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Consumer Electronics

The area of our blog where we discuss what’s new in consumer-electronics electronics.

Ring cameras, monitors, and alarms

Five Reasons Why I Love Ring

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Affordable comprehensive security. Five reasons why I love Ring.

ADT, SimpliSafe, and Arlo are all examples of home security systems. I’ve worked with all of them. There are certainly pros and cons between them but the standout offering is from Ring. You may recognize Ring as the video doorbell that many people have installed at their front door. Ring now offers a wide array of security devices as well as the most affordable monitoring on the market.

Here are 5 reasons why I love Ring.

  1. The Ring Video Doorbell is the first and still the best product of its type. You can choose the inexpensive model at $100, the middle of the road model at $189 or the top of the line model at $259. They all work great and if you’re willing to spend a little more you can get better motion detection, video quality and a more pleasing aesthetic and smaller size.
  2. While companies like ADT offer the widest range of devices including entry sensors, water, smoke and gas sensors, cameras, etc. they also have the highest monitoring costs upwards of $40 to $80 monthly and they usually won’t let you sign up without a multi-year contract. Everyone in the business knows that the money is in the monitoring. Most companies will break even or even lose money on the equipment if they can get you obligated to a long-term monitoring contract. This is where Ring is better. Monthly monitoring with Ring is just $9.99 and you don’t have to commit to a contract. If you do purchase at least one year of monitoring in advance the monthly cost goes down to $7.99. In my experience Ring offers enough device options and when combined with the drastic difference in monthly monitoring costs, it becomes a no-brainer.
  3. Ring offers entry sensors, cameras, motion-activated lighting, motion sensors, smoke and gas sensors and they’re always expanding their device lineup. A ring system can also be completely modular. This means that you can purchase and use as many or as few of their devices as you’d like. Want to only have entry sensors and an alarm siren and keypad? No problem. Want to have a comprehensive security system with motion-activated lighting and video recording? No problem. With Ring, you’re not obligated to buy certain equipment just to have a security system.
  4. All Ring devices and monitoring services can be easily managed from the Ring app on your smartphone or tablet or through the web interface on your computer. Every device is fully customizable via the app. Individual devices can be customized down to when they come on and off and how they interact with the security system as a whole. And best of all your system can be armed and disarmed from anywhere on the planet so long as you’re connected to the Internet.
  5. And finally, Ring is an Amazon product, which means that it’s high quality, affordable and easy to use. If there is ever a problem with the devices or monitoring Amazon is easy to get a hold of and always willing to provide technical support or replace defective devices.
ring security echo show
Featured image for our blog about local and cloud back ups.

Why are data backups so important?

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Data Backups

If you have any data on any of your devices that is important and irreplaceable, you owe it yourself to have a backup system in place. Don’t wait until it’s too late as a lot of my clients do.

Just think about all the important documents, photos, and other files that you would pay an arm and a leg to get back in the event of a data loss. Ideally, you should have at least one cloud backup and at least one local backup.

Carbonite, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, etc. are all examples of cloud data backups. The advantage to cloud backup says that most of them are automatic so that’s so long as your computer is online and on it’s always backing up your data to the cloud. Additionally, should a house fire, theft or hard drive crash occur your data in the cloud would be safe.

I also suggest a local backup. This can be done using a thumb drive or external hard drive and gives you a second layer of data redundancy should your cloud backup fail. Hard drives are just like any other device they all eventually fail. When that happens imagine what you would pay to get back your family photos, work documents, etc. That amount almost certainly exceeds the cost of setting up a cloud and local backup system. Data loss is inevitable. Why not get out ahead of it so you can survive it with minimal impact.

Featured image for extended warranty blog

Feeling Lucky? Why Extended Warranties are a Gamble

Tired of being asked by the cashier at Best Buy if you want to buy an extended warranty? Seems like they want to sell you a warranty on everything they sell even inexpensive, disposable products like headphones or printers.

My clients often ask me if they should buy an extended warranty. My answer is always this: purchasing an extended warranty is a gamble. You’re placing a bet that the item you’re insuring will fail sometime during the warranty period which is usually 2-3 years. If the device fails during this period, then you win the bet and the cost of the warranty is justified. However, if it doesn’t fail (which most modern electronics don’t) then you lost your bet and your money is gone with nothing to show for it except for maybe some piece of mind.

My advice is that if you’re that worried about a device failing within 3 years you probably shouldn’t buy it in the first place. However, if you buy it anyway, why not take the cost of the warranty and instead put that money into a savings account? In that scenario, you have money to fix the item if it breaks, and best of all if nothing goes wrong you still have your money. Seems like a much better strategy to me particularly over the long run.

