Blink Camera Review

Jan14

I live in a nice neighborhood but I always do have concerns about the possibility of ne’er-do-wells being on or near my property. And it’s an extra concern when I am away on vacation.

I’ve worked with video surveillance for the past 20 years and am well acquainted with video systems and have always wanted to put cameras on my property, but since I live in an old brick house and it is impossible to run power to the cameras.

But the great thing about technology is that it’s moving forward fast !!

So the first major requirement is to be battery operated. Cameras work on low voltage, but battery power is very limited. I looked around quite a while and found several possibilities, but they either required a payment for online storage or were too expensive.

I spoke to a coworker about home security cameras and he told me he had a Blink system at his house and found it to be quite capable. There is of course a phone app and he showed me the quality of the video and it was quite acceptable. It ran on two lithium AA batteries and the claim was that the batteries could last up to two years. It also had free online storage !!! It was limited storage but I would not have a need to retain historical video.

The cameras are indoor/outdoor and a three camera package ran around $300. I was willing to spend $100 on one camera system to test on my house.

It took a few weeks to get the camera mounted in the right place with the right angle to record what I wanted, but to not record unnecessary video that would waste the batteries. One of the most limiting parts of this camera was the fact that you could not “mask” areas so that motion would not trigger recording. You were only able to adjust the sensitivity based on distance.

BUT !!!!!

About a month ago Blink put out an update that allowed basic masking !!!

Woooooo!

Below is a good example of daytime video:

Below is an example of video at nighttime:

I even caught some “wildlife”:

Bottom line.

This is a fine camera for the price.

The good news is Blink is owned by Amazon, so there is a good chance the the camera system won’t be obsolete quickly but the bad news is Amazon owns Blink. (really not a huge fan of Amazon and it’s Liberal ideas/values/agenda)

Homemade Bacon !!!!

Jan11

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve made some homemade bacon.

One of the problems is the time. It takes a week to “cure” the pork belly in the fridge (yes, that really is rather simple), but because of the time it takes to smoke the bacon, it doesn’t take much to screw up the schedule at home and not have the time !!!

Well, that was certainly the case this time.

I had plenty of time off during the recent holidays but it was way too cold and wet for me to go outside and smoke.

So, instead I just did it inside in the oven.

As my daughter said, this was the best bacon so far !

Two things were done differently.

Obviously doing it in the oven gave me far better and consistent temperature control and also, I left the pork belly uncovered in the fridge overnight to get completely dry.

I also ended up making over six pounds of bacon, quite a bit of which I gave to some special people at work. You know you’re special if I share my bacon or ammo !!

Enjoy: