mobile – chmod 644

Tablo TV OTA DVR

October 26, 2025 at 9:16pm by windracer

I’ve had a hate-hate relationship with the regional sports networks (RSNs). Before cutting the cord on my Spectrum cable, I could watch the Rays and Lightning on Fox Sports Florida, and that continued for a while after I dropped Spectrum (and TiVo) for YouTube TV in 2020. Fox Sports then became Bally Sports in 2021 and then in 2023 YouTube TV dropped the RSNs completely (which made it hard to watch my local sports without cable). In 2024, Bally Sports became the FanDuel Sports Network and I ended up buying a separate streaming subscription so I could watch my local hockey and baseball teams for last season. Now in 2025, the Lightning announced a partnership with Scripps Sports that moved the hockey games off of FanDuel to local broadcast (on Channel 66 – The Spot) and streaming (which does not include YouTube TV, just DirectTV and Fubo). Argh! Since I still don’t want to go back to cable (although this was almost the straw that broke that particular camel’s back), my only option was, amazingly, trying OTA broadcast television.

TabloTV I haven’t watched TV over an antenna since I was a kid in the 80s … my parents never got cable, we were strictly a local channels household. In this modern age of multiple TVs, wireless streaming/casting, and mobile devices, I couldn’t imagine hooking up an antenna to a single television, so I started looking at options and came across the Tablo TV DVR for OTA (which ironically is also owned by Scripps, the same company now broadcasting my Lightning games). After doing some more research, reading some reviews (like this one), and planning the setup, I purchased a 4th generation, 2-tuner/128gb model on Amazon for $70, along with the Channel Master Omni+ 50 antenna for another $70.

Ring camera conversion, completed!

March 11, 2025 at 6:45pm by windracer

I started my switchover from Google Nest cameras to Ring back in May 2023, replacing my indoor Dropcams with battery-powered Ring Stick-Up Cams. At the time, I kept my Nest Outdoor cameras because Ring did not have a constant recording option, but fast forward to 2025 and Ring has finally added 24/7 recording to certain plugged-in and hardwired cameras as part of their new Ring Premium plan (for $200/year). I was losing my grandfathered $10/month Ring Protect plan in March and last year Google raised the annual price of Nest Aware Plus to $150, so it was time to upgrade some hardware and consolidate. I didn’t end up saving money (~~professional monitoring is now an additional $10/month on top of Premium~~ this is now included as of January 2026), but I did gain some convenience of finally being able to ditch Nest and manage all of my cameras in a single place (plus additional automation capabilities, but more on that later).

Switching from SpiderOak to IDrive

June 14, 2024 at 7:53pm by windracer

I’ve been using SpiderOak ONE for my online cloud backups since 2012 … almost 12 years. I was grandfathered into an unlimited plan for $125/yr and had just under 5TB backed up to the service. On April 24, the service went down for “scheduled maintenance” to move to a new data center … and was down for two weeks! Worse, there was near-zero communication about the outage, no response to support tickets, affected a lot of people (see here and here for examples), and in fact is still causing problems for customers today (over a month later)!

My annual renewal was coming up at the end of May and this was now the second big service outage so far this year (a total of 20 days of downtime!). It became clear to me that SpiderOak no longer considers their ONE backup service important (in fact, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks they did this on purpose to get rid of ONE customers), so I started looking at alternatives.

iPhone 15 Plus

October 15, 2023 at 4:05pm by windracer

I wasn’t really having any problems with my iPhone 12 Pro Max, but when checking the pre-order price for a Apple’s newest phone from AT&T it turned out that I could get an iPhone 15 Plus for just $100 after trading in my current device. I have never really been happy with the camera in my current Pro Max so I decided it wasn’t worth the additional $300 to get a Pro Max this time. It was a last-minute decision on my part but even though it wasn’t until around 11am when I logged in I had no issue placing a pre-order for a black 128gb device. A week later on September 22, my new device arrived.

