Tag: Reviews

[Updated 2/28: Added camera images]

As anyone that reads my blog can tell, I really like Ubiquiti networking gear. When I saw that they also had a video/NVR platform, I really wanted to try it. However, since I already had a working surveillance system, I couldn’t justify the cost to convert. Recently my father wanted a recommendation on a surveillance system and I started looking at options. There were a few complete systems at Costco, but they all received pretty mixed to poor reviews. I could point him to Nest cameras or a similar system, but each system was cloud based with a yearly fee. In addition, the cost of the cameras was a bit on the high side. With the Costco systems, I was concerned about ease of use and security of the cameras; many of the Chinese made/designed cameras have major security flaws that keep getting exposed. Securing these systems would take a lot of work and they would likely never receive firmware upgrades.

Once I added up the cost of 4 Ubiquiti UVC-G3 Cameras and a UVC-NVR, the Ubiquiti solution didn’t cost much more. The solution would have cost more, but I had a spare 8-Port UniF Switch (US-8-150W) sitting around that I gave my dad. My dad was onboard and he ordered all the components and some patch cords. We decided using 25 ft and 50 ft patch cords was easier than running structured wiring, so all we had to do was mount the cameras and string the patch cords in the attic.

I left most of the physical install to my dad and brother-in-law. Running the wires is never a straightforward task, but we got it done after a number of hours of work. We mounted the cameras so that they could be seen as I think it is a valuable deterrent.

While my dad doesn’t have an equipment rack like I do, his collection of equipment keeps gettin bigger!

While the physical install was in process, I started the software setup and install. The initial setup was pretty straight forward. I hard reset the UniFi switch (it had my config on it) and adopted it. Then I set the switch to do 24V passive PoE (it is a UniFi switch) so that I didn’t have to use PoE adapters. Plugging in the NVR was easy and it started up without problems.

The NVR setup wizard had me setup a Ubiquiti account for my dad and then it locally discovered the NVR (using Chrome). I probably should have read the instructions, but I didn’t and had a little trouble with this. I thought that creating the Ubiquiti account would go through a process to adopt the local NVR; it really didn’t and I had to connect the NVR to my dad’s Ubiquiti account later.

Once I was able to access the NVR, it should have been a simple process to plug in each camera and adopt it. Unfortunately I didn’t read that I had to use ubnt/ubnt as the username and password. I simply left it blank and got no where. After a few resets of the camera and a web search, I properly entered the username and password and the cameras adopted without problems.

After the software setup, I installed the iOS app, connected my Ubiquiti account (for testing I added a user for me) and was able to use the app to help adjust the cameras. The app needs work, but it is usable. As WiFi coverage on the outside of the house was spotty, the image kept freezing until I realized that I should just turn off WiFi and let the image stream over cellular.

Once we completed the install, I turned over the “keys” to my dad and let him configure the recording, motion detection, etc. I only gave him a basic overview as the software is pretty self explanatory which is great.

With the install completed, I decided to use the last camera for my own system and setup the UniFi video software on an Ubuntu virtual machine. The install was pretty straightforward and I decided to store the recordings on a Shared Folder (VMWare). I had to add the following to /etc/fstab:

    ./host:/ /mnt/hgfs fuse.vmhgfs-fuse allow_other,defaults,uid=109,gid=117 0 0

Where 109 and 117 are the uid and gid respectively of the unifi-video user. I also followed the instructions for installing a custom SSL certificate. I had some problems initially setting up the software as the UniFi Discovery Tool wouldn’t locate it, but after I connected directly to it instead of using https://video.ubnt.com, I was able to get it working. Will I keep it running? I still haven’t decided.

Pros

• Unified interface for camera management including being able to change white balance, contrast, etc. on each camera.
• Regular updates of the camera firmware and recording software.
• A company concerned about security.
• Free remote viewing system.
• iOS app.
• Decent video quality.
• NVR is compact.

Cons

• Remote browser viewing seems to require/prefer Chrome.
• If you don’t already have a PoE switch, there is an extra cost involved. The 5 pack of cameras doesn’t come with PoE injectors. The PoE injectors are unwieldy if you have more than one camera as each requires an outlet.
• Some discussion in the forums about quality of the iOS software.
• Timeline won’t show multiple recordings at once.
• Timeline feature needs some work.

