After my wife signed me up for Gizmo Crate, she asked me what kinds of items I thought might come each month. We brainstormed a bit, and my guess was that I thought it’d be a mishmash of items. One month it’d be 2-3 reasonably useful geeky items and some food, and other months it’d be a few food-type items and one really high-quality item. So far, I’m two-for-two. February’s crate contained a few moderately priced items of utility and this month’s Gizmo Crate featured a single headline item.

Food Units

Just because they’re not as expensive or have as much utility doesn’t mean that the food units aren’t appreciated. Neither this month’s Kettle Corn from Popcornopolis or the package of Pacific Gold Original Beef Jerky survived the act of being unboxed, photographed and then written about. I was a bit disappointed to get beef jerky again after receiving it February’s Gizmo Crate however the kettle corn was delicious and I devoured it quite quickly.

Geek Items

The first of the two geeky items is the Unplug Key Ring. Its design is very similar to European-style electrical outlets and has a matching keyring which “plugs” into the outlet. The outlet base has some adhesive so that you could affix it to the wall. I’m a bit of a keychain-minimalist, so this item didn’t really intrigue me all that much. But surely, I know someone who misplaces their keys and could make use of a good gag gift.

The second headline item of the Gizmo Crate is a pair of STREET by 50 Cent Wired In-Ear Headphones from SMS Audio. Apparently it’s 50 Cent’s answer to Beats by Dre. Unfortunately, I have had atrocious luck with earbud headphones. I’ve yet to find a pair that fits comfortably and manages to stay in my ear. I’ve tried a number of pairs, usually inexpensive ones, that never fit quite right and go into a junk drawer somewhere shortly after being purchased. Here, recently when I blogged about what’s in my backpack, I lamented the fact I was still using old over-the-ear headphones that took up so much room. I’m a bit conflicted on this item. They go for $50 on Amazon.com, which is a good value, but because I’ve never had any luck with earbuds I’m concerned that I’m going to miss out on this value.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the food items shipped this month, in fact I’m a bit ashamed that they replaced any kind of dinner for me tonight as I quickly wrote this blog. The Unplug Key Ring missed its mark as I won’t really have much use for it. And the STREET by 50 Cent Wired In-Ear Headphones go for roughly $50 on Amazon.com, so there’s definitely plenty of value in there. I figure if this set of earbuds doesn’t work well with my ears, then maybe I’ll use them to build my own custom-molded in ear headphones. Unless you’ve got some sort of quarrel with earbuds, I think you’ll find lots of value in this month’s Gizmo Crate.

Quite a few years ago, my roommate Pat and I went to Dave & Busters frequently. Frequently probably was putting it mildly. We were and continue to be geeks, we were hungry and we had little-to-no-regard for our disposable income. We’d pretty frequently meet up after work and head to Dave & Busters for a few hours.

One day, we were talking about all the 80’s arcades we remembered hanging out in growing up and just off-handedly, I mentioned the typical gift-shop where you could buy prizes with tickets won at that games. And about how all the really cool stuff was so prohibitively expensive tickets-wise that it made more sense to save our small allowances for months and just buy the items directly.

Most of the times we’d play a few ticketed games and then buy useless knick-knacks that were probably lost or forgotten about by the next morning. Eventually, I got sick of trying to buy the really cheap stuff and tried to think of other things to do with the tickets. One evening, there was a young kid in the gift shop counting and re-counting his tickets with an armful of stuff. Myself, I had a little cupful of probably a good 200-300 tickets. Not really thinking it through, I walked up to the little guy and said “Here you go bud, you can have my tickets.” I guess I had expected shock, awe and gratitude from the guy, but what I had inadvertently done is to set off his STRANGER DANGER alarm and he completely conflicted; scared of the stranger offering him free things and tempted by the hundreds of tickets I was giving away. I quickly tried to correct things and told him to go find his Mom or Dad first and I’d be waiting. For a few brief moments, I wondered to myself if he was running to the nearest store manager or police officer he could find and what kind of trouble I’d just brought on myself. Thankfully, he came back nearly immediately towing his mother and I was able to give her the tickets I didn’t want to spend.

Pat and I decided that instead of trying to appear as if we were trying to lure children with our unwanted tickets that we’d try and see just how many tickets we could collect. As somewhat mature adults, we had the tools in our toolbox to figure out which games had the best return on our investment and the ability to resist spending every single ticket within an hour of winning them. We immediately set out at playing some of the ticket games which we typically ignored because we found all the other games a bit more interesting. We now had a new goal: acquisition and hoarding of a copious amount of tickets. Over the next few weeks, we became regulars of the gift shop and got on a first-name basis with the people who had the responsibility of weighing/counting the tickets and crediting them to our accounts.

We established our ticket wealth primarily by recognizing there were a few games that seemed to pay out more tickets for our effort than others. For example, there was a linked basketball game each and each time a player hit 30 points everyone got more time in the game. It had a maximum of 6 players. If there were 3-4 people there that looked like they could eventually hit 30 points, it was a no-brainer to stand over there and play as long as you could keep the game full.

Another game we played a ton of was called Chip Away, it was basically some sort of odd game where you flung poker chips around trying to match up 3 or more of the same poker chip to score points. The more points you scored the more tickets you got. For some reason, the payout on this game was quite astonishing. I can’t recall the game mechanics that made it pay out so well, it just seemed like incredibly easy “money” to us at the time.

As it stands today, I never see the same behavior from either of these games. Somewhere along the line, just like at the casino, they changed the behavior of the game and the payouts dropped back down to pedestrian levels. In our numerous trips to different Dave and Busters since then both Pat and I notice that our favorite games from back then pay out at a greatly diminished rate. We’ve joked once or twice that it’s probably our fault that those particular games got toned down.

I can’t recall an exact number of the tickets we earned, but I believe by now it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands of tickets. Naturally, this happened over the years and we wound up buying quite a few items along the way. Some of the “bigger” ticket items were things that cost up to a couple hundred dollars. While playing we tried to keep loose track of how much money we were spending in order to earn those tickets and in every instance I’m sure we would have been much better off just buying the items we wound up spending the tickets on. But in some cases we felt that we were dangerously close to the break-even point. It was a bit entertaining to think that we were close to basically spending the same amount of money to acquire an item and also getting to play games and have fun along the way. Hopefully for the accountants at Dave and Busters, that wasn’t ever the case.

At any rate, of all the items I’ve ever “won” at Dave and Busters, here’s my all-time top three. I used a variety of factors in determining my favorites. Primarily, how much enjoyment I got in the prize. But I also factored other things in like the perceived value of the tickets compared to the actual cost of the award.

3. InfraRed Remote Control Helicopter

This item inspired this blog as we went to D&B’s to celebrate Pat’s birthday recently. I happened to have a ton of tickets saved on my Power Card and we bought a few random odds and ends, but the helicopter was the big-ticket item. I didn’t have much faith that it’d be fun, but after throwing 6 AA batteries in the remote control and then using those batteries to charge the smaller battery in the helicopter it actually was pretty fun to fly. We started talking about ranking all the things we’d bought at D&B’s and that’s how this blog article was conceived. Earing the helicopter an automatic admission to this top three list.