Now, there are some exceptions to this rule. The biggest being accidental damage. Most modern electronics are portable, small, and light but not durable. If you are hard on your electronics then purchasing a warranty that includes accidental damage, loss, or theft protection may make financial sense. These exceptions notwithstanding, I still lean towards passing on all extended warranties in general.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. Hopefully, I gave you new some things to think about when making your decision.

Smart TV displays

YouTube TV and the Trend of Virtualization

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Earlier this year, to save money, my wife and I switched from Cable TV to YouTube TV. I was skeptical at first but after using the product for several months now I’m thoroughly convinced it is superior.

All but one channel that I would like to have are included in the lineup. There’s no equipment to keep up with or pay for. I can watch up to three live streams on a number of devices at the same time. Devices such as my laptop, desktop, tablet, smart phone, streaming box and smart TV. No more freeing up space on my DVR.

YouTube TV offers unlimited cloud recording and all recordings are available in your library for one year.

My experience with switching between devices has been smooth and seamless. At $69.99 per month, my wife and I are saving $80 a month and we now have a superior product.

YouTube TV and other online services are perpetuating the industry trend towards virtualization. This all started 15 or so years ago with the remote desktop feature people were using to access a computer via the Internet from virtually anywhere. Once the Internet bandwidth crossed a certain minimal threshold, virtualization became not only possible but accessible.

Fast forward a decade or so and now we have virtual services like YouTube TV, Stadia, TeamViewer, zoom, Apple Music, Netflix and many others. All of these services are made possible by the many advancements in Internet connectivity.

I project within the next 5 to 10 years that most of us will not even need a powerful device. The size of the pipe bringing data in and out of your home or mobile device will be so large that almost all of the processing necessary to execute our daily digital tasks will be performed on a server somewhere in the cloud. And all of our data will be stored in the cloud as well. Documents, photos, videos, calendars, contacts, system preferences and so on. All we will need is a fast reliable Internet connection. This means no more cable boxes, satellite dishes, video game consoles, laptops, desktops, and even servers.

If you’ve got a fast reliable Internet connection all you need is a basic device capable of processing input (touch, mouse, keyboard and AV), displaying an image and projecting audio. The future is virtualization and the future is now.

mesh routers for better wifi in louisville diagram image

MESH Routers – Why You Should Buy Them

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Every year that passes we all end up requiring more out of our home and office WiFi Internet.”

Internet Getting Slower?  

New connected devices are introduced all the time. Devices such as smart appliances, smart lighting, home security, surveillance systems, and many others are being added to our WiFi’s list of things to do every day. To keep up with all of these new demands on our network resources, hardware manufacturers have had to rethink what a router is and how it works.

Without getting too technical, a traditional router sits in a specific location in your home or office and broadcasts a perimeter equally in all directions so that the resulting signal looks like the waves that emanate from a pebble dropped in a pond. This is the way it’s been for a long time. The problem with this is that for that technology to operate optimally the router itself needs to be positioned centrally in the home both horizontally and vertically oriented.

For example, if you have a basement, a ground floor, and an upstairs, the router should be placed on the ground floor as close to the center of that floor as you can get. Most people for lots of reasons cannot position their router centrally.

So, oftentimes we end up with routers in extreme corners of a house or on the other side of an external wall. This often results in a perimeter being broadcast outside of the home or to an area inside the home where it’s not needed and therefore is wasted.

Enter Mesh Routers

Mesh routers are a whole new way to approach Wi-Fi and routers. Instead of just one device broadcasting a signal equally in all directions, mesh routers have multiple devices broadcasting a perimeter and working in real-time to analyze your network resources and usage and, based on those two factors, steering your network resources towards the user and/or device that most need them.

An example of this would be my wife is upstairs checking her email, while I am downstairs streaming a movie. A mesh router knows that checking email doesn’t require significant network resources but that watching a movie does. Therefore, in real-time, a mesh router will steer more network resources to the person more in need of them at any given point in time and space.

Additionally, multiple mesh points can act as access points and can be strategically positioned throughout your home and office to give you the strongest and most reliable signal. Their ability to broadcast multiple network perimeters and communicate in real-time to analyze and distribute network usage and resources is why I recommend mesh network devices to almost all of my clients.

We have extensive experience with multiple brands and have worked in a variety of challenging residential and commercial space layouts. If you’re interested in seeing what devices we would recommend for your specific location, please give us a call. We can either help consult on the project or take this from start to finish. 

Chances are, we are going to be working from home more often as well as continue to add more devices. Let us help you maximize your home Internet capabilities. 

Check out our other residential tech services. 