Now that I have my dad’s whole system setup, I have to decide if it is worth replacing my 7 cameras with the UVC-G3 cameras. Since I already have a switch to power them and I’d run the software on a virtual machine, my cost is under $900. That’s a lot of money to spend when I have something that already works. I would get a better interface, easier remote viewing (right now I VPN into my home network to view the cameras), better video quality (my cameras are 720p), less concern over security issues in the cameras as Ubiquiti regularly updates the firmware and the recording software, and unified management of all the cameras (if I want to change the brightness or contrast on a camera, I have to connect directly to that camera and change the setting). However, the software I use now has a better timeline feature.

I’ll probably wait until something breaks before doing something; my system has been running (different hardware and software versions, but same cameras) for almost 5 years without a hiccup.

If you’re shopping for an NVR/camera setup, the Ubiquiti offering is interesting, but I think it needs a little work around the timeline feature and the iOS app before I can completely recommend it. While I don’t have much experience with other systems, this system takes a little technical know how as the switch has to be configured and the cameras adopted. For an installer to install this, I think it would be fine; for the average consumer I’d look elsewhere at least for now.

For many years, I’ve been using a Wahoo Fitness Sportband to hold my iPhone when I run. I’ve replaced it a few times and try my best to keep it in good shape. It appears that rinsing it after I run and adjusting the strap caused my last one to wear out prematurely. I can’t say that I’ve been disappointed with it, but when I heard a recommendation for the Running Buddy on MacBreak Weekly, I figured I’d give it a try.

The Running Buddy is a pouch that clips to my shorts using very powerful magnets. The pouch holds my iPhone 6s pretty snuggly the magnets ensure that it won’t move. When I first put my phone in the pouch and started running, I had my doubts about it as I thought my phone would fall. It was a weird feeling having the pouch on my waist. After a few miles of running, I forgot that I was still wearing it. One thing to note about the pouch is that if your shorts aren’t tight, then the pouch with your phone will pull down your shorts!

I’ve been running with the pouch for a few weeks and I can’t quite say if having the phone on my arm or on my waist is better. The pouch is slightly more comfortable as I don’t have pressure on my arm, but the pouch rubs against my stomach. The armband’s neoprene got quite disgusting because of the sweat. The different material of the pouch seems like it would repel sweat better.

I’m going to keep using the pouch as I’m starting to get used to how it feels.

Pros

• Convenient way to hold iPhone while running.
• No unsightly tan lines on my arm.
• No pressure on my arm.
• Material is easy to wipe off and doesn’t appear to retain sweat.

Cons

• Feels kind of weird on my waist.
• At first it feels like it is going to fall off.
• Can’t glance at information on screen.
• Unknown longevity as the part that comes in contact with my waist and shorts gets covered in sweat.
• Material rubs against my abdomen and could cause irritation.

Summary

This case is an interesting solution to holding my phone. For people walking, I can definitely recommend it if you don’t have pockets or the pockets aren’t convenient. For runners, I think it takes getting used to and if you don’t like armbands, it is definitely worth a try.

Last year I was looking at options for adding storage to my Mac Pro that I use as a media center, Jenkins server, DVR, and security camera monitoring. The Mac Pro has a 1 TB SSD but storage is eaten up very quickly with everything running on it. I wanted at least 8 TB of usable storage and while I could use a RAID, I was more interested in configuring drives as JBOD (just a bunch of disks).

I decided to get the WD 8TB My Book Duo as the price was reasonable at the time and I could configure it as JBOD. I would have preferred Thunderbolt 2 but for the price I went with USB 3. When I got the drives I configured it as JBOD and then partitioned the drives. I was curious to know if I could take the drives out of the case (Western Digital makes it easy to do) and just connect them individually to my computer without the Western Digital case. Turns out you can’t. The case does some magic to manage the drives. I was disappointed in this as it now became a potential point of failure where I couldn’t just take the drives out if the case failed.

The setup worked fine for about a year and then I started noticing that sometimes I’d see error messages on my Mac Pro about the volumes unmounting. I tried plugging the case into a different USB port, but still saw these issues at times. Things started getting worse and I decided to see if the actual drives or the case was failing. I took the drives out of the case and put them in a Thunderbolt dual bay drive dock. This, of course, caused me to lose all my data because I didn’t have the special WD magic sauce on the dock. It appeared that one drive was fine and the other drive was on its way out. I used the one drive and a second 2 TB drive in the dock for a few weeks and didn’t have any of the problems I saw before.

