Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Verizon still hasn’t released an update for the HTC 8x to push it to Windows Phone 8.1 that came out earlier this summer. The latest promise was October but that obviously still hasn’t happened. The Microsoft Band only works with 8.1 and above (and Android and iOS too) so I decided to take the plunge and manually update my phone. It’s not supported, voids your warranty, etc so do this at your own risk. I chose to update my phone but didn’t touch Tyla’s. Thankfully it has worked ok. This was my first real experience with with 8.1 so here are my thoughts after a couple weeks:

• Cortana is great! You can ask her anything and she’ll either search for the results or perform the action. One of my favorite capabilities is saying something like “Next time I’m at Safeway, remind me to buy bread.” It sets a reminder coupled with my GPS location. Super helpful!
• There’s now a notification center similar to what Android and iOS have. This feels like a “me too” feature that isn’t needed. The brilliance of Windows Phone is that you have live tiles giving you all the information you need at a glance. Now I have that but I also have this notification center giving me the same information in a less convenient fashion. It probably feels more comfortable for people switching to the platform, but I wish I could just turn it off. I should probably look into that more.
• In addition to the normal keyboard, you can also now use the “Word Flow” keyboard. This is like Swift Key for Android. You just drag your finger across the keyboard and it figures out what you’re trying to type. Pretty cool and really useful when your hands are busy or you aren’t looking at your screen the whole time.
• One big downgrade in my book is the loss of the “hubs.” They are technically still there but all the awesomeness about them is gone. For instance, I used to click on the “Me” tile and be able to make an update that went out to both Twitter and Facebook. Now I need an app for that. I used to be able to click on a tile for another contact and see their Facebook and Twitter updates without opening anything else. Now I need apps for that. Boo. This was one of the things that made Windows Phone more awesome than Android and iOS. Now we’ve lost that differentiator.

There are lots of other tweaks and changes and overall I’d call it a big win. It feels a tad sluggish on my phone but my hardware is over two years old now so that’s not terrible. We should be up for some new phones soon. More on that later but I’m thinking I might drop Verizon after being a customer for 14 years and switch to AT&T who appears to have much more love for the Windows Phone platform. Plus, AT&T doesn’t track you anymore.

I ordered a Microsoft Band the morning that they were announced. It’s an intriguing little device and I was already in the market for a watch device that would log GPS points for me.

First of all, the device works with Windows Phone, Android or iOS so pretty much no matter what you use, you’re included. There are a ton of sensors packed into this thing: mic, heart rate monitor, GPS, accelerometer, ambient light, galvanic skin response, and even a UV sensor. Those sensors let it act like a standard fitness device tracking your steps, your heart rate, etc and if you’re on a run you’ll get your GPS track too. It connects to your phone via a Bluetooth connection so you can get notifications about new text messages, emails, phone calls, Facebook messages, etc. It pretty much does everything that a fitness tracker or a smart watch do but it does it all in one device.

The LCD screen is a touchscreen so you can navigate through the various options and scroll through your notifications. The screen is really nice, but to read it easily, you pretty much need to wear it with the screen on the bottom of your wrist. That’s fine but you’ll want to make sure you use the included screen protector since it’s always banging on your desk. The other downside of wearing it upside down is that the heart rate monitor has a harder time locking onto your heartbeat. When I look at the chart of my heartbeat, it’s very spotty.

The app is a key part of this device. It let’s you adjust what notifications get sent to your band and it also displays more of the detailed information that it collects like your heart rate graph and a map of your run.

They say the battery lasts 48 hours if you’re not using GPS and that seems pretty accurate. I’ve been skipping the sleep tracking portion so I just turn it off at night and I can easily get 3 full days out of a charge.

There’s a ton of tech packed into this thing, but that brings up the biggest downside for me: it’s huge. All smart bands/watches are bulky to some extent, but this one feels pretty uncomfortable. Now you should know that I haven’t worn a watch in well over a decade so anything on my wrist feels weird, but this bugs me more than a watch. There are sensors and batteries around almost every part of the band. If it was more of a cloth/leather band, it would be a lot more comfortable but they obviously couldn’t fit everything into that form factor. It’s so big that I have a hard time getting my sleeve cuffs over it. If I tighten it down so that it fits under my sleeves better, then it’s really uncomfortable.

Is this cool? Yes. Am I going to keep wearing it? Nope. I forced myself to wear it for a week to give it a chance, but it’s just too annoying. I loved having notifications available with a quick glance at my wrist but that doesn’t outweigh the awkwardness of wearing it. If you want to buy one, go try one on at a Microsoft Store first.

Wearables probably are the future of tech, but we haven’t broken through to something really useful yet. (And no, the iWatch Apple Watch isn’t the answer either.) We’re going to look back at this whole generation of gadgets like we look at Palm Pilots and the Newton. We’re headed in the right direction but we still need to crack the code.

So is the Band a huge failure for Microsoft? Partially, but not really. This article talks about how the Band is a demo device for Microsoft to promote the bigger success in this picture which is their backend service/app called Health platform. They are trying to combine all these crazy independent silos of fitness and wearable data sources. It’s a great idea and hopefully it will take off even if this iteration of the Band doesn’t.

In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.

I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.

How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.

If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.

I do a lot of video recording at church. My usual setup involves 2 GoPros, a Canon T2i, a Kodak Z3 and a Sony sound recorder in case the main sound recording flakes out. That’s a lot of gear to lug back and forth. Also, the T2i only shoots 12 minutes of video at a time so it means I have a lot of clips to synchronize in Premiere when I get home. It was time to simplify.

