Well, I came off my scooter yesterday due to a puncher in my back tyre so I’ve had to rest from work – I’ve been taking it easy but in moments where I’m feeling better I plugged up 4 punchers in my tyre. I think long term I’m going to have to replace the back tyre but at the moment it’ll get me through to the end of the week.
Welp, got that all sorted out – I couldn’t order a Chromecast with Google TV via best buy however on a good side I realised it is available in Australia so I’ve ordered it so that it is delivered to my brother and then he’ll send it to New Zealand. I think going forward that once this whole COVID-19 is under control I’m going to turn October into the ‘upgrade my phone and gear while I head over to Australia for a holiday’ which will enable me to get Google gear without the stress of dealing with retailers in the US who apparently are keeping tabs of addresses of remailing services.
On the Google front I’ve setup my Google Workspaces which will give me all the Workspaces applications plus 2TB of storage for NZ$18 per month and combine that with YouTube Premium which is NZ$15.99 the total cost is NZ$33.99 which isn’t too bad given that I’ll be backing up my whole music collection that I’ve backed from my CDs in FLAC files (currently sitting on an external SSD but it is always good practice to have an offsite backup) as well as making extensive use of YouTube Music since I’ll upload my whole FLAC collection to YouTube Music and let Google do all the encoding required so then I can access my music from all my devices – laptop, desktop or mobile phone. I’ve jut finished uploading the contents of my external drive which is around 160GB but given that it comes with 2TB it is pretty much unlimited.
Once I’ve finished my YouTube Premium on my old account I’ll start up the subscription on my new account then upload all the FLAC files to YouTube Music so that they can be converted over. One of the cool things is that YouTube Music can be ‘installed’ as a PWA so it ends up acting like an application.
Side note: It is interesting to see that Google is heading in the direction that I thought they would in terms of consolidating around key brands such as using the YouTube brand for bringing together music, movies, linear television and so on. Another side note: If you have a Workspace/GSuite account, you may find that you cannot access YouTube – you’ll need to wait 30 days and have spent at least US$30 in terms of paying your subscription – that can either be in the form of a deposit or just paying for a couple of months. I found it out the hard way in the past – pulling my hair out wondering why it wasn’t working. On a good side, my Pixel 4 XL won’t arrive until November, and my Chromecast with Google TV will probably arrive towards the end of October after it is received by my brother and his partner in Australia then mailed to New Zealand – from what I understand there is a bit of a backlog between in Australia and New Zealand so it might take longer than usual. Oh well, all looking good. When it arrives I’ll give both a review including lots of photos and stuff.
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