This Light’s Easy to Install, but it Doesn’t Last

Cooper MS188W Motion-Detecting Halogen Security Light 

I’m not particularly paranoid, but it’s still something comforting to see a motion-detector light mounted at our garage door. For one, having one is easier than scrabbling for keys and keyholes in the dark and for another, the kids like to leave toys just outside the back door for me to trip over..

Soon after we got settled into our last house, we put up a security light with a motion detector in just that spot. At one of the BigBox stores, we found a 300-watt halogen fixture; the Cooper MS188W Halogen Motion-Detecting Light (available in white or bronze).

Roku Streaming Stick or Google Chromecast: Why not Both?

Roku 3500R Streaming Stick

If you consider cable television’s combination of poor customer service, high prices and forced channel bundling; it’s no wonder many former cable customers have “cut the cord.” I did: tired after decades of paying a gigantic monthly bill for a channel bundle including more than 150 channels I didn’t watch, I bid AT&T’s Uverse farewell. I increased my internet speed, invested in antennas to capture over-the-air HD broadcasts and bought a pair of Google’s Chromecast sticks and two different Roku Streaming Players. 

Description and Installation of a Roku Streaming Stick

We installed a Roku 2 and a Chromecast on the television in our family room, a Chromecast in the master bedroom, and put a Roku 3500R Streaming Stick on the little TV in our exercise room. Roku’s stick can connect to any TV that has an HDMI port, which is different from a Roku 2 that can also connect with component inputs. It plugs directly into a female HDMI port on the television, drawing power either from the TV’s USB port or from a wall AC adapter.

Share that Sound with a Friend with a Monster iSPlitter

Monster iSplitter 1000 Y-Splitter

You’ve certainly seen advertisements of a couple of teenage girls sharing a single set of earbuds: head-to-head, each with a single bud in one ear, big grins on both faces. Yeah, right: that’s a commercial. In reality, that doesn’t work – you need two sets of earbuds. If you want decent sound, you probably need two sets of real earphones. It’s a no-brainer.

So how do you send a single feed from a tablet, MP3 player, smartphone, or other device to two sets of ears? Simple: a Monster iSplitter 1000. The lower-case i notwithstanding, it’s actually a pretty useful little device. I say “little” because it’s quite small, about the size of one of those iPod shuffles: 32mm x 47mm and 11mm thick, with a 10.5-cm “tail” that terminates in a standard 3.5mm jack. For you metricphobes, that means it’s 1-1/4 x 1-7/8 inches and 1/3” thick, with a 4-inch tail. It weighs about an ounce, if you care. The iSplitter has two standard 3.5mm output jacks, which are controlled by individual volume-control sliders. The sliders go all the way from full mute to passing full volume of the input signal. This capability is handy in case two people are listening on headphones with different sensitivities or simply want to listen at different volumes.

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.

Need a Wireless Adapter? Call for a Panda

Panda 300Mbps Wireless-N USB Adapter

All good things - mediocre things, too - must come to an end, and that’s what happened to the old Belkin wireless adapter we’d had for five or six years. The house isn’t wired for Ethernet, and there I was, sitting at a bad-ass desktop machine: superfast (500-GB solid-state drive) and with memory out the wazoo, but no onboard wireless card. No problem: just buy a replacement…

I ended up with a Panda Adapter, which came from some little company in China (they all do – I looked). I wanted fast, and this is about what you get at a price point of around fifteen bucks. The listing at Amazon had a dozen different compatibilities listed, and the one I needed – Windows 7 – was in there. So I bit.

The little clamshell package showed up two days later (Thanks, Amazon Prime!). It included the wireless adapter, a printed user’s manual (about 4-point type) and a mini CD-ROM with the installer.

Your Fan has a Remote? Whatever Gives You a Chill

Seville Classics Ultra Slimline Tower Fan

Whether from old age or indignities suffered at the hands of movers, our old tower fan had begun rattling like a '77 Chevette accidentally fueled with diesel. We wanted our fan to be quiet, though, because we used it in the master bedroom to augment  the A/C's somewhat anemic circulation at night.  It wasn't, so “ new tower fan" went down on our shopping list.

We found this Seville Classics Ultra Slimline Tower Fan bundled in a twofer at our local Costco, packaged with a the sixteen-inch "personal" fan that the Ms keeps on the kitchen counter now. The big one includes a remote control (the necessary pair of AAA batteries included) that you can  hook onto the rear of the unit for storage. Seville's package blurbs boast that their fan is "ultra-quiet" and features "ECO SPEED." The bit about quiet is important, and  mostly true. The "ECO" business is the same sort of gimmick as "natural" supposedly meaning "coming from (somewhere) in nature"; hoping people will confuse it with “organic” (whatever that means).