2. Sony Playstation 2

At the time, we had a functioning Playstation 2 that up and died on us. We were pretty feverishly playing both Gran Turismo 3 and The Simpsons: Road Rage in our idle time. Then one traumatic day our PS2 died. Naturally, we had more idle time and needed to get our video gaming fix somehow, so we started going to D&B’s more often. We didn’t set out to replace the broken PS2 with one that we scored at D&B’s but that’s the path we wound up going down. One day Pat suggested buying a new PS2 and then we discussed the very remote possibility that we could earn enough tickets to just buy a PS2 by earning tickets at D&B’s. This is when we got most focused on our return-on-investment and nearly burnt us out on Dave and Busters entirely. The sheer number of tickets needed seemed incomprehensible, but when we crunched numbers (very roughly) the dollars almost seemed to add up. The cheapest route was definitely to pay for the PS2 ourselves, but dollar-for-dollar our D&B PS2 wasn’t all that far behind.

1. Animal

Animal wins in a landslide. Within the three purchases, I believe he landed somewhere in the middle chronologically. We were pretty spent accumulating the tickets in the most frugal of fashion for the Playstation 2. There most certainly was quite a bit of fatigue associated with that purchase. After finally “winning” the PS2, we went to Dave and Buster’s less frequently and just accumulated tickets. On a lark one day, we went in and I saw this 4 foot tall stuffed animal of Animal from the Muppets.

Those of you who know me well have probably heard me tell the story about how if it hadn’t been for The Muppet Show my parents probably would have had to resort to sedatives to get me to actually bathe on any kind of regular schedule. We all loved the Muppets and I still do to this day.

At any rate, it struck both Pat and I as hysterical to this monstrous stuffed animal. We both had sports cars at the time and we thought it’d be comical to leave him in one of the car’s passenger seat. For a very long time, Animal was in the backseat of my ‘92 Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX staring out the back window looking at whomever was right behind me. During one traffic stop an amused state patrolman asked me if I ever put him up in the front seat in order to get in the HOV lane, naturally I told the officer no and that would be against the law! Within the car club we frequently hung out with, I was known as that-guy-who-has-Animal-in-his-car.

Shortly after winning/buying Animal, we took him all around our apartment and did a silly pictorial and this is how Animal ultimately wound up in the the back of my car. It was a fun couple of hours we took a gazillion pictures and narrowed it down to these best few:

For this past Christmas, my father surprised me with a great gift: a father-son trip to Arizona in the spring to catch some Spring-Training baseball. When I grew up Colorado was a baseball wasteland without any sort of a major league team. Regardless, my father is responsible for instilling in me a love and respect for the baseball. It started off by coaching my little league teams and watching the nationally televised baseball games with me when we got a chance. For my birthday one year, my parents threw a birthday party at AAA minor league affiliate, the Denver Zephyrs, which featured a player who shared the same birthday as me, Joey Meyer, who holds the record of the longest recorded professional home run at 582 feet. My Dad is also responsible for setting me down the road of fantasy sports geekdom by buying my brother a copy of Earl Weaver Baseball, which the three of us drafted fantasy teams across all of baseball’s eras and played a 3-team league against each other. Earl Weaver Baseball can also be credited for my rooting interest in the New York Yankees. At the time I was a pre-teen, and this was before we had 12,563 television channels and the Internet to occupy all of our free time, instead we had books.

Unfortunately, not a whole lot of authors were writing books for the tweenage boy. So whenever we made a trip to the library, I’d wind up in the sports section of the library. The autobiographies of legends like Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Lou Gehrig and the like led me to become fascinated with the Yankees, much to my father’s chagrin.

A week or so ago, Dad and I flew out of Denver and Dallas respectively and met up in Arizona for a long weekend. In the next 3 days, we’d go see 3 different spring-training complexes, 6 different baseball teams, 25+ innings of baseball, 2 nature preserves, and 1 authentic Arizona Diamondback:

Which wasn’t exactly the Arizona Diamondbacks that I necessarily had in mind when we were planning this trip. However, in addition to being a baseball fan, my father is an avid hiker and photographer. I’m not nearly as active outdoors in Texas, but I do appreciate a good hike, so we hiked in the mornings a couple days near the ball fields we were visiting. On Thursday, we hiked in Estrella Mountain Regional Park, where we ran into our friend above not a stone’s throw away from the visitor center. Nothing quite like seeing a venomous pit viper slither across the hiking trail to incentivize you to keep your eyes peeled the rest of your vacation. On Friday, we hiked the McDowell Sonoran Preserve and marveled at the many Sagauro Cactus in the park, which I later learned are only found in this region of the North American continent. As a first-time visitor, the Sonoran Desert area seemed like another world. It’s a desolate and dangerous yet uniquely beautiful part of the world. Here are some of our photos from the two hikes:

We caught three different games while we were visiting; on Thursday we watched the Chicago Cubs take on the Cleveland Indians at Goodyear Ballpark, which the Indians eventually won 1-0. On Friday we watched the Texas Rangers take on the Los Angeles Dodgers at Camelback Ranch Stadium, with the Dodgers ultimately winning 2-1. Our final, game we caught the Oakland Athletics visiting the Colorado Rockies at Salt River Fields, which ended in an odd fashion as the A’s completely misplayed the last out of the 9th inning, leading to the game-winning run crossing the plate with the Rockies on top 5-4.

Each of the ballparks we visited were amazing, not a single bad seat in the house. We more or less wound up sitting in the same location along the 1st or 3rd baselines for each game. We were at field level and had a great view for each game. The tickets were moderately priced, and every stadium had affordable lawn seating in the outfield. The weather was absolutely spectacular for each game, it was overcast the first game and sunny the next two games. The stadiums were all intimate with Camelback Ranch Stadium being the largest of the three. You could count on mostly starters for the first few innings, then the minor leaguers would get rotated in the rest of the game. Aside the one miscue by the A’s the games were played pretty well by all six teams. One of the things I really appreciated was the lack of television time outs, constant visits to the mound (I didn’t see a single manager come out of the dugout), and other nonsense which causes baseball games to be interminably long.

For those of you considering attending Spring Training, I encourage it. I have a couple pointers that I thought I’d share: 1. Except for weekend games, there’s no need to buy your tickets far in advance. Dad and I bought our tickets the morning of each game before our other touristy activity. 2. If you’re visiting a particular team, spend the extra few bucks on the tickets to sit as close to the field and/or dugout as possible. Players constantly sign autographs and interact with the fans, it’s a real treat. 3. Buy your tickets for weekend games in advance, even before you fly in to town.
4. See as many baseball games as you can fit in. Most of the games are at 1:05 p.m., and there are occasional games at 7:05 p.m.