In order to get warranty service on the Duo, I had to send it all back. Since I didn’t know the state of the data on the drives I wanted to do a secure erase on the drives. I individually did a secure erase on the drives which worked fine negating my previous analysis that one of the drives was bad. I put the drives back in the case, reconfigured them then did a drive check using the WD utilities. The drive check failed which indicated to me that the case and not the drives were bad as I had just done a full secure erase which writes zeros to the drive.

The drives and case are now on their way back to Western Digital for warranty repair/replacement. While I don’t know if I had bad luck with this, I’ve moved on to a different case which doesn’t add magic sauce to the drives. Definitely a much more expensive solution than the MyBook Duo, but I trust it a lot more than I do the WD case.

Pros

• Reasonable price.
• Easy to setup.
• 3 year warranty.

Cons

• Crappy WD software to configure.
• JBOD configuration doesn’t let you remove a drive and use it in another mechanism.
• Failed after 1.5 years.

Summary

If you’re looking to add storage to a machine, I’d steer away from this case. In addition, Toshiba drives have been rated better for long term quality and in this case where the drives are running 24/7, spending some extra money on better drives will give me a little peace of mind. If the case simply allowed the drives to show up separately and not add the WD magic, I might have just chalked this up to a drive failure and given it a second chance. However, since all my data is locked into this case, I can’t recommend it. Once my case and drives come back from warranty service, I’m not sure what I should do with it. Any ideas?

Several years ago, I worked for a company that sold Sprint service. As part of my job, a “perk” was a company issued phone and then when the MiFi mobile hotspot was released, I got one of them for experimentation and use. (I use perk lightly because having a company issued phone or device is more of a tether keeping you connected all the time.) When I left the company in 2010, my boss said that I could use the company discount to purchase a device and plan; I purchased a MiFi and had a $45/month plan for 5 GB of data. After about a year, I realized that I wasn’t using the device much and cancelled the plan.

For the most part, I haven’t had a need or desire for a mobile hotspot and my iPhone’s mobile hotspot has worked fine when I needed it. Over the last year or so, I’ve heard advertisement after advertisement about “built in 4G/LTE” in cars which seemed like a way just to keep the kids in the back quiet and I ignored the ads. Earlier this year, I saw that AT&T was dropping the price of their “Connected Car” plans to $20/month for unlimited data (22 GB, in reality and then de-prioritization). Now things were starting to get interesting in pricing.

AT&T offered this plan on cars that had built in cellular, as well as with the ZTE Mobley which plugs into a car’s OBD-II port. The only problem with this, for me, is that I have an Automatic plugged into the port and only being able to use the device in the car had limited utility. Luckily, I read on forums that people were buying adapters to plug it into USB or AC. Since the cables looked like someone hand made them, I decided to make my own so that I could choose the parts. I picked up an OBDII Connector Cable Pigtail and a 5v to Dc 12v USB Converter (I picked this one because any heat generated from the electronics wouldn’t be right at the end of the cable). I soldered the pieces together and had a USB to OBD-II power cable.

I purchased the Mobley outright ($99) with no activation fee. When it arrived, I plugged it into my cable and into USB and it powered right up without problems. My first few uses of it were when I went to the car dealer and had to wait around; I plugged it into a USB battery (at peak power consumption, it uses something like 700 mW). It performed quite well and I got acceptable speeds without having to worry about jumping on an unknown WiFi network and dealing with my VPN.

The next test was when we drove about an hour to go camping; my wife was in the passenger seat and my son was in the back seat. My son had an iPad and was entertained for the trip. My wife started out the drive just saying that she would use her phone, but about 10 minutes down the road, she asked my son to hand up her iPad. From that point on, I think the hotspot gained a permanent place in our longer car rides! This past week we went on a driving vacation and covered about 1500 miles. The hotspot powered up when the car started (it was plugged into one of the USB ports; my car has 2 USB ports, but I bought a 2 port cigarette lighter to USB adapter, so I had a total of 4 ports) and was available wherever we had AT&T coverage which turned out to be maybe 75% of the total time in the car.

