Gadgets

Epson 8350 Projector Repair

After 3.5 years of faithful service and 1100 of operation, my Epson 8350 suddenly decided that it had an internal fault. The symptom was a red flashing temperature light. A quick call to Epson verified that I was way out of my warranty period. The closest official repair place was down in Vancouver, WA. I chatted with a local (unofficial) place too but didn’t get a warm and fuzzy so I shipped my projector down to Compass Micro down in Vancouver. Thankfully I had stored the original box and foam up in the rafters in the garage so I wasn’t too concerned about damage in transit.

Shipping only took a day and was about $20 (each way.) The gang at Compass Micro diagnosed it the same day it arrived. The lamp fan was dead and the part was $29. Tack on their $60 minimum labor charge for the first hour and I was back in action. The part took a few days to arrive and then they quickly shipped it back to me.

So while it would have been nice to not have this problem at all, I was very happy with the service and the total bill was a lot less than buying a new projector. If I have something like this happen again, I might be inclined to open up the projector myself and see if I can tell that a fan obviously isn’t spinning.

benmartens April 2, 2015 Gadgets

Pedometer Phone

With one of the latest updates to my Nokia Lumia Icon, I now have a pedometer with me at all times and I don’t even have to carry a Fitbit! Newer Lumias have a motion sensor in them and one of the features is a step counter. (The steps show up in the Health and Fitness app.) You can also get some pretty cool data about your location and motion in the motion data settings section. WPCentral has a good rundown of the new features there.

As long as this doesn’t drain my battery too much, it makes a lot of sense to have it integrated into the phone. I almost always have it in my pocket anyway so why should I carry a separate device?

benmartens March 25, 2015 Gadgets

WiFi Access Points

On January 1, I took over as the IT guy at church. We had a pretty bare bones set up and I was given the funds to spruce things up a bit. Once I got our internet speed upgraded from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps (for the same price with some billing fixup) and got new computers installed, the next task was to get better WiFi coverage.

A bit of searching around led me to these UniFi Access Points. They’re simple looking devices that can be managed from a central server app. These are slightly more complicated than your typical home networking gear but well within the reach of any aspiring nerd.

There are tons of complex features that you can enable like zero handoff switching between access points so your VOIP calls don’t stutter, but even just setting it up with the defaults gives you a great experience. I need to do some more testing, but it appeared that my devices were automatically connecting to the strongest signal instead of waiting until the first signal completely died out to grab a new one. The range was good and now with three access points, we can cover all of the buildings with a strong signal.

I’m tempted to install these at home too. Our house is just big/complex enough that we get a pretty weak signal in some parts. Two or three of these would make a big difference.

benmartens February 26, 2015 Gadgets

Sling Television

One of the major things that held me back from cutting back on cable last year was the loss of ESPN. Turns out, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If I had it, I probably would have watched it, but I guess I don’t really miss it at this point.

That being said, there will come a point where I really want to watch ESPN or some other channel that I lost access to. There’s now an awesome online solution for this and it’s called Sling Television (no relation to the Sling Box.) It’s basically an online cable subscription. For $20/month you get ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food, HGTV, Travel, Cartoon Network, Disney, ABC Family, CNN, and a couple others. There are a few $5 add-on packs if you want more sports, etc. Notably the ESPN package includes access to WatchESPN.com. The best part is that it’s super easy to sign up and super easy to cancel and it comes with a free 7 day trial.

If you’re a cord cutter but can’t give up access to live TV and some of these channels then this could be a great solution. The major drawback at this point is that only some of the channels have any type of DVR functionality (they store ~3 days of content) but stations like ESPN don’t enable this. And only some of the stations allow you to watch On Demand back episodes. If you’re looking for live TV, this is the way to go, but if you want to time shift your TV, you’ll want to pay more attention to what you actually get during the trial period.

While this might not be the perfect service for all circumstances, it’s still fantastic to see us getting closer to the dream of watching what we want, when we want, where we want, on whatever device we want.

benmartens February 25, 2015 Gadgets

Wall Mount

Lots of kids are injured every year from falling TVs. The number is increasing rapidly as people have moved from big heavy CRTs to light LCD TVs. The best number I could find was 12,000/year back in 2011. That’s not a huge number. There are plenty of riskier things to worry about first, but wall mounting the TV is something I’ve wanted to do anyway so this was a good excuse.

