Apple TV vs Samsung SmartHub

I promise, this will be the last post about our Samsung Not-So-Smart TV! If you’ve followed the saga, then you’ll understand why I gave up and bought an Apple TV. The question I want to answer with this post is: was it worth it? I bought a refurbished Apple TV for $75 plus tax from the Apple Store. Did this add enough value to my current Smart TV to make me glad I did it? The answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Not only is the Apple TV interface more stylish and easier to look at, but it works, which is more than I could say for Samsung. Disclaimer: our TV was purchased six months ago, but wasn’t the latest greatest Samsung model, nor was it the most expensive. Since then, Samsung has come out with newer models, and if you go by the images of SmartHub on their website, our version, though it is completely up to date, does not have all the bells and whistles available on newer TVs. On the other hand, Apple hasn’t updated the Apple TV in a couple of years, and our refurbished model runs the latest iOS for Apple TV. I actually like that stability, and I trust Apple to continue to support their product for years, even if they do come out with an improved version. The two devices are about the same generation, in other words, but the Apple TV doesn’t seem outdated, whereas the Samsung SmartHub we have does.

Apple TV is faster. A lot faster. Though I haven’t timed it, I would say that starting an app is at least three times faster on Apple than on Samsung. And that’s when Samsung doesn’t have to update the app before starting, which it did about once a week, it seemed.

Apple TV has all the apps Samsung has and more. Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, YouTube, Vimeo, and a slew of foreign apps all exist on both platforms (or as many as I could care about do). But Apple has a PBS app, and it has ABC (though you need a cable subscription to use it). Of course, Apple TV also can access the iTunes store where you can purchase or rent video (or audio), though I don’t plan to do this. And Apple TV has access to podcasts (video and audio).

Notably missing on both platforms are NBC, CBS, and other networks. And Apple TV does not have a web browser. Samsung SmartHub does, but it doesn’t do much. (See previous rants about how useless the browser is.)

But Apple TV works with iOS devices and Apple computers! It is incredibly easy to set up Airplay and stream video from a computer or an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch (some older models are not supported). With this, I can use the web browser on my iPad to view any video online and use Airplay to stream directly to Apple TV on the big screen. If iOS is limited (say at a Flash site), I can use my computer to do the same.

Apple TV also can be controlled by my iPad using the Remote app. The standard remote is fine for most app navigation, but if it comes time to search, I can use the keyboard on my iPad to enter text on the Apple TV.

Both Apple TV and Samsung SmartHub can be paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, but the Remote app for iPad means I don’t have to buy a new keyboard (that saves half my purchase price for the Apple TV) or keep one around the TV. We have enough clutter with remotes that I don’t relish another keyboard in the living room!

So who’s the winner? Hands down, the title goes to Apple TV. Since turning it on, I haven’t looked back, and the only reason I would want to launch SmartHub again would be to turn of the auto-update feature, so it will stop interrupting my viewing on the AppleTV with a notice that SmartHub has been updated, forcing me to grab the TV remote to keep it from automatically opening the darned thing (bad, bad choice, Samsung). I’m very happy with Apple TV, and I would even say the video quality is better on it than when using the same app (say Netflix) on the Samsung SmartHub platform.

However, if your home is filled with Samsung products, your verdict might be different. Maybe the ability to use your Samsung smart phone or tablet with your TV would trump the other benefits of Apple TV, though you’d still have to contend with the frequent updates and the slow performance of the Samsung Smart TV. Maybe the latest models offer some improvement. My question would be, how long will that last?

Samsung ‘Smart’ TV Review

Awhile ago, I wrote that our Smart TV wasn’t that smart. We have a Samsung UN40H6350AFXZA, and I’m glad we got a good deal on it, because I’ve finally given up on its smart features. When we bought it, the reviews said Samsung had the best browser and it could connect with an iOS device using the SwipeIt app. By the time I got ours and started to experiment with that app, it wasn’t working and was soon discontinued. Another app that promised iOS integration also disappeared and never worked for me (do you sense a trend here?). The Smart TV’s web browser was touted as the best available. It’s either gotten worse or never was very good. Yes, you can browse the web, but don’t try watching video. PBS programs that used to play, now crash after the first commercial. ABC and NBC programs won’t play at all, nor will ESPN. There’s quite a bit of free content out there on the web, but good luck accessing it with this TV.

Recently, I spent considerable time trying to get the Samsung “Movies & TV” app to work. It needed a credit card number, but for awhile there was no way to add that. I contacted support and got a couple of answers, neither of which actually matched what I saw when I tried to update my account, either at the website using my computer or on the TV. Then suddenly there was a new update and the option to add a card returned (but not in the place that either support article had told me). When I was finally able to “Watch Now” again, I could see why they needed my credit card. The only options were to watch through paid subscriptions.

