A few weeks back I got a DM out of the blue from whoever manages the ParsecTeam twitter account. Essentially they said that since I talk about Parsec all the time that they would like to send me a shirt as a sort of token of appreciation. So yesterday said shirt came in the mail so I thought I would post a picture of it here. It is REALLY bright blue, and the photo I took with it laying on the bed doesn’t exactly do it justice. Basically think how bright Twitch Purple is… but blue. I have this weird thing with products, in that I really only want to support the things that I truly believe in… and Parsec is definitely one of those given that I use it pretty much every night. I do not however have any sort of a formal relationship with the company and I am paying for services the same as anyone else. I opted into the Warp account thing more than anything as a way of helping fund development which I THINK is around $50 a year but I am not 100% certain of that.
The reason why I keep talking about Parsec is because it has been a game changer for me personally in opening up my options to play games on a system that effectively no longer supports decent gameplay. I’ve talked about this at length, so really don’t feel the need to dig back in this morning but if you are curious what I am talking about you can find the tales in these two posts: “In Home Streaming” and “Wireless Ethernet”. I guess throughout my life I have experienced a lot of things that I loved… that for whatever reason did not stand the test of time. As a result this has made me really want to show support for the things that products that make my life better. Parsec has definitely been one of those products and as such I keep mentioning it any time someone brings up wanting to swap around the way they game, or have a better mobile gaming option. I still would love to see native clients for the consoles, even if they can’t do bi-directional play and simply offers streaming from PC to console.
The thing I am the most curious about are the cloud options that they offer to rent. One of these days I am going to try out that Amazon Web Services g3.4xlarge even though I have no real need to do so. Mostly I am curious at just how viable it is for modern gaming and just how cost effective it would be to purchase one. If you were going to try and recreate my current gaming rig right now… even though it has some older parts in it… it would still cost around $2300. You could effectively game 24/7 for 52 days straight before you spent in cloud charges as you would on that system. My real question however is just how nice is the performance. At the moment I am streaming Parsec across my LAN with it configured to always try a local connection first, so I am not really sure how it is going to feel going out to AWS. One of these weekends when I don’t have another competing project I am going to give it a shot because I am super curious. I’m also curious what that big box feels like as compared to the much smaller specced $0.51/hour set up.
This morning went down a rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down. Originally I was going to make fun of my character in Assassin’s Creed Origins for somehow having two different bows, a battle axe, a sword and a shield slung across his back. Instead I talked more about Parsec, but legitimately I am going to try out the cloud option at some point. Mostly for folks that want to have a PC gaming experience a few hours a week without affording a PC… it might be a really cost effective solution. This is one of those things that I don’t need myself at all, but I would like to know how well it works before I offer it as a possible solution. I’m in a weird spot gaming wise where I am still playing a single player game, but not really feeling like I have much exciting to say about it. I’ve also been super exhausted this week, and need to wrap this up so I can get to work.
Yesterday during the day I posted a list of Ravnica guilds in order of my likelihood to play them. For the uninitiated the guilds themselves simply represent the various two color combinations that are available in Magic the Gathering. So instead of saying you are playing Black and Green… a lot of players simply say that they are playing Golgari as a not as short as saying GB sort of shorthand. The truth is I think it goes deeper than that and is instead a sort of tribalism that allows players to indicate that they are in fact “in the know” and part of the community. Whatever the case… they exist and I have certain proclivities. Here is my ordered list of guilds in decreasing likelihood that I would play that color combination.
Golgari – aka Green and Black
Gruul – aka Green and Red
Rakdos – aka Red and Black
Orzhov – aka White and Black
Selesnya – aka White and Green
Boros – aka White and Red
Simic – aka Blue and Green
Dimir – aka Blue and Black
Izzit – aka Blue and Red
Azorius – aka Blue and White
Later that night Kodra chimed in with a comment that I expected him to make at some point.
You notice that pretty much on my list every combination that includes the color blue is sorted to the very bottom as in general it is the color that I am least likely to play at any given time. Also note that pretty much any combination of Black and Green gets sorted pretty high given that those are my favorite colors to play. So why then do I hate one specific color of magic. The truth is I hate what it stands for… which is control magic. The challenge of the color pie is that in modern magic every color has specific themes that it excels at. Black for example plays with dead things, and also things that are just as likely to backfire and harm the player as the opponent. Green wants to go big and go fast and stomp stomp stomp stomp. Red wants to burn you… GIVE ME FUEL GIVE ME FIRE GIVE ME THAT WHICH I DESIRE! White does a bunch of things… but mostly small creatures with tricks, flyers and ways to prevent damage from being dealt. Blue on the other hand… while it also has a bunch of flyers… it excels at the magic of denial.