I picked up one of the more popular models from Monoprice for only $37. And I know some of you are content to leave your cables dangling down the walls, but that would drive me nuts in my own house. Running them through the wall is pretty simple with a kit like this for $40 from Amazon. It complies with code by splitting the box for the power and the low voltage cables.

Installation was pretty quick and simple: find two studs, drill the holes, and attach the mount to the wall. The laser level was a big help for this. That’s a paper bag you see taped to the wall to catch some of the dust.

Next I used the included templates to trace out the holes for the power extension kit and cut holes in the drywall. Yes, I could have just added a new outlet here, but doing it this way means that I can connect this outlet to my battery backup and add some extra protection for the TV.The final step was attaching the mounting brackets to the back of the TV, removing the old base, and then hanging it on the wall. The mount pulls out pretty far from the wall so that the TV can swivel 90 degrees in each direction (nice if we are watching from the kitchen), and it also tilts in the other two directions. My mount is really level, but the 5 degrees of tilt would help you correct most mistakes.I’m very happy with how this all turned out. It was pretty cheap and only took about 2 hours to finish. If you’re comfortable wiring an outlet and operating a drill, this is something you can accomplish. Just make sure you’re in the center of those studs! I used a stud finder and then pounded a small nail in multiple times across the entire face of the stud to find both edges. It’s all covered by the mount anyway so the extra holes don’t matter (and they are easily patched if needed.)

I’m still debating if this is a little too high. There’s plenty of adjustment in the mount that screws to the back of the TV so I might lower it just a bit.

benmartens February 13, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Amazon Fire TV Review

After Ken gave me a 32″ TV for the garage, I decided to pick up an Amazon Fire TV to go with it. Yes, I have a Chromecast sitting on a shelf already, but the Fire TV has a remote which is a big win. I don’t really like the idea of leaving my phone sitting out on my workbench to control the TV.

I started with the Amazon Fire TV Stick since it’s cheaper and takes up less space. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi signal isn’t strong enough in my garage. I even added a second access point right across the wall in the living room, but it still wasn’t enough to hold a steady stream. I suspect there is some sort of barrier between the house and the garage.

By that point, my long-lived hatred of Wi-Fi for stationary devices had boiled over so I took back the stick and ordered an Amazon Fire TV box.

That arrived and … it was a brick. I had ordered a refurbished model to save $20, but it still should have worked. A quick call to a very nice tech support lady got me a new one shipped out.

The replacement unit worked fine. I ran a cable from my network closet to the workbench and voila, I have TV out in the garage.

The Fire TV is a slick little device. It’s a lot like a Roku device if the Roku device first booted into the Amazon app. The other bonus feature is that the remote lets you do voice search. That’s a lot faster than typing character by character with a D-pad on the remote.

You can load other apps onto it. The main excuse for doing this was so that I could have YouTube up showing an instructional video for whatever I’m working on. While there isn’t a dedicated YouTube app for the Fire TV, they do have a simple app that opens up YouTube in it’s big screen experience mode. You can pair the website with your phone and then control it from your phone (similar to a Chromecast but more generic.) Then you can use the remote to pause, rewind, etc.

If you’re looking for a box to add smarts to your TV, this is a solid choice if you’re an Amazon Prime member. If you’re not, then I’d probably go with the Roku.

benmartens February 11, 2015 Gadgets

Epson GT-S50 Long Term Update

In October 2012, Tyla and I bought an Epson GT-S50 document scanner. We debated for quite a while about it since it was pricey, but more than two years later, I’m still loving this device. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to scan in your documents, but if you’re going to do it a lot, this is the way to go. It scans the pages ridiculously quickly, handles multiple pages with ease, scans both sides in a single pass, and in the end it creates a searchable PDF file.

The best part of all this is that when I’m done scanning the papers, they go in the shredder. And because it’s so easy, there’s no debate about whether something is worth keeping or not. Everything gets scanned and shredded. We’ve scanned over 3600 documents! That means 3600 pieces of paper* that didn’t end up in a filing cabinet somewhere in our house. And that is my favorite feature.