Contact Us Today for More Information on MESH Routers! 

Image credit: https://www.linksys.com/

image of earth

Rare Earth(s)… Why Our Planet Is So Unique and Vulnerable.

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I’ve always been a curious person. I’ve studied so many subjects ranging from psychology to philosophy, physics to chemistry, cosmology to astronomy, economics, and so on. Having a B.A. Philosophy, my academic training constantly exposed me to different worldviews, cultures, political views, etc.

Cosmologists and astronomers keep looking further back in time and further outward in space and, while they found earthlike planets inhabiting the Goldilocks zone around a sustainable star, they’ve still found zero evidence of life in any form everywhere we’ve looked. If that doesn’t give you perspective on how rare our planet truly is, then I don’t know what would.

Without getting political here, our earth is so rare, so sacred and so vulnerable. We have to do more.

One can argue CO2 emissions, natural climate cycles, and so on, but the fact remains the same. We are capable of screwing up our planet, and we may have already done that. I’ve always tried to be an optimist with a healthy dose of realism. And, I do have hope that our human ingenuity and science will fix this problem through some combination of renewable energy sources and environmental protections.

Seems like all the other political and social issues take a backseat to the environment for me. None of those issues mean anything if we don’t have a habitable planet. I’m not your typical socialist liberal looking to dismantle our economy with environmental sanctions and punishments. But, I do think we need to do more to protect our beautiful planet and sustainer of life.

Just imagine what the water and air quality would be today had the EPA not been established decades ago. We can’t rely on the goodwill of corporations solely to ensure that they don’t subject our planet to toxic waste and other pollutants.

In closing, the universe is unimaginably large and old and the more we look out the larger it seems to be. With no evidence of life anywhere else, we should all strive to protect and preserve our precious planet.

A picture of an OLED TV

The Case for OLED TVs…

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So, OLED TVs…

For most people, a $300 to $500 TV is just fine. However, for the discerning eye, there is a clearly superior technology and it’s OLED TVs.

To understand why we have to have a brief history lesson on what a modern flat-panel television actually is. Without getting too technical, all flat-panel televisions these days are LCD panels which consist of an array of little crystals that can take on certain color values to create an image on your screen. Behind these LCD crystals is a sheet of LED lighting called a backlight. The purpose of this backlight is to create white light that when passed through each LCD crystal gets converted into the proper color to create the image you see on your screen.

For a while, this technology has been pretty good. But there is one big problem. It’s called light bleed. Unfortunately, in an array of LCD crystals there exists a gap between each individual crystal. This results in just a little bit of that white light from the LED backlight passing through those gaps and this effect is most evident when you have a dark or completely black image on the screen.

This is where OLED technology comes in.

On an OLED television, every single LCD crystal has attached to the back of it, it’s own dedicated LED light. This effectively eliminates light bleed and results in what most people with an eye for this kind of thing say is a superior viewing experience with accurate, rich and saturated colors, true blacks, and deep contrast.

In the early days, this technology was too expensive to manufacture and ship and it was also plagued with longevity and burn-in and screen retention problems. However, in the last five years or so the technology has evolved to a point where it’s nowhere near as delicate and problematic as it was in the past. When we combine this with the fact that the prices have come down substantially, this may be the best time to buy an OLED TV.

To my eye, it’s the best picture I’ve ever seen on any TV. And, to most creative folks in Hollywood and in photography, graphic design, and cinematography, it is a faithful, true, and accurate example of what a TV image should like. For those with a little higher budget and/or a discerning eye I wholeheartedly recommend OLED TVs for your next TV purchase. 

If you have questions about these TVs or what brand and size you should get, please feel free to contact me. I can even help with the installation, proper settings, or auxiliary home entertainment products.

Since most TVs come with an overly bright default setting, you would be surprised how much better a few custom adjustments make your picture look. Call me, I’d be happy to help with this or any other home technology question you may have.

-David S. (502) 797-7399

information technology image

Tech Companies Are Now the Gatekeepers…

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Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and others now control many aspects of our daily lives. Whether it be the music we listen to, the movies and TV shows we watch, our conversations with friends and family, our calendars, our personal photos and videos, our sensitive personal information, the way we bank and shop and even our lifestyle and medical information, these modern-day gatekeepers control much of our decisions and actions.

30 years ago if you wanted to cash a check you went to your local bank, or shop for clothing you would go to a retail store, or watch a movie you’d go to a movie rental store, or even purchase an album you’d go to the record shop. Today all of those transactions take place on a tiny computer, that sits in your pocket, via the Internet.