Leaving the (Google) Nest

May 1, 2023 at 6:11pm by windracer

I bought my first Dropcams back in 2014, right around the time Nest (which had acquired Dropcam) was acquired by Google. Then I added the Nest Thermostat in 2016 (which was later replaced in 2021 with a Z-Wave one during an HVAC system upgrade), the Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors in 2018, and finally a bunch of Nest Outdoor cameras in 2019 for a pretty complete ecosystem all managed very nicely from the Nest website and mobile app. I guess I should be happy I got almost 9 years (has it been that long!?) out of the Dropcams before Google announced they are no longer supporting them and they will cease to function on April 8, 2024.

Google is offering Dropcam customers free Nest Indoor cameras as replacements, which is surprisingly generous, but only up to two (and I still have three perfectly functional Dropcams). I went ahead and ordered the free cameras, but after a few days of using them, I’ve decided it’s time for me to leave the (Google) Nest.

Apple Watch Series 7

September 27, 2022 at 8:32pm by windracer

[ I’ve been slowly (hardly?) working on this post for the past few weeks, but now that we’re stuck at home waiting for Hurricane Ian to arrive I figured I should finally get it done. ]

I’m a long-time user of fitness tracker tech: I got my first Fitbit in 2014 (after cancelling my original pre-order in 2009), followed by the Charge 2 and Charge 4. There was a brief time when my daughter had a Charge before she just stopped wearing watches altogether. My wife, on the other hand, went through a Fitbit Flex and Alta before I got her an Apple Watch (Series 3) in back 2018 (which she still has a loves). Honestly, with all of the other Apple devices in our home, I’m surprised it took this long for me to decide to switch and back on Father’s Day (two years after getting my Charge 4), I became the owner of an Apple Watch (Series 7).

[ Of course, since I got it, Apple announced and released the Series 8 … great timing! ]

Kia EV6 GT-Line

June 21, 2022 at 8:01pm by windracer

Back in March when we replaced my Highlander with the RAV4 Prime, we figured that would buy us (literally) some time for the Ford Mustang Mach-E we had on order to arrive before the late summer/early fall when we would again require two vehicles. But as the weeks passed it became apparent that the Mach-E was not going into production any time soon so we were also started looking around for my wife’s second choice, the Kia EV6.

Again, it’s not a great time to be buying a car (new or used) and we were casting a wide net, talking to local dealerships and ones as far away as Michigan looking for a) an available EV6 GT-Line, and b) the lowest over-MSRP dealer markup we could find. Luck turned out to be on our side again when one Friday evening I found a new Urban Yellow First Edition just a few miles north of where we found the RAV4 (the person who had originally placed the order for the FE apparently didn’t want it after all). We drove out first thing Saturday morning, test drove it, and decided to buy it (and we had to decide quick because when we got back from our test drive, another couple was waiting to check it out, sorry folks!). Actually finding the car notwithstanding, this was our easiest, smoothest car purchase ever, spending just under three hours total at the dealership before driving my wife’s sweet new ride home.

Homebridge (and HomeSeer)

May 15, 2022 at 5:14pm by windracer

A few weeks ago while browsing the Homeseer forums (which have been inundated with Insteon users lately, after the sudden shutdown of the service), I came across a thread about integrating Homeseer with Apple’s HomeKit using Homebridge. Everything in my home automation setup has been working fine, but I’m always looking for new ways to tinker and expand. I use HSBuddy on my iPhone to control my HS devices, but I thought it would be cool if I could use Apple’s Home app instead, which would also make it easier for my wife to use.

2022 Toyota RAV4 Prime

April 1, 2022 at 9:30pm by windracer

Toyota RAV4 Prime

At the end of February my (until now) trusty 2013 Toyota Highlander had a sudden and unexpected engine failure which, no longer having a working car, sent us on a stressful week and a half of decisions, research, and frustrating shopping (it is really not a good time, supply-chain wise, to be buying a new car).

I’ve been driving Highlanders (well, two of them anyway) since 2003. Now that my daughter is off at college (and almost done, at that) I knew my next vehicle was going to be downsized: we no longer needed the cargo capacity, V6 engine, or towing capacity of a large SUV, but still wanted an SUV (or crossover). Since I am pretty fond of Toyotas (we’ve owned two Highlanders, a Camry Hybrid, and a Prius) I was already considering the RAV4 as my next car.

I won’t go into the details of that stressful time but suffice it to say we had a stroke of luck near the end of our ordeal and wound up with our fantastic new SUV: the 2022 Toyota RAV4 Prime XSE.