My wife spent the weekend sick and I think has passed whatever she had onto me. So the end result was last night both of us came home from work completely dead and ready to go to sleep. We managed to last until around 8 pm before hitting the sack, and then slept the entire night through without interruptions. This is not exactly normal for us and as a result I feel a little weird after getting all of that sleep. As far as gaming went I managed to complete the daily key challenge in Anthem before logging out… thankful that you can bank keys for a later time. Shortly after that I attempted to play some more Breath of the Wild and managed to get the outfit needed to sneak into Gerudo Town… but could not stay conscious long enough to actually do that thing. It was around this time that my wife showed visible signs of succumbing to sleep… when in truth I had been quietly nodding off the entire time we were sitting in the living room. Basically I had a very unproductive night gaming wise, but I hope the sleep helps because she sounds miserable… and I am starting to feel that way.
This weekend I got wrapped up in the Magic the Gathering Mythical Invitational happening at Pax East, which is weird considering I generally bounce off of all e-sports streams. However I watched most of the finals on Sunday strangely compelled and finding myself actually rooting for one of the players. What was interesting about this specific format is that it all happened inside of MTG Arena, meaning there was no need for a judge and limited stalling tactics… the end result being very rapid matches given that most of the mechanical stuff was being taken care of by the game. What was also interesting about the roster specifically is it was a mix of Magic Pro League players, 8 Qualifiers that came up from the ladder play on Arena, and a mixture of notable streamer types. So this could have played out a bunch of ways, but if you were a gambler you probably would have bet on one of the battle hardened MPL players to take hope the trophy. However what happened in truth was something slightly more interesting. The final ranking looked a little bit like this…
Andrea Mengucci – MPL member
Piotr Głogowski – MPL member
Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen – Challenger – Mostly known as a Hearthstone Streamer
Ondřej Stráský – Challenger – Top 8 MTG Arena Qualifier
So yes at the end of the day Magic Pro League players took the first two slots… however they absolutely gave them a run for their money. Savjz especially played some matches that could have gone either way and like so many Magic matches it wound up coming down to card draw and top decking. I think this even more than probably anything was a chance for WotC to show that Arena players could in fact compete in the MPL and I wonder if at some point in the future we will see all MPL matches played out using the Arena client. The difference in speed was noticeable as well as the match being way easier to follow for the viewers at home. When watching a normal Magic match, things are happening so fast that you are largely entirely reliant upon the announcers to tell you what is actually happening. Here you can see both sides and the what the players have in their hands as well… and as a result it leads to way more tension as you know what the other player has as an answer to the play that the active player is about to make.
The other cool thing about the tourney is it gave them an opportunity to show off the cosmetic changes to the client including the introduction of special full art skins that you can get for various cards. The game also launched without card sleeve art that is so popular in games like Hearthstone. Throughout the game play they announced redeemable codes over Twitch that allows the players watching at home to pick up some of the things. Here is what I believe is a full list of the codes that are redeemable.
StarterStyles – The Pack Shown in Screenshot
SparkleDruid – Druid of the Cowl
SuperScry – Opt
ParallaxPotion – Revitalize
FoilFungus – Deathbloom Thalid
ShinyGoblinPirate – Fanatical Firebrand
Additionally they are starting to add the cosmetic rewards to various events. Now the interesting thing about a cosmetic is that if you don’t already have the card… you seem to also get the card when you collect its appearance. During one of the various redeems I did not actually have a copy of whatever card it was granting me and the game made a note that I was getting one of that specific card. I fully expect that there to be more cosmetics surrounding the release of the War of the Spark. That is probably a whole other topic however and I am running out of time this morning so going to wrap this post up. I really think Wizards of the Coast finally understands what it takes to make a viable product for the internet age, and I look forward to seeing what happens surrounding the Arena client and future tournaments. This was probably quite literally the first time I cared about anything e-sports related, so good on them.
This morning we are going to do something a little bit different from the normal fare. If you have read this blog for any length of time you know I have specific opinions of brand partnerships. However at the start of the year I was contacted by Anker Innovations to see if I was interested in reviewing any of the products in their Eufy product line. Now I have specific requirements when I consider reviewing a product. First and most important, I expect to have full control over the process and want to make sure that I am not getting into a situation where the vendor is expecting a fluff piece out of me. Secondly it should be something that I am actually interested in, and that I think my readers would actually be interested in.