It’s difficult to get by in the modern world without a smartphone, tablet, and/or a computer. But that’s not enough, you also have to engage with one or several of these gatekeepers. For example, I have several devices, some running on windows, some running on macOS, and others running on iOS and android. I own 2 iMacs, a MacBook Air, an Apple Watch, an iPad, AirPods, an Apple TV, and an iPhone. I also consume Apple services such as iCloud storage and Apple Music. And it doesn’t stop there. I use Gmail for one of my email accounts, Microsoft 365 Exchange for another email account, YouTube TV to watch TV, Spectrum Mobile from my cell phone service, Spectrum Internet for my home Internet and Apple Wallet combined with Apple Pay to make shopping easier.

Nearly every aspect of a typical day in my life involves at least some direct or indirect interaction with these gatekeepers. And their stranglehold on our daily lives is only increasing.

Some would say that’s cause for concern, while others would say it’s an inevitable outcome of evolution. I, however, choose to embrace it.

This is the world we live in now. It’s hard and only getting harder for the average person to navigate their day without interacting with Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others. Apple, Google, and Amazon effectively control the distribution of all types of media. Music, movies, TV shows, books, audiobooks, podcasts, and many other media are controlled by the gatekeepers. They’ve even branched out into banking and credit cards.

I guess the point of this article is to emphasize the present and increasingly omnipresent impact these gatekeepers have on we the consumers.

In my lifetime several distinct consumer categories such as television, stereo systems, security systems, various forms of entertainment, and even photography and cinematography have all coalesced into one overarching category; tech.

This has been great for me personally and even more so professionally. I’ve made a living off of all of these categories as a technology consultant for the last 16 years. Every year or two a new category gets swallowed by the tech monster and results in even more products and services I can offer my clients. My advice to you the reader is to remain flexible and do your best to embrace tech and it’s gatekeepers or you might get left behind.

Purchasing the right TV example

Don’t Blindly Trust Any Brand.

We’ve all said it before. Oh that’s a Samsung. That must be a very nice TV. Or we’ve heard someone say those are Klipsch speakers. They must sound great.

Most electronics and appliance manufacturers are banking on their customers blindly trusting their brand. There are a few exceptions like apple, but for the most part, all manufacturers make really good, mediocre and bad products. Even the ones that start out making only mediocre to good products usually bow to the pressure of making something cheap so they can appeal to everyone’s budget and sell more products.

My father was the type of consumer that these strategies were pointed directly at. He hardly ever researched the quality or longevity of anything he bought. He simply had a preconceived price that any item should be and, regardless of how high the quality of the item was, if it exceeded that dollar amount he would not buy it. I witnessed him buy DVD player after DVD player and stereo after stereo, all as a result of his cheapness. And he seemed to be OK with that and companies like TEAC and Kenwood and Sanyo (all of whom, not surprisingly, are no longer in business) were happy to manufacture crap and sell it to people like him. Over and over again.

I on the other hand like to look at a purchase through a binary lens. The first question should not be how much does it cost? It should instead be how good a product is it. The first question that most people don’t even ask is. “What am I getting in return for what I’m spending for the item? If I told you that I had a TV that cost $50,000 but that it would last for 50 years would you buy it? What about a car that cost $200,000 but lasted 60 years?

I, like many of my successful clients, am happy to pay more up front to buy something of quality that will last longer and will not need to be replaced over and over again. So the next time you shop for a TV or a computer or a stove or any other consumer electronics or appliances ask yourself a couple of questions.

  • What are the user reviews on this specific item?
  • What is the item’s longevity?
  • How much will it cost to maintain and upgrade this item over its useful life?
  • How energy efficient is it?

And if these questions have satisfactory answers then start thinking about the price. Don’t just say to yourself, “Oh that’s a Samsung refrigerator so it must be great.” I can guarantee you there are plenty of large corporations just waiting for someone to come along and say, “Oh this is a Sony TV so it must be great.”

Sony used to be the gold standard for TVs. And then in the last 6-7 years their high-end OLED TVs have again become the gold standard. But they also put out mediocre TVs and for a decade and a half their flat panel TVs were crap. But that didn’t stop millions of people from buying subpar TVs simply because they had the name Sony on them. This is just one of the many reasons I love Apple. Go ahead. Call me a fan boy. I’m fine with that. With a rare exception, Apple almost never puts out crap. Now some people will say it costs 2 to 3 times as much for the same thing and in a certain sense, I get that. But for the discerning consumer, their products are just better. They use better components. Their software and operating systems are better. And when you’re done with an Apple product you can usually get 25 to 50% back in resale value of what you originally spent. I can’t think of another example in the consumer-electronics space where that is true.

Hopefully, my words here have given you something to think about next time you make a big purchase.