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FitBit One

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fitbit-oneTwo years ago, I purchased an Oregon Scientific Pedometer off REI Outlet as a “trial” for whether I would actually use a Fitbit, and therefore justify the price of a Fitbit (which I had seen and heard about from a colleague for years). Initially I only planned on using the cheap one for a couple months, then upgrading, but a couple months turned into two years. So, I purchased a FitBit One for my “christmas” present, and just started using it. The review will be rather short, since it’s a pedometer, but all and all, I’m extremely happy. The unit is half the size of the Oregon Scientific, so it still fits in my coin pocket. It’s rechargeable, and while the specs say it should last about 10 days on a charge, mine seems to last about 2-3 weeks between charges. The screen is OLED, and shows steps, distance, floors (the unit has an altimeter), time, and some flower I haven’t yet figured out.

The best thing about it is with the Oregon Scientific, I was having to manually add steps to the database once a week. And if I forgot to do this, I would lose days/steps. Thankfully, this was extremely rare. Since the FitBit autosyncs with my computer, and then with the FitBit site, I was able to leverage their API with some PHP to have a script run daily do download the previous days steps. Holes, such as vacations would create, are resolved at the end of month when a script runs to update all the step counts for the previous 45 days (which should help avoid issues if I was on vacation spanning the end of a month).

I am extremely pleased with the unit, and would highly recommend purchasing one. As to why I didn’t get the Force or the Flex: I just don’t care for things around my wrist.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Scotch Sealing Tape Dispenser H180

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Scotch H180I know it’s a little weird to review a tape gun, but when I do use packing tape, I tend to get pretty angry at cheap ones. This wasn’t helped by one of the little plastic ones (that are like a shell around a small roll of tape) exploding in my hand the other week. So, I finally decided to buy a tape gun for home. At work, we use the red Scotch Heavy Duty tape dispenser. It’s inexpensive, and works okay, but I’ve found that with the retracting blade, you never get a real easy/clean cut with the tape. Knowing this, I looked on Amazon, and EVERYONE pretty much pointed to the Scotch H180. Costs a bit more, doesn’t come with tape, but the blade does not retract, and the build quality seems much more commercial than “home”.

The basic test is how much effort does it take to A. Dispense tape on a box, and B. (more importantly), cut the tape with a wrist movement. With the red guns, the first part is fine, the second is hit or miss. You have to put enough pressure on the “guard” to get the blade to come out far enough to cut the tape reliably. Sometimes this works, many times it does not. With the H180, the process is basically so quick, you think the tape broke, but instead, you get a clean cut and the tape where you want it.

My only complaint is, the dispenser should have a loop, or hook, or something at the base of the handle to hang the whole thing by a nail/peg. I might just have to tie something on, because laying it on a shelf just seems silly.

[xrr rating=4.75/5]

Asus RT-N16

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RT-N16 Rear (No Antennas)Years ago I moved my cable modem down to my garage to get it closer to the coax (CATV) splitter. The cable modem then had CAT5 running up to the office where my Airport Extreme (which provides routing) lives. This meant anything that wanted to be on the network had to either be in proximity to the office, or be on wireless. This kind of sucked for a DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) computer I have in the garage, and the hope of moving my electronics lab out to the shed. So, I’ve been planning to install a router in the garage next to the cable modem for almost as long as the cable modem has been down there. So, to that end, I purchased one of the most capable home routers in existence, the Asus RT-N16. Got it off eBay for about half price, but I really didn’t want to spend much since I don’t need the wireless capability (I have a very functional Airport Extreme). All I really wanted was a decent CPU speed, ram/flash size, and a GigE switch… which all basically means being able to run Tomato, DD-WRT, etc (which the RT-N16 will do. More later).

The router itself is pretty reasonably sized, not taking up much more space than a 5.25 external enclosure. On the back are the antenna jacks, 4 GigE switch ports, the WAN port (also GigE), USB2.0 (for a printer, or external HD), and DC jack. CPU, RAM, and Flash info can be found here. Basically though, short of the Asus RT-N66U, the RT-N16 is pretty darn near the top of the home router capability chart. It won’t route at gigabit speeds (seems to be around 150Mbit/sec), but I don’t have that kind of bandwidth at home anyway. Plus, the RT-N66U goes for at least twice as much new, and on eBay.

Anyway, after receiving the unit, was the most complicated and time consuming part of my experience: deciding which firmware to use. The stock Asus firmware is fine for most people but I really had 4 main requirements:

  1. IPv6 Support (Native from ISP)
  2. Built in DNS Server (for internal DNS)
  3. UPNP/NAT-PMP support
  4. Non-sucky NAT

So off the bat, DD-WRT and Tomato support built in DNS, the native firmware does not. There is an alternate to the native firmware nicknamed Merlin, but it only did some things, but not others. DD-WRT doesn’t support native IPv6, it only does 6to4 tunneling. All the firmwares do UPNP, but only Tomato does NAT-PMP. So it was looking more and more like Tomato was the answer. The biggest issue being that Tomato seems relatively dead, major code wise, with only people like Toastman doing mods. But, that’s good enough for me. I grabbed the latest Tomato from Toastman and loaded it up (which requires first loading dd-wrt, then Tomato due to some weird size or packaging issues… I’m not sure). Loading the firmware was really the only way I was going to find out if it met the last requirement. And by that, I really mean the ability for me to use things like Apple Remote Desktop from home, and have ports open appropriately. m0n0wall does not do this reliably. The biggest issue is that I had to do a lot of the configuration and testing without it being my primary router (I didn’t want to take my network down for install/testing). So, in short, I ended up moving back and forth between Tomato, DD-WRT, Merlin, and the stock Asus firmware at least half a dozen times before putting the whole thing down, forgetting, and then remembering I’d decided on Tomato at the end.

Then yesterday, I put Tomato back on the RT-N16, and configured it for IPv6, Internal DNS, DDNS, etc and installing it. All told, my network was down less than 5 minutes, and it seems to be working great. It fit very well on my garage “network” pegboard with some zip ties, and it just seems to work. I, of course, had to tell the Airport Extreme it was just a Bridge at that point, but that was quick and painless (though it does take a very long time to reboot for some reason). All functionality that I required seems to be working, including IPv6 (though for Comcast, you want to set it to DHCPv6 with Prefix delegation and leave the rest at defaults).

All and all, I’ve very happy. I will need to rearrange the pegboard soon as I can’t see the lights on the router at all, but for now, it works!

[xrr rating=5/5]