Hulu. It was my first foray into online movies and TV shows and I was into it way before any of my friends. I loved in the beginning. The ads were short and ad blockers worked. Over the years things changed little by little and while it is not the best choice for online streaming, if suffices...mostly.
At work I used Windows because,well it is corporate America and that is what most companies use, unless you are a Linux company, like Red Hat. At home however, I use Linux mostly (I have a Windows box, a fairly new one at that, I use just for a couple of programs) because I like it. It is secure and almost immune to viruses (or virii as I like to call them). I am not a guru, just a geek who likes to tweak and experiment. So much so that I downloaded and installed "CloudReady" on my old HP 6930b laptop. CloudReady is a wrapper to make Chrome OS work on almost any laptop and it is pretty darn cool. Running on an old laptop, it is not as fast booting as it would be on a real Chromebook but it is fast everyplace else. I liked it so much I had given a lot of thought to possibly buying a $250-ish CHromebook the next time one went on sale. Well, that was until yesterday.
I remembered I had a lot of things bookmarked in Hulu and decided to watch a few of them on my CloudReady Chrome OS loaded laptop, which is essentially a Chromebook (albeit heavier and slower than a regular Chromebook). I booted it up, launched the browser (Chrome) and then logged on to Hulu. I clicked on my queue and selected "iZombie" (guilty pleasure...sue me) and the obligatory ads began playing. Then nothing. I cleared my cache, turned off uBlock, reloaded the window. No change.
I repeated the process but this time rebooted. No change. I was perplexed. I know that before I put CLoudReady on this thing, Hulu worked (most of the time), but the major difference was in Linux I tend to use Firefox, something you cannot load in Chrome OS. So I went online and guess what? This has been an issue for at least three months now, with no solution in site. Someone wrote a JS hack to make it work but my guess Hulu found out about it and broke the hack.
That bums me out. I was thinking a Chromebook might be something I could use to stream videos but I guess I will just continue to look at getting a better tablet to replace the Asus TF201 I use. Oddly, it is back to being slow slab of attractive metal and glass.