The Need
To the first point Anker was extremely open to however I wanted to review the product, and to the second point I’ve had a want for years that one of their products solves. Our house offers some odd problems, and one of them is the fact that there is a door length window beside the front door. As such there is no angle of approach that the person on the other side of the door cannot see you. This is an issue if you want to stealthily see if you actually want to open that door, and to complicate this there are often times I am upstairs in my office when the doorbell rings. Additionally there are times when my wife is home alone and as such we have been looking for a solution that allowed us to check who is out there before making an effort to answer.
The challenge in our case however is that we don’t have a great source of power on the front porch. There are a number of doorbell replacement options that would normally work in this situation, however in our house the doorbell is not in a forward facing position but instead is on the sidewall of the porch. This means that even with a crazy fisheye lens set up that most of those have… I would be capturing a picture of the persons backside and not be able to see face or anything to actually identify who was there. So as a result this has largely just sat as an unfilled want… that is until Anker contacted me about the EufyCam E.
The Product
The claim of the EufyCam E is that you can effectively charge it once a year, and from that point forward it only needs connectivity to your wireless network to dial back in to the home base unit. This seemed to fit my need perfectly, so I agreed to participate in the review process. A few days later the package arrived on my doorstep drop shipped from Amazon. I unpacked everything in the box so you could have a visual reference for what all comes with the unit. Here is a breakout list of everything you see above.
Eufy Security Base Unit
EufyCam E Security Camera
Indoor Magnetic Mount
Outdoor Swivel Mount
Mounting Hardware with Anchors
Slimline Ethernet Cord (approximately 4 foot)
Power Adapter for Base Unit
Home Security Sticker
Quick Start Guide
16 Gigabyte SD Card (pre-installed in base unit)
The magnetic mount works extremely well, and quite honestly I am not sure why it is not considered to be outdoor compatible. However I personally chose to use the outdoor mount since I would be placing the camera attached to the ceiling of my front porch and hanging down looking at the front door. There is effectively a third usage mode that is not necessarily covered in the very limited quick start guide, but the device itself has a thick grippy rubber pad on the solid flat underside so you could in theory place it on a bookshelf or other similar surface. There are some challenges with this that I will get into later.
The Setup
The Setup of the device is largely straight forward and while there is a quick start guide, the bulk of the instruction resides within the Eufy Security App that is available through both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. You need to connect the base unit to your wired network, and for most folks this will mean placing it beside your wireless router. There are some challenges surrounding this, but again I am collecting those into their own section of this review. Once powered on the device will find your network and the light on the front will turn white signifying that it is ready to be configured. This is where the mobile app comes into play, and the above screenshot shows off some of the screens that it walks you through in the process of getting configured.
Once the home base has been configured you can then add a device, and since this kit comes with a single EufyCam E, I configured that but it appears to support a wide range of other devices that may not yet be on the market. Once again you are given a sequence of screens to walk through as you go through the mounting process including one that gives you a live preview to assist in placement. I did not screenshot this sequence as I was a little busy trying to attach the mounting hardware in the position that I actually wanted it. The above picture shows the placement of my unit and because of the angle of the overhang and the relatively small size of the EufyCam E unit it also makes it largely undetectable from the street. The connection is nice and sturdy and fairly easy to preposition, while at the same time not being too easy that it is susceptible to the pull of gravity.
The Functionality
The EufyCam E comes with motion detection functionality, and the app does a good job of alerting you any time it senses motion. After using it for a bit it does a fairly good job at not being triggered by things like leaves blowing across the field of view. It also has let me know that the outdoor cats that I have talked about more than a few times on the blog are coming to visit way more often than I realized. The above video is an example of the short clips that are stored each time it detects motion. These are stored to the SD Card on the base unit and can be exported to a directory on your phone.
It also seems to do a really good job of handling low light situations and switches into a black and white image like the above picture that I exported last night. Of note… there is no light at all on my front porch and I had turned off the inside light just to see how well it handled little to no ambient light. All in all I am pretty happy with the device and its functionality. It is currently in a pre-release state and as such I have not been able to find any real world pricing on it. Anker lists the device as $259.99 as its Manufacturer Suggested Retail price, but ultimately the market will determine how much of a discount is applied to that in retail. For my needs it does what I wanted it to… provided a camera that I can use to check the front door without needing wired connectivity back to either network or power.
The Challenges
The biggest problem I had with the EufyCam E and its Home Base unit is the fact that there is very limited documentation. I covered the golden scenario as far as set up goes, but when I went through all of those steps and encountered problems… there was nothing in the very slim manual to actually help me through troubleshooting the process. The first challenge is as I said before… the home base device requires an Ethernet connection and since most of us do not have RJ45 or fiber run through our walls that means you are going to snuggle this up beside your wireless router. This meant the Home Base was located fairly centrally in my house, but not necessarily close to where I would be using the camera.