Lastly, on Thursday, we visited Haus Murphy’s, a German restaurant in Glendale not too far from Camelback Ranch Stadium where we enjoyed a pretzel, some schnitzel, a proper Oktoberfest-sized beer and some Black Forest Cake. The food was tremendous and reminded me very much of all the wonderful time I spent in Germany.

Altogether, this was a wonderful trip. Now that I’ve done the Cactus League spring training, I’m tempted to take my love for baseball and see the Grapefruit League in the future. Maybe this time, instead of seeing an authentic Arizona Diamondback, I’d see a Tampa Bay (Devil) Ray or a Florida Marlin!

This year for Christmas, my puppies (via my wife) asked for BarkBox to be under the Christmas tree. I was a little worried that Santa had them on the naughty list, so I swapped their coal out for the BarkBox subscription and we’ve really liked it so far. In fact, my wife liked it so much that for Valentine’s day, she started fishing for hints trying to figure which of several “geeky” box-a-month subscriptions I might like best. Ultimately, I wound up selecting the Gizmo Crate based on what I could find out online. Apparently, I was not alone in my selection, as my wife reported back that demand seemed to outpace what Gizmo Crate anticipated and that delays were to be expected.

Per the Gizmo Crate website their aim is to have the crates shipped by mid-month and in their customers’ hands 2-3 days later. My crate showed up on Wednesday March 5th, so roughly two weeks late. The delays are regrettable, but I’m a bit more sympathetic than some vocal people out there on the Internets. Hopefully, as they get more experience, they’ll iron the wrinkles out of their process. The good news is, the next Gizmo Crate will hopefully be sent soon! Unfortunately, I went on vacation the same day that the crate showed up, so I had to postpone writing this blog until returning from vacation.

The first item out of the box was a 3.25-ounce package of Krave Basil and Citrus flavored turkey jerky, much to my wife’s delight, since she’s huge jerky fan. I’m not sure I’ve ever had basil-and-citrus-flavored jerky before, but I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it enough to look around online and see that Krave has quite a few different offerings. I would not complain a bit if another variety of jerky was sent in the upcoming months. I don’t tend to be a very adventurous eater, so I’m a bit curious to find out what I think about each months’ foodie item.

The next item out of the box was a pair of iGloves, which are a touch-capacitive glove that allows you to continue using your smartphones and tablets while keeping your hands warm. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a miss for me. I live in a warm climate, and despite what the natives might say, it just doesn’t get all that cold down here. I grew up in Colorado, and the winters down here are incredibly mild. I very rarely wear a jacket, let alone gloves. That being said, I won’t mind having these tucked away just in case the Polar Vortex makes its return and freezes us over, or in case I decide to visit friends and family further north.

After that, I pulled out a package of multi-purpose cable clips for cable management. For those of you who read my article about what’s in my laptop bag, you know how much I like cable management and keeping things tied up nicely. I’ve wanted something like these to keep my various charging cables more handy on my night stand. On top of that, there’s probably a number of loose USB cables at my desk that are just begging to be tied down and organized more neatly.

Following the clips, I pulled out an item that I was pretty excited about and started wishing that the crate had come a couple months earlier. The Power Bank 2600 mAh is a little battery that can be used to recharge your devices like tablets, smart phones, iPods, etc… I have a similar item already in my laptop bag which has managed to nearly charge my Nexus 5 from empty to mostly full (about 75%) but that charger’s battery came from an old disassembled laptop battery and may be a little run down. I’m hoping this new battery is fresher and can provide even more juice to my devices. Either way, it is compact enough that I’ll carry two for at least twice the juice. Maybe I’ll even find a way to take them both apart and Frankenstein them together into some sort of super Minty Boost.

The last item out of the Gizmo Crate was a Wireless Blutetooth Speaker. I couldn’t quite determine from the packaging or the contents who the exact manufacturer is or what the model is, but it appears to be a bit of a Jawbone knock-off. I found a number of similar knock-offs on Amazon.com and linked one of the more inexpensive models for you to look at. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the sound when I paired it up to my phone and left it playing my music while I wrote this blog. I’m not much of an audiophile, but this speaker sounded far superior to my run-of-the-mill amplified computer speakers on my desktop PC.

In researching the dollar value, I thought that the price of the subscription certainly was trumped by the value of the items in the Gizmo Crate. The dollar value of the items in the crate didn’t quite match up with the dollar value of the same products I found on Amazon.com, but what we paid was considerably lower than buying the items individually, which makes it a good financial bargain. What really gives it value is the fact that each of these items has its own unique utility. Aside from the slight problem caused by the fact that Texas is generally hot, I have a use for each of these products. Several useful items for at a financial bargain means that the first Gizmo Crate winds up being a great deal for those who subscribed to it. I look forward to unboxing a few more Gizmo Crates and blogging about it here!

This year for Christmas, my stocking contained a couple 6-inch NiteIze GearTies from my mother (Hi, Mom! I love you!) which I absolutely loved. In fact, they got me thinking I could use quite a few more and some longer ones, and I’d finally tackle the rat’s nest that had become my laptop bag. In all honesty, my laptop bag is far from a rat’s nest. But, as anal-retentive as I can be about such things, it felt like a rat’s nest. While I had everything out, I started yanking out some old, obsolete items like a DB9 to DB25 Serial Adapter. I wound up consolidating down a little bit, but not necessarily all the way down to the least common denominator. I have a few items which could be considered redundant, but I like having a couple extras just in case I need them.

My laptop bag is a MobileEdge MEBPS1 that I bought in a closeout deal for $30 more than six years ago. I wanted to link to the backpack, but wasn’t surprised when I couldn’t find any. About the closest I could find was this MobileEdge Select Backpack on Amazon.com. Aside from the awesome “Dr. Pepper/Black” color combination on it, I love that the product description specifically mentions CDs and PDAs, two things people probably don’t carry around a whole lot these days. I’m sure there are better bags out there right now, but I’ve really liked this bag and have not been given a reason to upgrade it.

