Automatic Power Saving Power Strip

The fear of summer electric bills is upon me and I am dead set to do anything I can to minimize them. In my quest for lower utility bills I found the easiest and cheapest green home upgrade....in a power strip? Yep. 

Cutting the Cord: PART 4

I'll probably die years from now still irked at the cable company for raising my rates 49% overnight. I've had some success in my quest to eliminate cable TV from my life. With my DVR needs fulfilled with an over-the-air solution that has network access to it's content it's time to get that content on my TV. Let's give Roku a whirl.

Cutting the Cord: PART 3

Still at it. The TV overlords have raised my rates to nosebleed heights and I am bound and determined to find alternatives to the price gouging ridiculousness of cable TV.  One of the biggest things I would miss from the land of cable? A DVR. A time-shifting, show-recording, never miss an episode DVR. Once you've had a DVR its hard to live life without one. At times while in the car, I miss something that was said on the radio and find myself looking for a rewind button that doesn't exist. Yep, a DVR is a must. The trick; DVR without cable.

Cutting the Cord: PART 2

Still peeved at the cable company for a 49% rate hike but dissatisfied with my previous effort I took a shot at another product; Google's Chromecast.

Cutting the Cord: PART 1

Let's face it, cable sucks! At least the price does. I have (had) something over 400 channels available to me through my cable provider, of which I maybe watched ten to fifteen of them on any regular basis.  The option to watch so many different things isn't bad, except when you have to pay for all of them when you watch only a few. Doubling up on this conundrum the few channels I watch are only included in the higher packages, forcing me to pay full toll. I tolerated this until last December when my "offers" expired and my bill sky-rocketed from $115 to $172, a gain of 49%!!! When I was told new offers would not be available until the first part of the year I cut my services down to the basics with DVR and cough up something like $85 a month for local channels, or actually less than half my local channels since cable doesn't include the extended HD channels available in my area, just major networks. The first part of the year is here and the offers are lousy. Why pay so much for so little??? The fix for my dilemma, I hope, is to cut cable all together. 

World's Cheapest Noise Canceling Headphones

When I'm in the shop I usually like jamming to my music but the tunes don't sound good over the buzz of saws, routers and vacuums.  I do what I can to keep the noise down for my neighbors so turning the volume up to eleven is out of the question. Besides being rude to the neighbors, extreme decibel levels can be quite damaging to your ears.

I've tried wearing ear buds or headphones in the shop but even though you can still hear the music, you can also hear the tools and the two don't mix.  I looked at noise cancelling headphones but they can be insanely expensive.  What I needed was inexpensive headphones mixed with great noise cancelling capabilities.  I saw these inexpensive hearing protectors and when I ordered them they actually worked quite well, but still no music. I had some inexpensive headphones laying around and wish the two could be combined somehow.  Once I started playing, it was amazingly simple.