Amazon Prime Day 2019

[AggieMike88]

Anyone finding any useful deals on Amazon Prime Day they wish to share with the group?

 

[denverpilot]

They’re not the best cameras or the best system out there but I’ve been wanting to play with the (Amazon owned) Blink XT2 camera system for a while now.

Saved quite a bit on the 5 camera system plus the required Blink Hub. That plus a giant pack of the needed Lithium AAs, three mounts, and one outlet plug hanger for the hub since it’ll need to be centrally located, was $309 with tax. If I don’t like it, selling it won’t require taking much of a loss, if any.

A friend who’s into the Google ecosystem noticed they fought back with their Google Nest Hub half off through WalMart and other Google Home stuff.

If Amazon would quit crippling the crap out of their tablets, they’d make for great touchscreen wall devices for home automation, but as it stands you have to jack around side-loading the Google Play store and such just to get various apps on them that then run poorly due to their limited hardware. They need to make their OS a tad more Android friendly. The constant war between the two companies is annoying at best.

Also almost did an Echo Show 5 at $50. That’s about all it’s worth if that, and I decided it’s still too useless to bother. (Was rubbing it would be nice to see the cameras with it but the FireTV sticks can do it, so who cares? Don’t do enough video calls to justify that feature and would have to use the Skype integration (at least they did that) to truly have a video calling platform that works for all callers. With crappy rural bandwidth the upstream sucks for video anyway so... not much point, and I took it out of the cart. Ha. Just viewing the camera clips remotely or live will probably crush my network pipe anyway since they have to upload for that to work.

The correct system for here would be the Eufy cams for a completely WiFi setup and locking up the hub securely since it has write-to-SD-card capability *at the hub*, or a system that stores everything in a local NAS, also secured AND any clips triggered by movement (slowly) copied off-site.

But we’ll give the cheap-o system a try and see. I can’t even think about anything like Ring with our crappy upstream pipe.

Seems like that’s always the best deals on these type of days is Amazon’s own hardware. I almost never buy their hardware away from one of their sales. Saves a ton if you’re in the Amazon ecosystem.

 

[denverpilot]

Annnnd... Amazon waited until delivery day (today which was bad enough) to tell me they need my “approval” to push delivery of the cameras into August.

Way to go Amazon. Weren’t quite ready for the orders dropping the price that much would create?

Or finding bugs/problems with the already delivered ones?

Who knows. I’m thinking about it for now.

“Updated delivery estimate: August 14.
Your approval required by: August 12.”

Bah. Gives me time to shop around again for something that works with Blue Iris and a NAS with my crappy Internet upload speeds.

If you’re going to snag people with a major discount on Prime Day into buying a venerable camera system with distinct flaws, you’d better be ready to ship them. ‘Cause that trick don’t work if I find the right system for a rural house with crap bandwidth upstream... hahaha.

 

[chartbundle]

My crappy chinese camera system has the cameras respond to motion and upload to my 'NAS' and then the NAS has a custom sweep script that uploads interesting stuff off-site when it feels like it.

Sure, there's a window between when a camera sees you and when you could cut the Internet cable, but oh well.

If I were really paranoid I'd setup a tiny all-flash NAS and embed it in a wall/crawl space/attic/bury it outside where it could never be found.

 

[flhrci]

If you’re going to snag people with a major discount on Prime Day into buying a venerable camera system with distinct flaws, you’d better be ready to ship them. ‘Cause that trick don’t work if I find the right system for a rural house with crap bandwidth upstream... hahaha.

When they get their satellite internet going, you will probably have to subscribe. They have you where they want you! And they will probably be the only way the common man can get into space to! LOL

 

[flhrci]

@denverpilot You aren't making porn video with this stuff are you?

 

[JOhnH]

Annnnd... Amazon waited until delivery day (today which was bad enough) to tell me they need my “approval” to push delivery of the cameras into August.

Way to go Amazon. Weren’t quite ready for the orders dropping the price that much would create?

Or finding bugs/problems with the already delivered ones?

Who knows. I’m thinking about it for now.

“Updated delivery estimate: August 14.
Your approval required by: August 12.”

Bah. Gives me time to shop around again for something that works with Blue Iris and a NAS with my crappy Internet upload speeds.

If you’re going to snag people with a major discount on Prime Day into buying a venerable camera system with distinct flaws, you’d better be ready to ship them. ‘Cause that trick don’t work if I find the right system for a rural house with crap bandwidth upstream... hahaha.

I'm sort of guessing the problem may have been related to the work stoppage of Amazon employees that are demanding more than $15/hour for warehouse work.

 

[denverpilot]

When they get their satellite internet going, you will probably have to subscribe. They have you where they want you! And they will probably be the only way the common man can get into space to! LOL

Thought that was Musk the Business Bankruptcy Man doing that? LOL.

@denverpilot You aren't making porn video with this stuff are you?

Lord no. If I was, I could afford MUCH better cameras and models than me.

I'm sort of guessing the problem may have been related to the work stoppage of Amazon employees that are demanding more than $15/hour for warehouse work.

Probably.

For fun I looked and that would have been $8/hr when I started working skill-less jobs in the beginning of the 90s. Minimum wage back then was $4.25/hr and I made that at one job, less than that at another job (restaurant work - not serving though so tips were poor and magically our back room share disappeared or dwindled before we ever saw it), and I got all excited about $5.25 at the third job.

Which would be $9.87/hr today.

The old timers who didn’t leave those jobs might have been to the equivalent of $15/hr after ten years there.

And of course at the airline they had flight bennies back in the day when loss factors weren’t maximized by computers quite yet and you could actually use them on days off. Having beers on a beach in Mexico was a couple of times a month event for most of them. On a Tuesday. Without taking time off.

I wonder if that’s even possible for the ramp rats of today. I should have taken more advantage of it, but with two other jobs it was difficult, and I had airplanes that needed renting.

 

[Unit74]

Only NAS I know about.....