The Contents

1. “The Diabetes”: My glucometer, test strips, etc… I don’t (can’t) usually go far without this.
2. MobileEdge Select Backpack
3. Panasonic RP-HC101 Headphones: My ears are anti-earbud, so an over-the-ears set of headphones is a must.
4. USB Micro On The Go Cable: This cable has come in handy a time or two in order to write files from my phone directly to some sort of USB storage. usually when doing some sort of backup/restore of the phone.
5. 3-foot Micro USB Cable – White: Used primarily for plugging phones/tablets into computers’ USB ports.
6. 5-foot Micro USB Cable – Black: Used primarily for plugging phones/tablets into a power adapter.
7. 3-foot USB Extension Cable – Clear: This came with one of my very first flash drives and wound up being handy a time or two, so I’ve kept it.
8. 10-foot CAT5e Network Cable – Blue : Pretty self-explanatory.
9. 6-foot Mini USB Cable – Black: I’m not 100% sure why I still carry a Mini USB cable. My digital camera has a MiniUSB port but my use of an Eye-Fi card makes it a bit of an extravagance.
10. 6-foot USB 3.0 Extension Cable – White: For when my other 3-5 feet of USB cable just isn’t enough.
11. 6-inch NiteIze GearTie: Extras just in case I decide to buy a new cable and my overpowering anal-retentive nature can’t be corralled.
12. Bobino Cord Wrap – White: This also was a stocking stuffer. If my ears weren’t earbud-resistant, they’d work awesome with this. It seems like it’d come in handy for some unknown cable down the road, so I keep it near by.
13. 12-inch NiteIze GearTie: See above, plus I use this tie to wrap up the other loose ties.
14. Mini to Micro USB Adapter: I picked this up when I bought my first Micro USB device and figured it’d be handy so I could keep using my Mini USB cable. Little did I know that I’d be overrun with Micro USB cables a year or two later.
15. Ethernet Crossover Adapter: A crossover adapter for a network cable just in case I wanted to network two computers together, or the odd occasion where I need to plug into a piece of hardware like a router or a switch.
16. Micro to Mini USB Adapter: Considering my glut of Micro USB cables, I thought one of these would be handy, and I could possibly quit carrying #9 above.
17. Micro USB to Lightning Adapter: As a recent iPad Air user, I figured a couple of these would save me money from having to buy additional cables from Apple.
18. Dual USB 4.2 Amp Travel Charger: A portable charger with enough output to charge both my Nexus 5 and iPad Air at the same time.
19. Universal 18650 Battery Box: This is just a little portable battery box, there’s an 18650 battery cell inside and it can be used as an emergency charger for both the Nexus 5 and iPad Air if needed.
20. Canon G12 Digital Camera: My digital camera.
21. Work Laptop: Nothing special; I hope to switch this in and out with a Chromebook depending on whether I’m headed towards a personal or professional destination.
22. iPad Air: I decided to try a bigger tablet when my company started a bonus program to subsidize iPad purchases.
23. RJ45 Coupler (not pictured): I’ve been waiting for these to show up from Amazon, for when a network cable provided just isn’t long enough and I’m too lazy to go find one of the appropriate length. I can think of a couple hotels I stayed at before which had wired networks but no WiFi and loaned out horrendously short network cables.

So, there’s a little bit of redundancy in my choices. I have multiple Micro USB cables, but I carry multiple devices which require a Micro USB cable to charge. I’d hate to be put in a position between charging my phone or my tablet. I also have enough adapters to ditch the Mini USB cable permanently, but in the event that my Eye-Fi can’t talk over WiFi to transmit my photos, I’d like to have the cable handy just in case. I don’t find myself in data centers nearly as often as I did ten years ago in my career, so a lot of the tools that I used to see in my backpack have been relocated over time. However, because of my own network I wired up in my house I decided some sort of network tester would be a good idea. Thankfully, the Pocketethernet was brought to my attention, and in a few weeks I’ll be adding it to my bag. I’d definitely like to pick up some sort of nice, compact screwdriver set just in case I do need to get into a computer away from home.

One thing you’ll notice is the absolute lack of any kind of installation media, not even Operating Systems. Thankfully, an app called DriveDroid has made it unnecessary to tote around a bunch of software DVDs. I keep whatever’s important enough in ISO form on my phone, and in the event I ever need it, then DriveDroid will let me mount the ISO and boot right off the phone’s storage via USB.

Suggestions and Feedback

Aside from the items I mentioned above, what other kinds of things am I missing from my bag? For the items I’m considering adding, do you have any recommendations on products that I should try? Finally, what kinds of things are you carrying and why? Please feel free to leave your feedback in the comments!

On the first Saturday of every month, car enthusiasts of all kinds descend on Classic BMW of Plano for a car show called Cars and Coffee. I’ve attended a few times it’s an exceptional gathering for motorheads and on mornings like this one, it’s nice to be outdoors. Cars and Coffee have events across United States as well as in Europe too. I showed up as the event started to wind down around 9:30 AM, and cars were beginning to pull out of the lot. But I still got to see quite a few great looking cars.

My favorite thing about Cars and Coffee is that the majority of the cars there are “real” cars that people own and not some sort of dedicated show car that rarely gets driven. It’s also a melting pot of exotics, muscle cars, sports cars, imports, classics, etc… the variety of different cars is very enjoyable.

I meant to take my camera but I left it at home on my desk. I tried to take a few photos with my smartphone but my polarized sunglasses made it impossible to see what I was actually taking a picture of. I will have to remember to take a my regular glasses and my camera next time. At any rate, here’s a few of the usable photos that I took. As an owner of a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette Z06, there may be a heavy dosage of Corvette pictures:

I have been experiencing a problem the past couple years with my smartphones and tablets. Each time I upgrade my smartphone to newer hardware than my tablet, or vice versa, I pretty much abandon the older device. I’ve always attributed this to the age of the hardware, but I’m beginning to think it’s more a matter of size than anything else. My tablets have generally been smaller. I started out with the original Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 as my first tablet, and not too long after that I was an early adopter of the first Nexus 7. Because I’ve been buying bigger and bigger smartphones, I began to find that whichever of the two devices was more powerful, I would use it in place of the other device. Case and point, my darling wife Julia gave me an early Christmas gift when the Nexus 5 came out. For the most part, my Nexus 7 sits uncharged and neglected on a coffee table at home. There’s nothing wrong with the Nexus 7 it just lacks the horsepower that the Nexus 5 has, and the size advantage of the Nexus 7 is easily mitigated by that performance difference.

When in Doubt, Buy a Bigger Tablet

In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about my neglected Nexus 7, thinking that if it were just a little bit bigger, I’d use it more often than I am. I’d even entertained the thought of buying something like the Nexus 10 but in comparing the Android Geekbench scores, I was a bit worried about paying four hundred dollars to buy equivalent hardware and a bigger display as my Nexus 5. If I wanted more display real estate for the same price, I could’ve bought an additional 27” 2560x1440 IPS display and a video card to drive it for my desktop computer. I just couldn’t honestly justify spending the money on the Nexus 10.

Thankfully, my Christmas present to myself was a new job this year. At work, they believe that 80% of the decision-making executives of our clients are iPad users. Because our company provides software-as-a-service, there is an emphasis on making sure that our web-apps work well on iOS devices, especially the iPad. They instituted a program where the company contributes money towards the purchase of iPads in the form of an Apple Store Gift Card, and negotiated corporate discounts. I’m usually pretty oblivious to when the planets align like this, but in this case the light bulb immediately went off above my head. I’m a pretty dedicated Android guy but in this case, it was too good to pass up on an iPad Air at an extremely discounted rate. My out-of-pocket for the 16GB WiFi version of the iPad was roughly $200 plus tax. My bottom line ultimately was an iPad Air at the same price out of my pocket as the latest Nexus 7.

