Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve used phones with Microsoft operating systems for a long time. Tyla and I have used the Nokia Lumia Icons and HTC 8x phones. Tyla and I have used the HTC Touch, HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC Ozone and Motorola Q. The Q was my favorite of the bunch. I could type 30-40 words per minute on that tiny little keyboard. Before the phones, I had other PocketPC devices like the Jornada. I’ve developed apps for all of them and I have a bunch of apps currently in the Windows Phone store. To say I’m a fanboy is an understatement. Windows Phone is a fantastic operating system.

But.

We’re switching to Android. Our two year contracts are up this fall and we’re making the switch. It’s going to be painful and we’re going to have to relearn a lot of stuff about how to use our phones, but I think it’s worth it. It really feels like Microsoft is giving up on the high end Windows Phones. The Nokia Icon was a year or so old by the time we bought it and it’s still one of the best Windows Phone devices available. It seems like people are completely abandoning the high end Windows Phone market. It’s doing pretty well in third world countries. That’s great, but I want a high end phone.

And while it’s true that the top apps generally exist on Windows Phone too, sometimes they are unsupported third party versions of the apps or they come years after the other phones get the same app.

I hate that this happened, but I can’t ignore it any more. It’s time to pick a camp and Android is it. Why Android and not iOS? I don’t like Apple’s walled-garden mentality. I know it works great for a lot of users but I’m not one of them. Plus, Android is the market leader and for once it would be nice to be on the dominant platform.

So if you have a favorite Android phone, let me know. I feel like phone tech has slowed way down in the last year or two so I’m happy to save a little money and get last year’s model. I want a great camera, a ~5 inch screen, Android Pay, and a thumbprint reader would be a nice bonus. What do you suggest?

A couple of you have written me recently to say that you have already dropped cable TV or that you’re thinking about it. It’s something I think about regularly. For now I’m satisfied with our current plan. We have a very simple TV package (no ESPN) with a very nice Internet package (120/10Mbps.) If we dropped the TV part, we’d pay almost the same amount since we’d have un-bundled Internet. I know it’s a scam to keep their TV subscription numbers high but I’ll take it. But if you’ve decided that dropping TV might save you some money, here are some things to help you plan the transition:

1. Educate yourself! There’s a great (short) guide to cord cutting from Tom Merritt available on Amazon. If you’re a Prime subscriber, it’s currently free. Otherwise it’s a whopping $0.99. In fact, that’s probably all you need. Go read that book and ignore the rest of this post.
2. If you like podcasts, check out http://www.cordkillers.com. Tom Merritt and Brian Brushwood host a weekly show about how to watch the TV you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. This is great no matter how you consume your content.
3. How do you like to watch TV? Do you have to keep up with the latest episodes as soon as they come out? If so, make a list of all the shows that fall into this bucket and start adding up $2/episode which is about what it will cost to buy them. I’ve found that my viewing habits have changed dramatically and I’m not keeping up with current TV very much. I greatly prefer to wait until the season (or even the series) is over, wait for it to show up on Netflix or Amazon and then watch it all at once. Shows are a lot more enjoyable for me this way.
4. Do you need any live events? Sports is probably the most common example. If yes, then you’ll need to figure out how to watch them. Maybe it means getting a basic cable package for the months when your sport is on. Or maybe your sport offers a package to stream games online. DirectTV has an online-only package like this for the NFL.
5. If you still want to have the experience of fliipping on random live TV, two great options are SlingTV and Playstation Vue. Think of these services as old school cable except it’s delivered over the Internet. The caveats are that you’ll need to make sure they work with your devices and sometimes DVR-style features are limited to certain shows/channels. I expect to see a LOT more players in this market space in the next year or two.
6. Pure streaming is a great solution, but if you’re willing to mess with some hardware and if you can get a good broadcast TV signal at your house, then you can pick up an antenna and some kind of little DVR box like a Tivo Roamio. Check out antennaweb.org for help picking an antenna and pointing it in the right direction.