Upon the initial set up I kept encountering a problem where the EufyCam E stated that it had limited to no connectivity back to the home base. This made no sense to me as standing on my front porch I had full bars of wifi on my phone and pretty much any other device that I drug out there. So when it said it had limited connectivity, it must not have mean’t wifi. I theorized that I needed to move the Home Base closer to where I would be using the camera and as such needed to figure out how to get a wired connection elsewhere.
Now if you have read this blog for awhile you will be familiar with my Wireless Ethernet post, where I took an AC1200 wireless repeater and used it as a very heavy duty wireless dongle. I happened to have a spare one of these and opted to install it near the entertainment center which is about 8 foot away from the front door. After some fiddling and rearranging, I got the Home Base installed there and sure enough this immediately resolved any connectivity I had between the EufyCam E and the Home Base. So not only does this mean that you need a wired connection for the Home Base… but that wired connection needs to be pretty close to where you intend to actually use the EufyCam E.
This was something that I could personally mitigate because I happened to have spare hardware on hand that I could utilize, but this might prove to be more of a challenge for other users given its very “quick startup” approach on the documentation that expects everything to follow the ideal path. If I could change anything about the device I would beef up that documentation and make it clear to the consumers that you have to have that base station within a very short distance from the EufyCam E. That also presents the challenge of how this would function in a multi-cam set up.
The Conclusion
I traveled down this path in part because I trusted the Anker name. I went through my Amazon purchases before sitting down to write this post and over the years I have picked up a dozen or so products by this company. They range from spare batteries to replacement chargers and even a usb-c dock, all of which have worked just as well as I expected them to. They were also willing to let me review the product however I chose and gave me the freedom to say whatever I wanted about it. I had a need to fill, which was to provide some sort of a security camera cable of watching the front porch without the need for running dedicated network or power. In all of those the EufyCam E has lived up to my needs and I find it downright useful to be able to check the front door from bed when the motion sensor trips.
The downsides however are the fact that it is designed for an ideal scenario where you have conduit in the walls with network connectivity run to every room. Most of us have our wireless router in a back office somewhere and not necessarily close to the area where you would want a security camera. So that means that most users are probably going to need to do some fiddling to make it work. Essentially you are trading the hassle of getting dedicated power and network run to the location of the camera… to doing some internally rerouting to make the device fit the need. All of that said though… I like it quite a bit and will probably be looking to add a second camera or two for the back of the house when The EufyCam E starts being sold retail.
If the $259.99 price point is within your budget, this product does a good job of what it is supposed to do. I of course will provide updates as I live with it over the coming months. I can probably wrangle some discount codes in the future if any of my readers are interested in that sort of thing. Now I need to stop writing and go put out some food on the front porch… since during this entire process my ticwatch has been buzzing and one of the outdoor cats keeps checking to see if I have fed yet.
Last night I had to do some World of Warcraft maintenance, in that I had allowed my Emissary quest to stack up for three days and was about to start losing them. I fairly joylessly burned through those, then decided to take a chance at a 370 piece of loot from the Warfront that is now open to Horde players. I still find those pretty fun but ultimately wound up with disappointment in that I got a 370 item in a slot I already had one. You would think they could factor in the gear that the player has when they give those extremely limited time rewards like that… because since it is ultimately a shot at loot every three weeks… please give us something we can use.
From there I popped into Monster Hunter World where I largely did some maintenance there as well. I spent most of the night farming up zenny so that I could buy the Power Charm, which is an item that takes up a bag slot but gives you a pretty potent damage boost. I had already purchased the Armor Charm which does the same thing, but for your defense stat. These apparently open up once you have fought the Zorah Magdaros final form and cost 24,000 zenny for the Armor Charm and 36,000 zenny for the Power Charm. Later through the magic of crafting you will be able to turn these into Talons… and then re-buy the Charms again… but for now I should be set for the early High Rank content. I’m up to the Tickled Pink quest which is to hunt a High Rank Anjanath, which I simply was not ready to deal with mentally last night and wound up wandering off to do other things.