First Thoughts

Aside from an early wave of “Why doesn’t this work like it works in Android?!?!” confusion, most of my first thoughts naturally related to the size. I have a couple initial observations about the size:

It’s difficult to type well and hold at the same time. I imagine that much of this can be attributed to what I think is an awful keyboard in iOS devices. The iOS keyboard pales in comparison to the current Android keyboard and is downright rudimentary when compared to aftermarket Android keyboards like Swype. The 10-inch form factor of the iPad Air includes enough added weight and size that I don’t think I could easily hold the tablet in one hand and type well with the other like I currently do with my Nexus 7. However, I could very easily rest the tablet in my lap, hold it with one hand and type with the other if the iOS keyboard weren’t so bad. Hopefully this is something I get acclimated to with use.

This shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s on the list, but I am disappointed it’s not the first thing that came to mind. Regardless of its ranking it makes a tremendous difference in comparison to the 7-inch tablet. Even though I had my TV on, my Chromecast ready to go and the app installed on my tablet, I watched an entire episode of House of Cards to kick off a 5-6 episode marathon this week on the iPad and enjoyed watching it—not nearly as much as I did when I watched the next few episodes on my television, but the fact that a 10-inch tablet can compete with a television is impressive.

I think probably the best analogy I can make contrasting the sizes is this: The difference between a 7-inch tablet and a 10-inch tablet really reminds me of the difference between reading a paperback and hardback book. The 7-inch tablet is easier to hold for longer periods of time, but everything feel compressed and condensed. The 10-inch tablet is fancier, looks nicer, and the content is easier to consume, but the size difference takes a bit of a toll on you over long stretches of use.

What’s Next?

My main objective here is to see if there’s a niche in my mobile computing for a 10-inch tablet that survives when I get my next phone upgrade. Considering that I’ve bought a new phone and tablet, their latest editions respectively, in the past couple months, it might be quite a while before I get to put this theory to the test. I guess how much I set down my Nexus 5 and use the iPad Air over the next few months will suggest how much weight that extra screen real estate actually carries. Additionally, I’m curious to find out if the 10-inch tablet is enough for me to break me away from my desk when working on writing things for the blog. My experience using the keyboard app on the iPad has been disappointing so far and I get the impression that if I had a Bluetooth keyboard, I’d need to sit at an actual table to do any work which is a bit defeating. If I have to sit at a desk to use a “real” keyboard with an iPad Air, then why not just go over and sit down at my desk? I have a sneaking suspicion that a Chromebook may need to supplement my 10-inch tablet to meet all of my mobile computing needs.

Note: That is not some weird lumpy texture on each of the phones/tablets, it’s the reflection of the 1970’s popcorn ceiling that’s directly above it!

A friend introduced me to StumbleUpon what seems like almost a decade ago but probably isn’t nearly that long ago. I wrestled a bit with trying to define StumbleUpon and decided to just poach this from the Wikipedia page: “StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.”

The long and short of it, users select categories that they’re interested in, and StumbleUpon feeds you pages from those categories. As you find pages that you like or dislike, you can thumb them up/down, and that will influence whether pages of that nature are presented to you in the future. There’s also a social aspect to StumbleUpon, as you’re more likely to be presented pages from categories you share in common with your friends and that they also liked.

As you surf the Internet outside of StumbleUpon, you may find a page that you like and it hasn’t been discovered yet by StumbleUpon or its users. A quick thumbs up from your toolbar and the page gets added to StumbleUpon based on your discovery. Naturally, StumbleUpon also allows for “Paid Discovery” as a source of income and an alternative method of content discovery.

As a teeny, tiny little blog, I’m quite keen on ways to drive more traffic to my site. Those of you who have connected with me on the various social networks should notice that I’m pretty religious (but hopefully not overzealous) of shouting from the mountaintops each time I’ve published a new blog. I’m always excited when I notice that one of my blogs has been liked, re-tweeted, shared, etc… I’ve often wondered what would happen if one of my blogs went viral. The closest I’ve come is when my blog about my revenge on relentless telemarketers stayed relevant on the /r/humor sub-Reddit.

On a lark, I decided to try and see if I could re-create something similar by buying Stumbles. What I was hoping, was that I’d get a few more eyes on the blog, which would generate a few more likes, which would get more eyes on the blog and so on and so forth. When I recently blogged in my most popular category of blogs, I created a campaign on StumbleUpon to promote that blog.

Within the campaign, you pick your target audience and the categories you wished for your page to be displayed on. Early on in the campaign, I made the mistake of being way too broad with the targeting of my promoted page. As my funds dwindled, I focused this down specifically at what I thought my demographic would be and I got better results.

There’s also an option to pay a premium for “engaged” stumbles. I had hoped that an “engaged” visit included the user liking (or disliking) the page, sharing the page with another StumbleUpon user or following one of the links within the page. What I found is that StumbleUpon also considers any visit over five seconds as “engaged.” Upon learning of that, I decided to discontinue the extra money per visit for engagement. I simply don’t consider a visit of five seconds as “engaged.”

Early on, my results were actually pretty disappointing. I was getting a lot of traffic, but all of it was really low quality. Very few of my StumbleUpon visits were spending more than a few seconds on the site. It was horrendously rare that they followed any of the links in the page, and none of the hundreds of visitors had liked the page. I take blame for these poor results early on, as I had been far too broad both in my target market and with the categories that the page was getting presented to.

As I mentioned, I decided to stop paying a 50% premium for “engaged” visits and to completely narrow my target market and categories down. I picked only a couple of categories and changed my target market. Upon making that change, I had some encouraging results. The average stumble was still a quick drive-by, but I started noticing that the page was accumulating additional likes. I’ve never had any of my blogs accrue more than 10-12 likes, but at the end of my two-week campaign my blog had collected 16 total likes, and I hit some threshold where I’ve continually seen 10-20 referrals from StumbleUpon on this page since the paid campaign ended.

Conclusion

So is it worth it to pay for a Stumble? Or a better question, is it more effective than other forms of content promotion on the web? To be completely honest, I just don’t know. I don’t have very much experience with any forms of paid discovery. At one point, I received $100 of credit to use on Google AdSense and I don’t remember that having a very measurable impact on what I wound up promoting. This is not an arena in which I can claim much experience or expertise.

However, I think it’s worth pointing out that I definitely had positive results that I felt could be quantified. The promoted page is now by far my most viewed and most liked page submitted to StumbleUpon. I’m not sure that it’s a viable way of promoting a new article being published to the blog, but it’s certainly been a fun experiment to give it a try. If anything, I’d be willing to spend a few dollars per article just to see the data on the graph above for the articles that I’ve authored and submitted to StumbleUpon. Promoting every blog does not seem to make much sense, but under special circumstances I’d be very willing to spend some money in order to get those blogs out. I just need to remember to be more specific and targeted with regards to the audience and the categories its promoted to.

