Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

Back in 2005, I wrote a post about a radio station in Philly called Ben FM (95.7.) I joked that it was nice to have my own radio station and actually got a few gullible random Philly residents who wrote in with their comments on the station. Unfortunately those comments have been lost to time.

But now that joke is a bit closer to reality. If you come to my house and tune your radio to 91.9, you’ll here my very own radio station. Why? Well Tyla and I generally listen to country and the two country stations around here are terrible. 94.1 plays the same dozen songs over and over again and 100.7 has one of those stereotypical overdone morning show radio guys who is painful to listen to. Nevermind that if you have the radio on while taking a shower, you are lucky to hear two songs in the whole 10-15 minutes you’re in the bathroom.

I’m too cheap to cover the house in Sonos equipment, so instead I purchased 0.5 watt FM transmitter from Amazon. I hooked it up to the server in our house which is always on anyway. The server is currently playing music from a Christmas playlist that I put together on Xbox Music, but in the future I could see paying for a Pandora subscription and letting that run.

So far it’s working out really well. Every radio in our house easily gets a clean signal and now we have a station playing exactly the music we like with no commercials.

Do you look at this whole Kindle thing and think that you might be interested in it but you aren’t willing to pay for a new one? I’d love to sell you my second generation Kindle along with a case. Yep, it’s old but it still works great. It’s one of the 3g models so no matter where you are, you can download new books without trying to find a wifi connection. Plus you can even check your email and surf the web for free (though it’s pretty slow and I can’t imagine anyone doing that very much.)

Why am I trying to sell it? I use my Kindle A LOT and I’m really interested in getting one of the new Kindle Paperwhites. There are so many new features since I bought that second gen Kindle four years ago (for $300… used). I really want to upgrade but I’m having a hard time justifying it since the old one still works so well.

So if you are interested in stepping foot in the Kindle waters for a cheap price, let me know what you’re willing to pay. I know it’s not going to fetch $50 but if I could even get a little money for it, it would make the upgrade easier.

When we bought our Ford Escape six months ago, it came with a free trial of SiriusXM radio. We loved not having commercials, but overall we didn’t feel like the service was worth it. I was disappointed in the sound quality and it cut out a LOT around our home in Seattle. Maybe we’re on the edge of the satellite coverage? I understand it losing a signal under a bridge sometimes, but it would lose it in the trees along 522 up to Monroe and with nothing overhead at the same spot on 405 at 124th St every single time. But even with all that, the ability to listen to music without commercials and without connecting another device was really nice. Plus it also feeds traffic data into our navigation system which is handy.

When the free trial was up, they called to try to get us to continue. They walked through a number of deals culminating in $0.99 for one month and I said no. We kind of wished that we had said yes to that last deal so clearly it did still hold some value for us.

A few days later, we got an offer in the mail for $30 for 6 months. It’s normally $15/month so that’s a pretty great deal. We decided to go for it with the intention of cancelling again unless we can get a similar good deal. $15/month seems a bit crazy considering I pay $10/month for access to Netflix streaming and $10/month for access to millions of songs on Xbox Music.

In Windows Phone 7.5, there was an option to receive group text messages and see all the other recipients. In Windows Phone 8, that was removed and it was incredibly confusing to receive a group text message. After getting the [collapse]original message you start receiving replies from people you’ve maybe never even talked to before.

That was all fixed in the latest update which I received on my HTC 8x last week. Go into Settings > Applications > Messaging and then enable Group Text all the way at the bottom. It seems crazy that it took so long for this feature to return, but I’m glad it’s back. The update also enabled the FM radio that has been lying dormant in the phone.

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While I love the design and quietness of the newer slim version of the Xbox360, the infrared receiver on it isn’t very good. You have to be pointing your remote control directly at the box to get it to register. Since we use the 360s around the house as our Media Center Extenders to watch TV, we spend a lot of time accessing them via remotes. We were having particular trouble in the living room so it was time for a little change.

I picked up an infrared extender for $17 on Amazon. It’s a very simple IR repeater. You plug the transmitter onto the receiver of the 360 and then put the new receiver somewhere that’s more visible. We stuck it onto the bottom corner of our TV. The whole thing is powered via USB which would be super convenient if our TV had USB power (it doesn’t.) The new extender works much better and it’s very rare to have trouble registering a command from the remote.