Instead I popped over to burn through some quests in MTG Arena, where I seemed to have a ton that wanted me to cast White spells. I had picked up the Eternal Thirst deck as one of my freebies, and I decided to start playing around with it. I have to say… for a weird Cats and Vampires concept I am really digging it. Unless you are also playing against a deck with stupid life gain powers… you can do some come from behind nonsense with this one. I feel like I need to tune it a bit and swap some cards, and could ultimately make a super powerful deck out of it. For the purpose of questing though… it had plenty of white cards so it allowed me to whittle that down in a few turns. This morning I noticed I had another freebie deck available and unlocked the Blue/Green Merfolk deck… which included a single copy of one of my favorite cards… Jadelight Ranger. I am hoping that one of the decks they end up throwing my way is the Explore matters deck that we originally had in Alpha. Mostly I don’t want to spend the proxies on rebuilding it if they are going to give me like 90% of the cards in a few weeks as we keep rotating through unlocking free decks.
At this point we are up to 41 blogs signed up for Blaugust in one form or another, with a significant number of folks hanging out in the Discord just for the sake of fun that we may be able to sway one way or another. I am super happy with this early participation, and in side conversations there are a bunch of folks on the fence trying to determine just how much they can afford to participate themselves this year. In that always be plugging style of conversation… if you are at all interested in starting up a blog now is the time to do it. Pop on by the sign up form and let us know your information and we will do our best to support you through that early blogging experience. This is of course also an open offer as well to folks who are currently blogging and just want to up their frequency of posting… or really want to help mentor the next crew of bloggers.
Since I last posted updates there have been a few new entries and you can see the entire list in an easy to use google sheet that I have been maintaining.
The official pre-week starts on July 25th so there is still plenty of time to get a blog up and running before the official August 1st start.
There are times where I have the sort of luck that pisses my friends off. For example I have pulled a couple of those ultra rare chase cards from Battle for Zenndikar and Kaladesh, just buying random single packs here and there. Magic the Gathering just released its return to core sets with M19 and there are a bunch of interesting cards in it… namely a much needed reprint of Crucible of Worlds and brand new version of the classic legends era dragons. Ultimately I would like to have a copy of each for eventual EDH brewing purposes, and as a result I picked up a fat pack on Friday in my post funeral travels. Now a fat pack has 10 packs and seems to be for lack of a better term a partial piece of what would have normally been a full box.
They tend to be feast or famine, either you get the good end of the rare/mythic sheet or you don’t. In this case I managed to pull 4 mythics out of those ten packs. I took the above photo to show off everything that came out of that box, with the last two on the left side being just a couple of cool looking common foils. I found it weird that I got a duplicate rare out of the batch so maybe they are doing the fat packs different than they have done before. I was extremely excited that I managed to pull a Crucible of Worlds and at least two of the three color dragons. Unfortunately I did not pull the big daddy of them all… Nicol Bolas, the Ravager. I still consider this an insanely lucky box, and walked away mighty happy with it.
As far as the rest of the weekend… it was largely spent hanging out and playing some Elder Scrolls Online. I have now officially finished the Orsinium content and wow… I am exceedingly impressed with the quality. If that is at all representative of what I have to expect from the follow up releases, then I am going to be a very happy boy. I’ve since started on the Thieves Guild which is the next content release in order… having largely skipped Imperial City due to its PvEvP nature. I did however spent a chunk of last night running around and collecting Skyshards out in Cyrodil.. I am sure frustrating someone who was there to try and take keeps and mile forts. The only actual PVP I got into was being found by a roaming murderball of Ebonheart Pact players… at which point my screen froze and I crashed out of the game only to come back very dead.
The most fun however was prior to that when I was roaming around in Coldharbor with Ashgar and Tamrielo doing the public dungeon there. It all started simple enough… the three of us on Voice Chat when Ash mentioned mostly to himself that he was going to ignore the Public Dungeon for now until he could come back with a group. I said that I had not done the public dungeon there for the same reason and Tam chimed in that he had largely been avoiding any group content. Before long the three of us were converging upon Ash’s location and doing the public dungeon which had two quests inside of it. Additionally we realized that there were a bunch of optional bosses in various corners of the place and we set forth to take each and every one down earning us a conqueror achievement.
I kinda love that this game does not care at all about where a player is in the progression, and that you can pretty much just group in for whatever happens to be going on. I abused this power to help Void get some crafting materials by porting myself to Windhelm and then letting him piggy back in on that to get the shrine there. I love that this game has decided that horizontal progression is the way to go because it has allowed me to invest resources in a really nice set of gear knowing I won’t be upgrading it anytime soon. I love that I can just do whatever happens to cross my path and still feel like I am moving towards a goal in the form of Champion points… knowing that I am also adding progression to every single character as I go. I am very happy with the current state of Elder Scrolls Online.