Back in 2012, I built my own NAS machine and blogged about it as I built and used it. That series of articles turned out to be pretty popular and useful. Consequently, last year I wrote two similar NAS build articles: a 12 TB NAS and then a very basic “Econo NAS” for people operating on a minimal budget. The only unfortunate part of these articles is attempting to keep them up to date. Prices changes on the parts, and the parts become obsolete, which both contribute to the articles quickly becoming outdated and obsolete themselves. I figured for 2014, I should be prepared and create a brand new DIY NAS build from scratch.

As it is with my prior articles, my suggestion is that DIY NAS builds are built around FreeNAS. The feature set is pretty incredible, and the difficulty of using and maintaining FreeNAS has been minimal even for a big Windows dummy like myself. I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS.

Because of the creation of the EconoNAS in 2013, I’m going to try and morph this build into something a little bit more powerful. If I had to build a NAS for use in the home from scratch for myself or to help a friend, here are the parts that I would recommend. In both the prior articles, cost containment was a major concern. In this article, I’m more concerned with maximizing performance for a reasonable dollar figure. For the parts I spent more money on, I did a bit of analysis and justification for the added cost.

Why Build a NAS?

My original primary objective was to create something for backing up our different computers. All too often a curious friend or family member will ask me a question about their computers, and the conversation always starts with me asking about their current plan to keep the important files on their PCs backed up in case of a computer meltdown. Unfortunately, most people answer that they don’t really have one. Between viruses, sliding hardware quality, and our own mistakes, there are just too many things that can go wrong with our important data. This kind of NAS device goes a long way to helping create that backup plan. However, there’s a multitude of other possible uses for a NAS:

• Backups
• Storage
• Torrents
• Hosting your own Cloud Storage Service
• Others (Share yours in the comments below)

In this day and age, everybody has a need for some sort of external storage. Attaching that external storage to a network and building it using PC hardware opens enough possibilities that it should be strongly considered by anyone who’s lacking this external storage.

Motherboard

Of the things I reconsidered for this blog, my choice of form factor for the motherboard was on the list. I’ve decided to stay with the Mini-ITX form factor for two reasons: size and power consumption. Firstly, I appreciate the small footprint of Mini-ITX. When I built my NAS, I didn’t want another computer case eating up more real estate around my desk. Secondly, the NAS remains on 24/7, always consuming power; paying a premium for a form factor that uses less power quickly pays for itself once you factor in your electricity costs.

Typically, I’ve selected motherboards with integrated processors which are cooled without fans. I wound up literally striking gold with the Asus C60M1-I AMD C-60, since it had an integrated CPU, fan-free cooling, and 6 SATA ports all on a Mini-ITX form factor board at an extremely reasonable price. I used that same motherboard for my first revisions of the DIY NAS: 2013 Edition article, but it quickly disappeared as it became obsolete. Unfortunately, at the time of the writing of this blog, I couldn’t find a Mini-ITX motherboard with an integrated CPU with enough SATA ports that wasn’t also insanely expensive. Consequently, for this build I expanded my search to all possible Mini-ITX boards.

Here’s the set of must-have features that I look for when shopping for a motherboard for a NAS:

• Less than $150
• 6 or more SATA ports
• Support for at least 8GB of RAM
• Onboard Gigabit Ethernet
• Integrated video
• Mini-ITX

For the NAS, I don’t have a preference of AMD over Intel. I wound up picking the combo that I thought would lead to the best bang for buck, and selected the ASUS H87I-PLUS LGA 1150 Intel H87 Mini ITX Motherboard. Here are the important features of the motherboard:

• Intel Socket 1150 for 4th Generation Core i7/Core i5/Core i3/Pentium/Celeron
• 6 x SATA 6Gb/s
• Up to 16 GB of DDR3 1600/1333/1066 RAM (2 slots)
• Onboard Gigabit Ethernet
• Integrated video
• Available PCI-e slot for SATA controller card in future.
• Reasonable price: $100.99

As you can see, at the $75 I paid, the ASUS C60M1-I AMD C-60 really was a great deal when it was available. The extra money—$25 for the board, plus the cost of a CPU—in this case gets us more RAM, which can benefit FreeNAS greatly, and it supports much faster processors. From a performance perspective, the additional cost has quite a bit of associated value.

People who have built this machine and tried to use it headless have found that the motherboard is persnickety and will not POST without a keyboard and monitor hooked up. My suggestion for this hardware would be to use a dummy DVI Device and the cheapest little USB keyboard you can find. Otherwise, it might make sense to spend that extra $10-20 on a motherboard more well-suited for running headless.

Running Total: $91.99

CPU

In past blogs, I haven’t had to research CPUs, since I’ve always found inexpensive, feature-packed motherboards with integrated CPUs. In this case, those kinds of motherboards were more expensive than buying things separately, so I also shopped for a CPU in this article. The motherboard I picked has an LGA 1150 socket, so I wound up picking the cheapest LGA 1150 CPU that I could find. At $59, the Intel Pentium Processor G3220 3.0 GHz LGA 1150 is considerably up to the task of powering FreeNAS. Unfortunately, that pushes me a bit north of my ideal $150 price point for the motherboard and CPU combo, but I feel the added performance and possibility of CPU upgrades in the future justify the cost

Running Total: $148.98

RAM

In past builds, the comments section has more than a few people asking why I didn’t select ECC RAM and why I didn’t include more RAM. I don’t disagree with those thoughts; every computer would be better with ECC RAM, and every computer would be better with more RAM. In creating these build blogs, I’ve tried to do a bit of cost-benefit analysis to try and decide if the additional cost provides enough benefit to justify the added expense of ECC. On my own FreeNAS box, I have been running 4GB of non-ECC DDR3 1600MHz now for two years without any problems to date. In a similar vein, iXsystems, who sells FreeNAS devices like the one we’re building, also has come to a similar decision by not including ECC on their machines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ECC isn’t the better choice—it is. I’m just saying that the benefit doesn’t quite justify the cost. I’m not sure about you guys, but in my experience with building my own computers the past couple decades and working with other people’s computers, RAM just doesn’t all of a sudden go bad. Bad sticks of RAM are pretty binary; either they’re bad when you get them or they’re quite fine. A great way to make sure you don’t have a bad stick of RAM is to put it through its paces using Memtest86+. Here’s a great blog from Corsair that goes over using Memtest86+. In addition, it’s a good idea to do other kind(s) of burn-in testing to make sure your NAS is stable and ready for duty. This additional time and effort to get the NAS ready made me confident enough to use non-ECC RAM.

RAM prices continue to fall, and FreeNAS benefits from more RAM; because of these factors, I suggest buying as much RAM as you can afford. My NAS works just fine with only 4GB, but because of its age and current prices, my recommendation would be to buy Crucial 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) for $84.94. There are only two DIMM slots on the motherboard; upgrading in the future is going to be costly. I’d suggest you splurge and buy a 16 GB kit (8GBx2) if you plan to run at the maximum memory capacity at an point in the future.

