard time with verbal communication, despite a lot of work and knowing a lot of words. Because Duolingo is an app, it has a hard time teaching verbal communication. Written words are easy, including reading, and it is easy to play recordings of Spanish to the user, but although it can listen to you speaking, it doesn’t do a good job of evaluating that. It also isn’t great at having you put together sentences on your own: a common exercise is for you to translate by putting a list of words in the correct order, and it gives you a few extra words to choose from as decoys. That’s not really composition where you have to recall words and the correct form of each word. It also has some exercises where it asks you to write down a free form sentence, but I’m not that confident it always even knows what I am trying to say, so while it makes corrections, they don’t always seem to end up saying what I was trying to say. Plus it rarely tells you why a mistake you make is wrong, and even though I pay for the service at the Super level, because I don’t pay more for Max, it often hides “why” behind a pay wall. I still like Duolingo and it does give some grammar lessons, builds vocabulary, and gives you a lot of time to listen to Spanish. And it can be pretty entertaining, which makes it easier to keep studying. They have lately emphasized more and more AI instead of using actual voice actors and teachers writing lessons. It shows, but they want to make a profit and AI lessons cost them a lot less than human teachers.

Continue reading “Aprendiendo”

I started thinking about retiring to another country and there are a handful of Latin American countries that seem like good alternatives to Europe which has a higher cost of living. The countries I have looked at are Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica. All have stable democractic governments with good scores for human rights. All three offer retirement visa programs open to people from the US who can show some kind of passive income, which I have from my pension. While it is easy to visit any of those countries with just a valid passport, living there longer than 6 months requires a temporary residence visa, usually a first step to a permanent residence visa, and possibly citizenship. The temporary residence visa for Chile is valid for two years. The requirements sound pretty easy: valid passport, proof of pension, clean criminal history, a passport type photo, and $200.

Back in January I was renewing my library card and one of the benefits of having a card was free online language lessons from a service called Mango. That got me looking up the best ways to learn language and Mango did not fare well, one site saying it teaches language in the most boring way possible. There are better alternatives that you pay for, sometimes a lot. But there was also Duolingo, which is incredibly popular and can be free, though I very quickly decided to get a 1-year subscription for $60. It does a much better job of keeping things interesting and is more interactive, though I don’t think it is that good at listening. Still, it is a good way to learn vocabulary, grammar, and practice listening. Lately the company has taken heat for trying to do too much with AI tools instead of having voice actors read scripts, and I think their AI stuff is definitely lower quality even though I am learning their most popular language.
Continue reading “Visa Application”