If all that looks like too much work, here is my short recommendation:

• If you already have Amazon Prime, start with their video service. You might also want to add Netflix. Want ESPN? Get SlingTV. And if there are specific TV shows that still aren’t covered, then you’ll either need to buy the seasons individually or maybe Hulu will meet your needs. Remember that cutting the cord isn’t necessarily cheaper. The nice thing is that you can have more control over your spending. For example, you can turn these services on and off every month depending on what you’re watching.
• On the device front, I recommend a Roku. They have multiple versions for under $100 and they support almost every video service on the planet (Playstation Vue is the only notable exception I’m aware of.) If you already have an Xbox One or a Playstation 4, those make pretty good streaming devices but they don’t support as many apps as Roku. The Amazon Fire TV is also a great device.

Cutting your cable cord gets easier every month so even if you investigate this now and decide it’s not for you, check back again periodically to see how the world has changed.

Our house is just big enough (or has just enough walls) that a single WiFi router has a hard time fully covering the whole thing. Early last year, I added a second router downstairs with the same SSID as upstairs. That helped a bit, but it still had a problem. Basically your device connects to the strongest signal and then as you walk around the house, it struggles to stay connected to that same signal. It won’t automatically hop to the strongest signal. That finally got annoying enough that I upgraded to some access points from Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti makes enterprise grade network gear at consumer prices.

I purchased two Ubiquiti Networks UniFi AC LR AP devices. There are a couple different ones available but this seemed to fit the bill for me. I was particularly excited about the “zero handoff” roaming feature. A program is always running on one of your computers to analyze your wireless clients and hand them off to the appropriate access point. It does it so smoothly that even time-critical traffic like VoIP calls work fine. Unfortunately, after I got everything installed, I realized that the zero handoff feature only exists in some of their more expensive models.

But all was not lost. My reading informed me that the feature really isn’t that important if you set up your network properly. The key is to not have your access points overlap too much, and, if necessary, you can tell the access points to intentional drop traffic once they reach a certain signal strength. These access points will let me fine tune all of that to get the correct behavior. Additonally they also support beam steering which means that I can tell devices to prefer the faster 5GHz network if they support it.

I took this opportunitiy to redo my SSIDs so if you come over to my house, you’ll need to redo the wireless settings for your phone/tablet/laptop. But hopefully once you do, you’ll have faster Internet access. These new access points support 802.11ac and will serve up bits to you at up to 867 Mbps!

I got a shiny new upgrade at work that included a Dell U2715H 27″ monitor. My old setup was three 24″ monitors. I have the one on the right turned in portrait orientation for reading long documents. The 27″ monitor replaced the one in the middle. It actually doesn’t look that much physically bigger because the bezel is so much narrower.

I’m really happy with it. The text is incredibly clear and the extra resolution gives a nice amount of extra real estate. I still think that a 30″ 4K monitor could be the ultimate desktop display but it will be a while before the price on those comes down.

Aside from those good old mechanical spring keyboards, my favorite keyboard is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. There’s also a wireless version which is the 7000. The two halves of the keyboard are split and rotated in toward each other just the way that your hands normally face. Each set of keys is concave to help keep a similar distance to your fingers no matter where the key is.

I don’t love all the shortcut buttons across the top but I mostly ignore those. I do, however, like the Back and Forward buttons below the spacebar. I map those to my music player so I can quickly skip songs.

One more shortcut button just became useful: the zoom button between the two halves of the keyboard. The software doesn’t support this in the UI, but you can remap this to be a scroll button.

1. Go to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center”
2. Open commands.xml in a text editor.
3. Search for <all> and you’ll see this under that section:
   <C319 Type=”6″ Activator=”ZoomIn” >
   <C320 Type=”6″ Activator=”ZoomOut” >
4. Change it to look like this:
   <C319 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollUp” >
   <C320 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollDown” >
5. Open task manager and terminate itype.exe
6.  Restart itype.exe or reboot and voila!

[source]