Running Total: $215.54

Case & Power Supply

Because I’ve been tremendously happy with mine, my number-one recommendation for a case is the Lian-Li PC-Q25 even though it’s expensive at $127.00. I’ve enjoyed working inside this tiny case, and I haven’t had any issues getting six drives inside mine. In fact, growing it to that many drives was really a piece of cake. I absolutely love the built-in hard-drive rack. A power supply will set you back another $41.99 or so. In the likely event you think that’s overkill on the case, I’ve also been a fan of the Cooler Master Elite 130. It won’t hold as many drives, looks to be a bit more difficult to work in, and isn’t as easy on the eye, but it’ll also save you $70 or so off your bottom-line.

For those of you having a difficult time finding the Lian-Li PC-Q25 available any longer, I think that the Silverstone DS380 is a fantastic replacement for the PC-Q25. The DS380 holds more drives (up to 12) and features some hot-swappable drive bays on the front of the case. It’s on the expensive side at $149.99, but I think it is worth the price.

Running Total: $384.29

Storage

FreeNAS Drive

FreeNAS gets installed to and runs off a USB Flash drive and it only requires 2GB of space. In my FreeNAS box, I attached a USB header to the motherboard and hung an inexpensive flash drive off of it. However, flash drives are small enough now that they can just live permanently plugged into the USB ports on the back of the computer. At $6.39, the 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit gives you plenty of space for FreeNAS and gives you the possibility of tinkering and playing with all of the plug-ins available for FreeNAS.

Alternatively, check out the Brian’s Face 16GB USB Drive on Tindie for $12.00 or pre-loaded with the current FreeNAS ISO for $15.00.

Running Total: $391.28

NAS Drives

When I looked at hard drive prices, I was a bit disappointed to see such little movement in the three months since I last updated the 2013 edition of the DIY NAS build blog. In fact, on the two drives I picked for that build, the Seagate drive was only a few dollars cheaper, and the Western Digital drive was actually more expensive! I was very cost conscious in that prior build, and then insanely cost conscious in the EconoNAS build, so when faced with the decision to either trim a bit of cost off the total price or to add additional storage I felt that the additional storage was the best direction to go.

I’ve picked out 4x4TB hard drives in order to total 16 terabytes’ worth of storage. I wound up selecting two different Western Digital Hard drives, the WD Green 4TB WD40EZRX for $168.99 and the WD Red 4TB WD40EFRX for $188.99. Personally, I was leaning towards four WD Green drives. The Red drives have a longer warranty and are supposedly intended for use in NAS devices, but carry a premium of around $20.00 per drive. I split it up between two models because hard drives get manufactured and shipped out in batches. If a retailer got drives from a bad batch and you bought all your drives from that same retailer, then you have a much higher chance of issues with multiple drives in your NAS. Buying different models of drives helps reduce that catastrophic failure risk. Personally, I haven’t had any issues with my WD Green drives in my NAS. However, the longer warranty on those WD Red drives might come in handy one day. A mixture of WD Green and WD Red drives seemed pragmatic.

2014 NAS HDDs
WD Green 4TB WD40EZRX	WD Red 4TB WD40EFRX
$139.99	$165.72

Because the hard drives are the meat and potatoes of your NAS device, I highly recommend doing some capacity planning and careful research of the hard drive models you want to use. My opinion of consumer-level drives is pretty low (but I’m glad they’re cheap!), which is why I’ve designed my own FreeNAS to be redundant, that includes a premium to buy multiple drives rather than fewer, bigger drives. Total drive cost increased from $475 to $650 to go up from 12TB (4x3TB) to 16TB (4x4TB). When doing my research, prices on 3TB drives had me considering an 18TB configuration (3xWD Green 3TB and 3xWD Red 3TB) very strongly. I was nearly swayed by the fact that extra 2TB would only wind up costing around $50. However, it limits your ability to easily upgrade in the future, which is why I ultimately decided to leave two of the SATA ports unused and only select four drives. It was basically a coin-flip between the two options, so I felt it was important to mention it here.

Total: $1002.70

Conclusion

System Summary

• Intel Pentium Processor G3220 3.0 GHz Dual-Core
• 8 GB of RAM (16 GB max supported)
• 8 GB of storage for FreeNAS and other FreeNAS plug-ins
• 16 TB of total storage available for NAS
• Integrated Video, Gigabit Ethernet and much more (see motherboard)
• Room on motherboard for 2 more SATA drives
• Room on motherboard for an additional SATA controller (PCI-e)
• Room in case for up to 3 more hard drives

If I were to build a NAS today, or help a friend build one, this is definitely the direction that I would head down. In fact, I’m currently considering replacing my existing motherboard and RAM with the Motherboard, CPU and RAM I discovered in my research for this blog. The total price of $1050 is competitive with the pricing of the off-the-shelf systems that Seagate (Seagate Business Storage 4-Bay 16TB NAS – STBP16000100 for $990) and Western Digital (WD My Cloud EX4 16TB for $999) are currently offering, but the feature set of FreeNAS, and the fact that it’s running on PC hardware that you can upgrade and expand down the road blows those systems out of the water. Furthermore, because this is built out of computer components, the prices will come down on the hardware. The off-the-shelf custom hardware from these other companies are much less likely to be easily upgraded, and if they can be upgraded, it is sure to be expensive. In reviewing the parts, there’s also some areas where you could buy cheaper components; the case, the power supply, the CPU and Motherboard, and amount of RAM all could be easily dialed back down to help contain costs. In this case, I think this additional expense pays for itself in the form of functionality today and down the road when you want to upgrade your NAS.

What about you guys? Have you built your own NAS? What did you use to build yours? And finally, what are you using it for? Please feel free to tell us about your DIY NAS experiences in the comments.

Updates

3/07/15: At least two comments have mentioned that the ASUS H871-PLUS requries a monitor and keyboard to POST. I’ve amended the motherboard section to reflect that. Since I was editing this article already, I also updated all of the prices to current. The price of the NAS fell by another $60 or so to $1002.70

7/22/14: I went through and updated the prices on the components. I also added a blurb in the case section about the Silverstone DS380 for the people who are finding the Lian-Li PC-Q25 to either be out of stock, or it’s price inflated. Since being published the price on the parts fell down from $1141.72 to $1068.26, roughly in the neighborhood of $75.

9/5/14: This week I went through and researched prices, each item is probably 1-2$ cheaper except for the CPU, which has risen by a couple bucks. The total price fell down from $1068.26 to $1050.08. Interestingly enough, both of the Seagate and Western Digital NAS enclosures of a similar size have seen their prices move closer together, the Seagate’s price rose to $990 and the WD’s price came down to $999. Overall these prices seem pretty stable.

¼/15: Updated the blog with a link to the DIY NAS: 2015 Edition.