That’s all Samsung seems to care about are. If you’re interested in Hulu or Vudu, or if you already have cable (and why do you need a Smart TV, then? — all you need is a DVR), then this TV might work for you. But if you’re interested in a Smart TV so you can watch free streaming video from the networks for shows you’ve missed or can’t watch at the scheduled time, then you won’t get very far with this TV. The web browser is extremely buggy and slow. It crashes anytime I try to play video. Yet there are constant SmartHub and firmware updates that ought to update the Flash capabilities so it can play more video. But those never help; instead, they seem to make things worse. Samsung also won’t let me delete their apps that I don’t want (like the Kids or Fitness apps that I have no use for, or HBO Go that is useless because I don’t have HBO or the many paid subscription apps I don’t want to subscribe to), so I can’t free up memory (nor can I add memory), which is one cause of the crashes.

I will say that the Netflix and YouTube apps do work. So if that’s all you need, then you might like this TV. However, you will find that they are slow, especially when you are required to update the software before you can run the app (something that seems to happen once a week or so). But the performance of these apps is decent. And the picture quality of the TV is really quite good. So I’m glad we got a good deal on it, and I don’t feel too bad that I’ve decided to ignore its smart features and buy an AppleTV to replace the features this TV promised but couldn’t deliver.

I don’t know what that says about all the latest hype about Samsung smart TVs and product integration. Maybe if you have a Samsung phone and a Samsung TV they work better together, but after my experience with this model, I’m suspicious. Our TV is about six months old and is already outdated. Yes, the model debuted in 2012, so the technology is a little more out of date, but I’m pretty sure our AppleTV will still be functional in two years, and won’t be limping along with as many problems as this Samsung. I also be that the user experience with a Samsung TV won’t be quite a cool as it is in the commercials if you have to wait for your app to update when you want to switch your video from your phone to your TV. It’s funny how in the commercials you never see the spinning circle that is a constant feature on our TV every time we start an app. And on the commercials, nothing ever crashes, yet in real life it’s a common occurrence.

Creamed Asparagus on Toast

It’s been awhile since I posted a recipe, and tonight’s comfort food is perfect for this time of year (or any time, but it makes me think of spring). So next time asparagus is on sale or you find some at the farmer’s market (or better yet, pick it fresh from the garden), give this a try. It’s easy, filling, and delicious.

The basic recipe includes asparagus cut into 1-2 inch lengths, onion, butter/olive oil, milk, hard boiled eggs (make ahead and peel when cool), and toast. For 3 people, we use about a pound of asparagus and half an onion. Sauté a the onion in oil and/or butter (a generous amount such as a tablespoon of each). When the onions start to turn clear but not browned, toss in the asparagus and lightly sauté for a couple of minutes. Then add two or three tablespoons of flour (a couple of handfuls) and stir until the flour is coated in oil. Add milk a little at a time to make a fairly thick cream sauce. Cut the eggs into halves or quarters and then into pieces (use one egg per person, give or take). Salt and pepper to taste.

Toast the bread — we prefer home made whole wheat bread that is a little dry already (the end of an old loaf), but store bought bread is okay. Whole grain is best, but it’s really up to you. When I was a kid and my Mom made this for us, I’m pretty sure she buttered the toast, but we generally skip that step. Ladle some of the creamed asparagus over a piece of toast and serve. 

To spice it up, add some mushrooms or other spices (I added a little fresh fennel tonight for fun). To stretch if you don’t have a lot of asparagus, you could add carrot or parsnip cut into match stick pieces. A little green pepper might also work or in place of regular onion, use shallot or green onion. If you want a creamier sauce, use whole milk. For a lighter version, use 2% or less, or use low fat buttermilk to replace all or part of the milk.

Poetry Contest Submission

Every now and then, after (or in the midst of) a heavy grading period, I have to remind myself that in addition to being a university professor, I’m also a poet. In the throes of a busy semester, this can be a challenge, but this morning, I took a few minutes to work on a poem and send out a submission to a contest.

In general, I’m not a big fan of contests. It can feel like a waste of time and money, given the odds of winning. So I’m fairly selective about the contests I choose to enter. i like them to have a good reputation but not be the creme de la creme (those top national awards don’t need my money). But more importantly, I like to feel like I’m getting something for my money besides a lottery ticket. So the contest rules need to be clear and fair, and the organization running the contest needs to be one I know, trust, and want to support with my entrance fee. An added bonus is when the entrance fee buys you a subscription to a magazine (which I’d often rather have than a copy of the prize-winning book). It’s also nice when contest entries are also considered for publication in a magazine (though i don’t like it if I get the feeling you have to enter the contest to be considered for magazine publication).