Now I will admit that pretty much every color has some form of denial built into it. Green is good at blowing up flyers and artifacts, Red can nuke stuff… black has a lot of straight up death to a creature cards, and white can throw creatures into time out exceptionally well. Blue however just has a lengthy library of ways to keep you from actually doing anything. If a control player is doing what they are intending to do… they effectively shut you down from being able to cast anything. This means that one player is having fun tormenting you… and the other player is frothing at the mouth and wanting to flip the damned table. Blue players tend to couch this commentary as that they like doing tricky things, but those tricks are played at the expense of someone else’s fun.
Don’t get me wrong I have played control before and fiddled around constantly with my “Mill” deck for years. For the uninitiated “Mill” is a deck style named after the card Millstone that forces the player to place the top two cards from their library into their graveyard. One of the alternate win conditions in Magic the Gathering is that when one player cannot draw a card they lose the game. So in Mill you are playing a constant stream of cards that force the player to discard over and over until they have nothing left. Right now there is a card called Persistent Petitioners that if you have 4 of them in play… can force the player to mill twelve cards at a time. Sure it is weird and entertaining the first time you encounter it… but if you keep encountering it the fun wears off for everyone but the person playing the deck. Ultimately the reason why I do not enjoy Blue… is because too often the fun of a control player comes at the expense of everyone else.
Of note this is also why I generally do not like broken combos like Krark-Clan Ironworks that if encountered you might as well just concede and move on with your life. There was an unlimited combo in Amonkhet that involved players creating a bajillion cat token creatures. The first time I encountered it… I let it play out just to see how nonsense it could get. Notice the opposing player has an army of token creatures… and is at 183 life to my 15. Once again this was entertaining the very first time I encountered it, but not at all from that point forward and if I even got the whiff on the wind of someone playing this combo… I could concede out and move on to the next match hoping for something more manageable. The players who love combos like this feel a sense of gratification for breaking the game… and everyone else just feels like the game is dumb for allowing something like that.
The times I am happiest playing Magic the Gathering is when you have some random back and forth interactions, the type that you see often among brand new players. I love two people sitting down with a bunch of random jank and hoping to succeed, and I guess that is why in general I prefer draft formats for the randomness. I’m working on a pauper singleton league at work as I have said before, in part because those constraints do a lot of things to stamp down power combos. If Arena had a format where they literally gave you a randomized deck that aligned to some basic color themes… that would probably be my favorite format ever. I think ultimately I am chasing the joy we felt first playing this game when we absolutely did not know any better and had six of us sitting around a table playing in a grand melee.
Today we return to my normal nonsense. Yesterday felt really weird, but not as weird as I guess I expected it to feel? I am still very much engaged in Assassin’s Creed Origins… or in the way that I play it… Egyptian Skyrim? I’ve made it to Giza and can now die happy… or actually at this point I have made it past Giza. Climbing to the top of the pyramids was an interesting challenge as you effectively had to work your way from gap in the capping to the next gap all the way up to the top. That is one of the bizarre things about this game… in some ways it feels very much like Breath of the Wild where it seems like you can climb everything in your view… until you suddenly can’t. When the game wants to cut off a route it makes something un-climbable which just feels really odd considering the rest of the game you are pulling off crazy moves that would be impossible to actually do in real life.
One of the mechanics that I both love and hate is the torch, because I am having to use it an awful lot here in Giza as I explore the depths of many tombs. It feels cool because in theory the torch shows about as much as you would expect from an actual torch. The negative however is the game knows this… and regularly presents you with rooms that have dimensions that do the torch no favors, and in those situations I find myself working around the edge in a vague attempted to not fall into some pit or something. So far I have not actually encountered an actual pit, but by god my mind knows that the moment I stop being vigilant… BAM A PIT. Additionally I love that the game shows me actually equipping weapons… but it really shows the nonsense of my inventory as I am equipping two different bows… a sword and shield… and a giant freaking battle axe.
Another thing we need to continue talking about is how freaking gorgeous this game is. I’ve always been enthralled by Egyptian history… and roaming around all of these locations in virtual avatar form is amazing. Memphis is pretty much how I imagined it… a swampy mess. I also love the fact that there is a dedicated croc hunter in a vague attempt to keep the waterways clear enough for the people to safely traverse. I am not entirely sure why I am on this single player kick, but I am going to roll with it at least until Anthem starts going through its pre-release posturing early next month. I will say… all of this is really making me want to pick back up Witcher 3, which is even less linear than Assassin’s Creed Origins… and quite literally something I could play for six months and never have seen everything. The biggest thing about this game…. is I am always happy to return again the next night.
So readers… what are you up to that is interesting? Playing anything great?
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.