For Christmas this year, I asked for a Logitech Harmony Smart Control for Christmas and my dearly beloved wife was happy to oblige. I’ve been a longtime user and admirer of Logitech Harmony universal remotes, having used both the Harmony 650 and Harmony 550 in recent years. I’ve been a big fan of what I boasted to my peers as “Finally, a universal remote done correctly.”

For those of you with Universal Remote experience, it’s typically been a frustrating experience of blindly punching in multitudes of product codes never finding quite the exact code for the device you’re wanting to control and not having the full functionality of your original devices’ remotes. The Harmony remotes are refreshing in that much of that setup is done through software on your computer with a considerably more comprehensive database of products. Furthermore, programming an activity has been convenient and simple. I don’t have a very impressive home theater setup, but I thouroughly enjoyed being able to sit down and press a single button to listen to music, watch TV, watch Netflix on my Chromecast, or play a game on either of my game consoles.

When I saw that Logitech was offering a new line of Harmony products which were WiFi enabled and included an app for controlling your home theater devices from your smartphones and tablets, I was excited again. I’ve been pleased with using my android devices to control the Chromecast and I’ve wondered just when exactly we’d see people start replacing remote controls of all kinds with those devices. Personally, I think smartphones and tablets are still a bit dense in order to make a great remote control for your television, so I was pleased that a traditional remote continued to be supplied with the new Harmony products.

First thing after opening gifts Christmas morning, I was looking forward to playing with my new toy.

Setup

Setup was pretty easy; the Harmony Smart Control included the remote control, the Harmony Hub, an infrared (IR) repeater and a small power supply. I situated the Harmony Hub near my TV and plugged it into power. I then put the IR repeater down near my receiver, which sometimes had difficulty getting the reception from my other remotes. I enabled Bluetooth on my smart phone and installed the Harmony app. Once inside the app, it walked me through entering my devices, testing them out, setting up activities, and programming the remote. My device settings were saved up on the MyHarmony website like I mentioned before, a universal remote done correctly.

WiFi Connection Issues

It wasn’t too long after completing the setup that I noticed that the IR Remote wasn’t working very well. It was sluggish, unresponsive, or just didn’t work. Because I had the option, I’d try with the Harmony app on my Nexus 5. Sometimes that would work, but most often it wouldn’t work either, which was concerning. I began to notice that there was a red LED intermittently on the Harmony Hub and began to worry. Being a geek myself, I did what I always do when something didn’t work: I power-cycled it.cycled it. After powering back up, it worked briefly but then began to misbehave again, which lead to more power-cycles, this time on my WiFi router, my Verizon FiOS router, and my phone. Regardless of what I turned off and back on, that pesky red LED kept coming back, and the Harmony remote just wasn’t working.

This is when my concern escalated into Google searching, which seemed to suggest that the red LED meant that the Hub was losing connectivity to the WiFi network. Some further research lead me to this 20-page thread on Logitech’s support forums about the Harmony Hub losing connectivity. I read each and every post, sympathizing with the people in the very same boat, and I began to wish I’d researched the product a bit before putting it on my wish list for Christmas. The thread was full of lots of people trying lots of different tips to try and resolve it. I tried nearly all of them:

1. You name it, I rebooted it
2. I reset the Harmony Hub countless times paired it back up and reconfigured it
3. I made sure the Harmony Hub had downloaded and was running the latest firmware from Logitech
4. I used the app WiFi Analyzer to make sure there wasn’t any contention on the channel my router was broadcasting on
5. I tweaked the router to give the Harmony Hub a static IP address
6. I made sure the Harmony Hub was mere inches away from the WiFi router
7. I placed a lesser Universal Remote on a pyre and sacrificed it in an attempt to satiate the heathen gods of electronics (not really, but I would’ve if I thought it would work)

Quite literally the only thing that I didn’t do that people said they had luck with, was to buy specific routers that people had bought. Inside the thread, a few people had reported luck with the ASUS RT-N66U. To be honest, I was tempted to do it too, but I couldn’t justify spending $150 on a router to get a a $100 Universal Remote working on my meager home theater. Furthermore, I have what I believe to be a nice router already. It’s from the family of DD-WRT routers running Tomato. In our household, we’ve got probably almost a dozen different WiFi devices which we’ve all used in the past without any kinds of problems with the WiFi. Furthermore, I can’t remember any kind of houseguest not being able to easily connect to and use the router themselves.

Logitech Customer “Service”

After my troubleshooting and sacrifices didn’t result in resolving the issue, I resorted to emailing the Logitech Harmony Support team, hoping they had access to some sort of arcane magic that would get the Harmony Hub working. I detailed out what steps I had tried, the forum post that I had researched, and stated that I didn’t think it was reasonable for anyone to have to replace a perfectly functional router in order to get the Harmony Smart Control working with their WiFi networks. WiFi has been around far too long for there to be such poorly designed devices running around. Because I sent it in an email, I didn’t expect an immediate response, but the auto-response promised a reply within 48 hours. Four days later, I finally got my response.

Before I go on any further, I’ve worked these kinds of jobs. My first full-time job two decades ago was taking these kinds of phone calls on inkjet printers, and since then I’ve worked at a number of places providing support to end-users on a variety of products. I know that 99.9999% of the solution is just getting on a common wavelength with the customer.

All this being said, I was aghast at the response that I received; an obvious copy-and-paste hatchet job based off of the subject of my email, without any consideration to the details that I provided. Logitech’s response to my problem was to essentially tell me to do what I’d already told them I did again and let them know if those steps didn’t solve my problem. Nothing is more infuriating than to be frustrated with a product, ask for help and then get a response where it’s clearly the case that they didn’t even bother to read what you had written in the first place. Rather than wait another four days or longer, I told them I wasn’t interested in their help if they weren’t going to bother reading what I said.

Final Thoughts

As a last gasp, I enabled the WiFi on the Verizon FiOS router that I’d disabled ages ago and hadn’t been using. I completely reset the Harmony Hub, re-paired it and had it use that new SSID instead. It’s only been two or three days, but I haven’t had any WiFi disconnects since then. Because it’s a gift from my wife, it has sentimental value, otherwise it’d be in the refunds pile at the nearest Amazon distribution center and we’d be buying a different universal remote control, quite possibly something that’s not Logitech.

I hate doing this, but I can’t recommend this product to anyone. In fact, my advice is to stay miles away. The Harmony Hub was poorly designed and tested, which is evident by the number of people with different routers all having the same WiFi connectivity problems. Furthermore, the fact that a lack of WiFi connectivity also stops the IR remote from working correctly doesn’t bode well for the product either. As much as I have loved the Harmony Universal Remotes, my suggestion is that you stay far away until they’ve resolved their WiFi connectivity issues and they’ve integrated an Ethernet port on the Harmony Hub itself.

For those of you willing to fight through the connectivity issues, the awful customer support and the potential expense of finding and buying a compatible router, my feelings about the actual line of remotes are still the same. It’s a Universal Remote control done perfectly, it’s just too bad the same can’t be said for its network connectivity. Read through the support thread to gain an understanding of what looms for you in the future.