The contest fee should be modest, but there should be a fee. I never trust a free contest unless I am absolutely confident about the organization running it (state Arts Commissions or other well-recognized organizations that run grant competitions are the main exceptions to the rule). I’ve heard of too many scams for poets out there to want to enter your free contest. But I have no interest in paying through the nose just to be read. I’ll take my chances in the slush pile, thank you very much.

I want to support a few contests per year by entering them. They should be sponsored by literary magazines or organizations that support writers, so I feel like I’m giving back to the community with my submission. If I get something good to read out of the deal, even better. And if my name gets mentioned among the finalists or even better as one of the winners, that’s fabulous, but I’m not holding my breath. I like the tangible, certain rewards that build a community of writers the best. Fame and fortune (or at least prize money) always seem too elusive to bank on.

Southern Literary Festival 2014

Each year in the South, a group of undergraduate English majors and their professors descends on one member institution for a weekend of readings, workshops, and fun. This year, the host school for the Southern Literary Festival was Ole Miss (University of Mississippi to the rest of the country), who did a fabulous job arranging panels and entertainment. It didn’t hurt that the festival ran concurrently with the Conference on the Book, an annual event hosted in Oxford, so there were quite a few other authors milling around and some of the events were combined. So, for instance, we all got to witness the live Thacker Mountain Radio program as it was recorded for public radio, there was a Blues performance, and of course there was a chance to wander around the Square and browse in Square Books. SLF panels included readings by Cheryl St. Germain, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Chiyuma Elliott and Dereck Harriell, Megan Abbott, and of course the student prize winners, whose work was published in the annual literary magazine of the festival. Students also had master classes in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting, and there was an open mic where anyone could read.

Started in 1937 at Blue Mountain College by a group of professors, which included Robert Penn Warren from LSU, the festival has a long and storied history. It has fostered many young writers, including the young Flannery O’Connor, and has featured many greats of Southern Literature. Each year is a little different, tailored to the strengths and talents of the host institution. Yet each year features the literary contest, readings, and workshop or master class experiences. It is a great asset for Southern schools, and membership is open. So if you are associated with a college or university in or near the South, contact me or the current host for more information.

The opportunity to hear good writing and have conversations about craft, and the chance to interact with students and teachers from schools around the region is an incredible experience. Though I know well how hard it can be to pry yourself loose from the demands of the current semester, those days spent in a festival like this can be incredibly invigorating and rewarding. If you don’t live in or near the South, search for opportunities like this in your area. Then make the time to attend. You won’t regret it.

How Smart are Smart TVs?

First, let me say that we’re pretty happy with our Samsung SmartTV in terms of its picture quality. It was a good replacement for our previous model that bit the dust (don’t ask). And it does stream Netflix relatively well, even if browsing titles is more than a little clumsy. But the promise of the SmartTV features seems to be more hype than reality.

First, most of the Samsung apps involve subscription services. Free internet TV is hard to come by, though Samsung does provide a web browser app. This is the biggest disappointment. Not only is it next to impossible to navigate with the supplied remote — calling it clumsy would be an incredible understatement — but it won’t play much and is constantly in need of updates.

The main problem seems to be with Flash. Videos on some sites tell us that we need to update our Flash player, which we can’t do except by updating the whole SmartHub or the browser or possibly the firmware. Other sites tell us we’re out of memory, but we can’t delete apps because Samsung doesn’t allow that for their recommended ones (the subscription apps). So we could buy movies and TV shows with the recommended apps. Or if we subscribe to cable, we could watch TV on demand if we had the premium channels.

But to watch the content we’d like to stream from network TV or other free sites, we might as well hook up a computer to the TV. Or an AppleTV or possibly Roku or other box might work. So where’s the value in the Smart features?

At least we got a good deal on this model, so we could not feel cheated that the hype of SmartTV was mostly hype. I’d rate the IQ of our TV at maybe 100. It does a few things relatively well, but there are serious limitations, and it has a long way to go before it will be a full replacement for a computer (even just for watching video.) It always felt like a waste to dedicate a computer to the TV, since there was so much processing power that we really didn’t use. The idea of a SmartTV makes a lot of sense. The reality is far from perfect, though.

We’ve read that Samsung will make major revisions to its apps on March 26, getting rid of all paid apps (not the subscription apps). There may be more changes in the works, which could make the experience better for awhile, but then it could all change again as Flash gets updated on websites, for instance. Oh, and there used to be an app called SwipeIt for streaming iPad or iPhone video, but I could never get it to work. Now it has disappeared from the Samsung apps store. The constant flux in what’s available and what the capabilities are may hold out some hope for the future, but it also makes the user experience more frustrating in the present.

Concrete Poetry

I always have a little fear and trepidation introducing concrete poetry to a class of creative writers, as I did today. On the one hand, I’m afraid I may get a lot of texts written in a shape that don’t have much poetry to them; on the other hand, I am convinced that the visual side of poetry is at least worth considering. Concrete poetry can lead to abuse or innovation, in other words, so it helps to show some examples.

