Mac Power Users 459: My Life is a Subscription

+1 – if you like Acorn, try BritBox, owned by BBC and ITV. Massive collection of Dr Who (26 seasons from 1st to 7th Doctor). Coronation Street and East Enders episodes within 24 hours of broadcast in the U.K. If you want to watch British TV live, check out Transponder.tv . (Not HD quality, but live.)

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MHZ is another subscription TV service for mysteries. We have worked our way through all of their French series and most of the Scandinavian ones. It seems most of my viewing now has subtitles. A lot of it is much better written than our big 3 network stuff.

Good ideas. I’m actually going to do an updated post on this in January. Just digging out from some personal items in November.

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Ok @ismh, that was like magic. Thank you.

After reading this, I looked into it and I just learned that my local library also provides this for free. So glad I came across this post

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I shuddered to hear MacSparky say he wanted Apple to bundle in iCloud sync for pictures. I absolutely DO NOT want any of my stuff automatically in any cloud system! I fear that while that might be fine for most folks that alone would drive me off iPhone and into Android.

I want to be in total control of what and if I do anything in the cloud.

Only way I’d approve is if Apple also allowed anyone with a WebDAV server to set up their own personal iCloud system. In fact, that I’d really like.

Thought about this MPU episode and this thread when I read this article about software subscriptions (Software as a Service) and others.
Barrons - How Subscriptions Are Remaking Corporate America

I wish Apple would improve iCloud Photos but not make it mandatory, which I doubt they would do…I mean, you can just turn off iCloud Photos easily. But they need to drastically improve this sync service and improve family sharing, if enabled. Additionally, I wish Apple would basically give away (I know, I’m crazy!!!) cloud storage for Photos. I’m sure this would be abused and cost them tons of money, but I can still wish. :slight_smile:

I took him to mean he thinks we shouldn’t be charged for it, not that we’d be forced to use it. But I could have just heard what my brain wants to.

I’ve found Amazon Photos to be really useful. It’s free for Prime members and there is unlimited storage.

I’m a fan of Anylist and 1Password in part because they can sync across devices and also between users. My husband and I can share the same passwords where needed and shopping lists, recipes, etc. Can we use Keychain the same way? Can we share Keychain? I’m under the impression we can’t but it seems to me that Keychain has come a long way and I’d be more willing to drop 1Password if we could share it.

Nope. Keychain can’t be shared.

Keychain also doesn’t store 2FA codes, or secure notes, or software license codes, or important files (tax returns, scans of social security cards, drivers licenses, etc).

If you’re thinking of replacing 1Password with Keychain, you’re probably missing out on a lot that 1Password can do!

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In episode 459, @katiefloyd refers to a previous episode of MPU that goes into detail on all of the perks )and not so obvious ones) of an Amazon Prime subscription. I wasn’t able to fish that out with my Google-Fu. If you happen to know with episode that was, please post it here.

Thanks

I believe she was referring to this episode:

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OK I know it’s an odd request, but would David consider providing his spreadsheet in something other than a numbers file? My preference would be .ods but I can also read excel files. Don’t have numbers on my old Mac and can’t install it as on Sierra and it requires High Sierra.

I just downloaded the spreadsheet and exported it from Numbers to Excel:

There was a warning about checkboxes not being supported.

From there, I opened the file in Excel and exported it to ODS

And, just for good measure, an older Excel format (xls instead of xlsx)

Let me know if that does it.

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Wonderful!

Much appreciated the ODS version works just fine.

Thanks. That’s what I thought and why I started using 1Password in the first place. I just wanted to be sure Keychain hadn’t progressed into something I had failed to appreciate. You are right about all the other features of 1Password, which I actually do use. I think I just needed reassurance that I should continue my subscription.

Thanks

I agree. Most of the apps that I have subscribed to and have stay subscribed to have shown me the value of them switching to a subscription model. I’ve loved TextExpander but the lack of good updates is difficult

So I decided to automate this. I wrote a google apps script that parses my apple store subscriptions (still working on the parsing logic for other subscriptions). The workflow goes like this:

Get a subscription confirmation from the App Store. A gmail rule adds a few labels (I have rules that add them to finance (receipts) and apple labels, and a “New Subscription” label.

My script fires every 12 hours, when it finds one labeled “New Subscription”, the subscription, app, developer, price, frequency (i.e. month/year), payment method are parsed from the email. Monthly/yearly costs are calculated. The data gets appended to a google sheet.

The script creates an Omnifocus URL, exports the URL to a shell script in google drive. Hazel renames the file, and runs a shell script that executes the file and adds the review subscriptions task to Omnifocus.

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