In one of the hotels we were staying, I was able to get over 20 Mbps down which to me is amazing considering my first cable modem was 5 Mbps down and the first cellular data links I worked with at QUALCOMM were 9.6 Kbps.

While $20/month seems like an unnecessary expense for times that I won’t use it, I can justify the expense.

Pros

• Easy to use (just plug it in and connect to WiFi).
• Coverage wherever AT&T has coverage.
• Hard to use up 22 GB a month in normal usage (we used about 17 GB on our last trip and that was using it in the car and hotel).
• Device is reasonably priced ($99).
• Monthly fee is reasonable ($20/month).
• Automatically turns on when power is applied.

Cons

• Have to buy or make a cable to use outside of the car.
• Limited to 5 devices at a time. This seems like a lot of devices, but we had a total of 6 and some devices always stay connected to WiFi causing me to have to block/unblock a device).
• Doesn’t support carrier aggregation which would support higher data rates.

Summary

As much as I didn’t want to think that a mobile hotspot would fit into my usage, it has proven to be an excellent device. I’m sure that my review (except for the auto power on) would be the same with any mobile hotspot, but the price of the device and the price of this plan make the ZTE Mobley a keeper. Even though you can turn your phone into a hotspot, it doesn’t stay on all the time and uses data from your plan. By having a separate device, you don’t have to worry about going over your usage and being throttled and don’t have to worry about turning on the hotspot.

I would be interested in trying out the other mobile hotspots that AT&T has to offer as they would look neater than my soldered set of cables and be more compact, but I have to check the terms and conditions to see if there is a problem moving my SIM to a different device and keeping the same plan.

When Apple announced the AirPods last fall, I wasn’t impressed as I already had Bluetooth earbuds that I used for running that worked quite well. It took me a few weeks to realize the advantages of them over other ear buds such as no on/off switch, take one out to pause, pairing across all devices, easy charging, convenient carrying case, etc. After that, I was convinced that they were the sleeper hit of the event.

Once the AirPods became available to order, I immediately placed my order; the price didn’t phase me. When I received them a few weeks later (I didn’t get in on the first batch), my excitement quickly turned to disappointment. They appeared to be plagued with problems such as dropping constantly on phone calls and popping while listening to music on my walks. I found forums posts where people had similar issues and I went ahead with Apple’s online support so that they could get it on record that there was a problem with my combination of devices and AirPods (iPhone 6s, first generation Apple Watch). None of their suggestions worked, but I didn’t really expect them to as I had tried what others suggested in the forums.

Several weeks later, I received a call from Apple wanting to see if I had time to follow up with a support person collecting information for engineering. Sure, I said as my AirPods were basically useless at that point. I spoke with an Apple person for well over an hour during which the AirPods dropped and switched to the iPhone’s speaker many, many times (once every few minutes). I didn’t hear back from Apple, but saw some forum reports indicating that the beta iOS versions fixed the problems (I don’t normally install beta iOS versions on my device). When iOS 10.3 came out, I immediately installed it (I backed up first because the APFS update kind of scared me). I was more than pleasantly surprised about my AirPods; they now worked exactly as Apple had described. Over 2 months after I bought them, they had become completely usable!

Now that I had working earbuds, what impressed me with the AirPods? First off, charging is easy and convenient. Next, the charging case makes it easy to carry them. There is no on/off switch and taking the AirPods out of my ears pauses the music. They are so convenient that I find myself listening to music more when I walk the dog.

Pros

• Convenient charging/storage case.
• Fits well in my ears.
• Easy to pair with all my devices.
• Acceptable sound quality (I’m not an audiophile so it works for me).
• Taking the AirPods out of the case immediately turns them on.
• Removing one AirPod pauses the music.

Cons

• Initial issues delayed my full use of the AirPods.
• There are cheaper ear buds on the market.
• Easy to drop or lose.
• Batteries won’t last all day.

Summary

I’ve tried a number of Bluetooth ear buds and headsets over the years and besides my Plantronics BackBeat Fit that I use for running, I haven’t managed to keep using any one for all that long. I’m cautiously optimistic that the AirPods are going to be my ear buds of choice for the foreseeable future. While they are not the cheapest ear buds out there, I think that all the pros outweigh the cost.