What I like about concrete poems is that they can develop their own, visual sense of grammar. There is a syntax to the spatial arrangement of words on the page that works counter to sentence syntax. Indeed, often there is no sentence and the ‘words’ may not even be pronounceable. I like getting students to think outside the box and to think of poems as something other than prose. But I don’t like to give the idea that concrete poetry is static.

Far from it. The best concrete poetry challenges our linguistic norms, including challenging our habit of making language sense from left to right and top to bottom. So I show them a poem written in different lines that curve and bend in different directions, even one circular line. There is no logical place to begin the poem. If you start with one sentence and end with another, you might get a completely different sense of the poem than if you did it the other way around, or another way. There are multiple readings of the same text, depending on your entry point.

Writing a poem like this may take more technical prowess with typography than your average undergraduate can muster, but being exposed to the poem (and to other concrete poems) might allow them to think of poetry as not being (completely) linear. If they begin to look for connections around and within a poem, and not just in the straight line of prose, then they may pay more attention to other ways of creating meaning in a poem. Some of those may be more visual than auditory.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: Be Useful

I keep marveling at how much my blog’s traffic has increased in the past year and thinking about the posts that made this happen. On the surface, the best advice I might give for driving more traffic to your blog could be: write about technology. My techie posts, which weren’t part of the original concept for the blog, have garnered far more hits than my poetry or teaching posts. But I don’t think that writing about tech is the only solution. Some of my food posts have been fairly popular, and there’s even a post where I was trying to define Nonfiction that regularly gets a hit — welcome students from Full Sail University (wherever you are) who must be assigned to find a page like mine. I see you in my stats now and then.

No, rather than taking the easy solution, to write about tech issues, I want to suggest that you write about whatever is on your mind, but make it useful. That said, I know it’s hard to predict what will be useful for others. So my rule of thumb has become to write about things that are useful to me. Then if others think so, too, I may have a hit, and if not, at least I can use it.

Case in point: when I was having problems with my DSL modem last year, I started a series of posts chronicling my problems and eventual solution. I tried to be very detailed about what my symptoms were and how I fixed them. I described every step as accurately as I could remember (without giving away personal details). I did this at the time, so I wouldn’t forget what I’d done if I ever had the problem again. People (and then search engines) started to notice. It was a rant, and that felt good, but it was a useful rant because it also provided information, and I’m convinced that’s what drove the traffic to my site.

I’ve done the same with a rare blood disease that our dog came down with a year ago. I recounted what I had learned about it, but I also recounted the experience of caring for and ultimately losing our beloved pet. I don’t think it’s the emotional content that draws viewers, but instead they want to know what someone else has experienced and what they might expect. I don’t know that our experience will be similar to theirs — and I sincerely hope theirs will be one of the cases where the dog responds to treatment and goes into remission — but knowing our experience must be useful.

Of course, I’ll continue to write about poetry, teaching, cooking, and the occasional odd-ball topic like the Motorette my mother eventually sold (thanks to someone who found out about it on my blog). You can’t always predict what will be of use to others, after all. So don’t let this advice stop you from writing about your passion even if that seems like the most useless topic in the world. As long as you approach it with the goal in mind to make it useful, at least to yourself, then my bet is there will be others who find it useful, too, and they will find you.

The Power of Twitter for Writers Looking to Publish

I often forget about reblogging. This is a post by a former student (who’s gone on to do some great things in her young writing career) that I found very helpful in thinking about new ways to make use of Twitter for writers. We got into a discussion of Twitter lists, which got me started collecting lists of magazines, magazine resources, and writers. Not only does this help me organize my Twitter feed and see more of what I want to see when I want to see it, but since people can subscribe to my list (or I could subscribe to yours), they could see what’s tweeted on my list. My next project is to hunt for some similar lists and subscribe. Who knows what I might discover. After following New Pages, Duotrope, and a number of literary magazines of interest, I’ve seen some cool announcements of open submission periods and found a few new lit mags I want to keep an eye on. Thanks again, Christy, for the original suggestions.

Christie Collins's avatar

If you’re anything like me, you set up a Twitter account when it was just reaching popularity in 2008-2009. You followed the short list of your friends who had a Twitter account. Then, for funsies you followed a few starlets just to add to your following list and to be trendy (I’ve followed Ellen DeGeneres since day one).  If any of this rings true for you, then you (bored and let down) may also have left your Twitter account stagnant for the next four years. This was certainly my Twitter story.

Just last year, I realized what millions of Americans already knew about this social medium.  For some people, 3,000 of your closest friends are on Twitter, and for you, this is why Twitter matters. For the rest of us, finding a niche for your account is vital to its usefulness. For years, I already had a niche – writing…

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