* This number includes scanning in a bunch of older documents that were previously in a filing cabinet as well as some stacks of photos.

benmartens February 10, 2015 Gadgets

Fitbit Aria Review

Tyla and I both weigh ourselves every morning and write down our weight. While the day to day change isn’t always something to get worked up about, it’s important to understand your trend as it stretches out to weeks and months.

We decided to step the geek up a notch and buy the Fitbit Aria scale. It connects via Wi-Fi to your home network and automatically uploads your weight to your Fitbit account. You can then view the charts and history online or in a phone app. This is definitely a luxury purchase, but it’s a nice convenience.

Once you get it up and running, it works like almost any other scale. But getting it up and running was the big issue for us. I spent a very long time wrestling with it, talking to tech support (no help) and surfing the web. I tried it with my phone and two different laptops. I tried setting up a Wi-Fi network just for the scale that had no security on it. Nothing worked. Finally, I pulled out an old Android phone that KenC gave me and it worked the first time.

Fitbit ships an application that runs on Windows and is supposed to do the setup, so surely this can’t be everyone’s experience. But this still seems like a pretty big hole in their testing. I’m using a very common router (WNDR3700) and fully patched phone and laptop OS’s. This should be a mainstream case.

Oh well, we are up and running now so there’s no need to do any more setup. And if I do change the network or something, I’ll know to grab an Android device!

P.S. I feel obligated to mention that the money for this purchase came through my health plan at work which can only be used for a specific set of items. If we were using our general funds for this, I think we’d still be doing manual logging.

benmartens February 6, 2015 Gadgets

Ford Ousts Microsoft

The next version of Ford Sync won’t come from Microsoft. They’re tossing out the old system and starting with a newer one that, frankly, makes more sense to me. Here’s the problem: your car lasts 10 years and your phone is out of date in two years. The existing Ford Sync systems are basically a point in time piece of technology that needs to live the lifetime of your car. Why bother baking all that into the car? All you need is a big touch screen with some microphones and buttons placed around the car that all work in concert with your phone. Your phone already has the Internet connection and is being regularly upgraded, so let the phone be the brains of the operation. The car should just be a dumb terminal that gets smarter and more useful when a phone is within range. That seems to be more the direction that Ford is taking with the new system and it’s the way that the systems from a lot of other companies work too.

I have my eye on one of the new F150s but I struggle with the decision about Sync. I like having the big screen with navigation in my car, but the Waze app on my phone is so much more useful. Is it worth spending the extra money to get the current full Sync system like we did in the Escape? Probably not. The basic functions that let you connect your phone via Bluetooth are useful, but the rest of it just gets out of date pretty quickly.

Hopefully we are heading in a direction where the carmakers don’t try to compete too much in the fast paced consumer technology world, or if they do, they give us a way to upgrade the hardware. Even if you velcro’d a tablet to my dash, I’d be pretty happy. At least I’d know I could replace it in two years with something cooler/better and it would probably interact with my phone a lot better than the system you developed years ago based on even older hardware.

benmartens February 4, 2015 Gadgets

Workbench TV

A lot of my projects have how-to videos on YouTube so it’s not uncommon to have my laptop sitting on the workbench while I work. That’s not terrible, but it would be nicer to have a more permanent installation. After a chat with KenC and some swapping, I ended up with a 32″ LCD. It’s a bit bigger than my initial thought but it ended up working quite well.

He included a mounting bracket with the pile of goodies and since the studs are bare in the garage, mounting was a breeze. The next concern was protecting it a little bit from the saw dust. Using scrap lumber, I whipped up some shelves to cover the top and the sides. They’re not beautiful but I didn’t have to buy anything extra to build them so the price was right.

I’ll have a future blog post with more details but to get content to the TV, I’m going to be using an Amazon Fire TV. For the sound, Ken mentioned that the speakers weren’t great, and indeed, they are not. They would be sufficient for this purpose but I’m going to try to hook up some old computer speakers to the headphone port and see if that sounds better. They can sit right inside the new shelves.

Thanks Ken for helping me upgrade my shop!

benmartens January 23, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.