What to Do When a Surveillance Camera is a Waste of Money

Q-See QN6401X EasyView WiFi/IP Camera

You know us dog people: we’re nuts about our mutts. So like many of the fraternity, we've often wondered what it is the pups do when we’re not watching them. It would be interesting to know just which one dragged that pillow into the family room or whose paws made those drag marks in the carpet. That’s why we bought a cheap-o surveillance camera – not because we wanted to video the home invaders, because we wanted to spy on the dogs.

The operative word is “cheap-o” – that’s why we ended up with a Q-See QN6401X EasyView Wireless/IP Camera, which set us back the sum of (about) a seventy bucks. I am here to tell you, it was seventy bucks wasted.

Mohu Curve: the Centerpiece of Our Cord-Cutting Stragegy

Mohu Curve 30 and Mohu Curve 50

Apparently 2014 was the year for cutting the cord: it's the year streaming went…wait for it… mainstream. No longer was streaming just for early-adopting millennials who gave up or never even got a cable subscription, even their parents grandparents said “So long, sucker!” to Comcast and ATT, and bought Rokus and Apple TVs. I ought to know – I’m one of them.

Sick of inflated prices and even sicker of paying $120/month for 200 channels, 160 of which we never watched, we cut our cord last year. In place of cable, we bought several streaming devices (two from Roku, two Google Chromecasts) and some high-end antennas to pick up over-the-air broadcasts. Let’s look at one of those antennas.