Church now has a Canon VIXIA HF R500 camcorder. It shoots 1080p video and will do that for hours on end. That takes the place of the T2i as the main video source. I still set up a GoPro and the sound recorder for now but those are small and easy to deal with.

The Canon camcorder isn’t as good as the T2i in terms of video quality. Shooting in church is generally a low-light situation and the camcorder just doesn’t have the sensor in it to handle that super well. The result is acceptable though and given how much simpler it makes my life, I’ll go with it.

I’ll probably still lug all the gear with me every once in a while, but generally I think I’ll be using this camcorder.

The other day I was marveling at how quickly my desktop computer at home was plowing through a video encoding task and realized that I built the computer almost 2 years ago! I think this is the best that a computer has ever withstood the test of time. I don’t even know what I’d really do to upgrade it at this point. I’m very happy with it. The only thing I added to it after the build was a mid-range graphics card.

I’m less happy with the computer I built 4 years ago, but that’s mostly goes back to my frustration with buying a cheap case and a few mistakes that I made because it was my first build. But in fairness, that one is still doing a great job too. It runs 24/7 in my network closet and acts as our file server, media server, cloud backup machine and VM host for an instance of Windows Home Server to manage daily PC backups of every computer in the house.

It’s nice (and odd) to feel so content with a computer after two years.

One of the great features of the newer Kindles is that they tell you how much time is left in your chapter and in the book. It calculates this based on how fast you are reading. It’s one of the great features you can add when you’re reading digitally instead of with dead trees.

Unfortunately, for some reason the calculated time remaining isn’t always accurate. If you find that it’s not quite right, you can tell the Kindle to re-sample your reading speed and make a new calculation. To do this, click Search while you’re in the book and then search for “;ReadingTimeReset” (without the quotes.) Voila!

Every time we move offices at work, people set things outside their offices as last-chance giveaways before throwing them in the trash. The last time this happened, I was surprised to see a Wacom tablet! For those who don’t know, Wacom makes high quality drawing devices that hook up to your computer. In the days of modern tablets and touch screens, this is less important, but they are still used by artists as the primary way of doing art on the computer. I’m no artist, but I’ve always wanted to play with one. I double checked that it was really a freebie and then brought it home.

I don’t know how often this will get used but it has already come in handy to mark up a proposal from a tree-removal guy for our yard project.

Last year I picked up new skis with the money from our health plan. This year I don’t have a big purchase like that in mind, but there are a couple smaller things that I’d like to buy. I made the first purchase the day after New Years: a Fitbit One.

Fitbits have been around for a few years and they come in a variety of form factors, but basically they are fancy pedometers. The Fitbit One tracks steps, stairs, and your restlessness while sleeping. It syncs wireless whenever I’m near my computer and uploads all the data to a website. There is also an app for the phone that I use to access the data and enter my weight. (Some day I might pick up the scale that works with Fitbit and automatically records my weight.)

The device is great. It runs for over a week on a single charge. The software is well done too. You can add friends and see how many steps they’ve taken. It builds up a sense of competition and encourages you to get out and walk some more.

The downside is that I feel like I’m going to lose it before too long because it’s super tiny. You know that tiny little pocket inside the right pocket of your jeans? I don’t know what it’s for, but now it’s a Fitbit holder. That seems to work fairly well.

I like the idea of logging data about myself in a variety of ways and this adds to the mix. For now it’s a novelty, but the OCD streak in me will probably want to carry this every day for a long time. It would be kind of interesting to know how many steps I take in a year.

We’ve had a Foscam FI8910W around the house for a while and I’ve enjoyed being able to look in on Tyla and Elijah while I’m at work. It has worked so well that we decided to expand our collection a bit. We now have a camera watching our front door and another in the garage. It’s a really easy way to watch for packages, make sure we shut the garage doors, and keep track of people who come up to the front door.

To manage all three cameras, I picked up a copy of Blue Iris. It has an incredible array of options including the ability to tweak the motion detection to your heart’s content and then set up alerts that will send you emails, text messages, and much more. Any motion gets recorded to our main file server and backed up into the cloud. There’s an app for all the phone platforms that lets me view live feeds from all the cameras and see recent alerts.

I’m really impressed with the system. These cameras are only $60 each now. It makes me want to pick up a few more.

When we ditched a bunch of our cable stations, I picked up a Chromecast to help simplify streaming. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it’s a little device a little bigger than a USB stick. It plugs directly into an HDMI port on your TV. You then install a plugin for the Chrome browser (or on your Android phone) and you can use your laptop or phone as a remote control to choose videos on YouTube, Netflix, and some other streaming sites. The reason it made such a splash is that after you pick your video, you don’t have to stay on that page with your laptop. You can keep browsing around while the Chromecast streams the video. And oh, yeah, it’s only $30.

We don’t have Android phones so that immediately decreases some of its value for us, but I did install the plugin for Chrome. I think I can easily say that if you want to watch YouTube on your TV, there is no better way to do it than with a Chromecast. The other apps work equally well.

The only place where it falls down is if you want to display an entire Chrome browser tab on your TV. That is acceptable for text browsing, but if you’re streaming a flash video, it’s unwatchable on the TV.

After I played with it for a while, the device went back in the box for future use. Our TV doesn’t have any spare HDMI ports in the back so it would have to stick out the side. I don’t need it often enough to have it sticking out like that.