Lazy Man and Money

Double Deal Monday!

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Regular readers know that I rarely post twice in the same day. The only thing that happens less often is me posting about a deal. There are a lot of deals out there and so many deal sites do a much better rounding them up than I ever could.

However, today I’m going for a daily double as I’m going to do both those rare things. Fittingly, I have two deals to share.

The first deal is one you might have already seen. Amazon has put their Echo on sale for $130. However if you add two of them to your cart and use promo code “ECHO2PACK”, they should come up at $160. That’s only for today (7/24/2017), so if you are reading this on some other day… sorry… but move on to the second deal that is available all week.

The $160 price for 2 is $80 a piece (that kind of math is why they pay me the big bucks). I got mine when they first came out taking advantage of the special promo to nab one at $99. For the first time since then, it seems Amazon is making them available cheaper (albeit only if you buy in a little bulk). If you have a big home that can make two of them then great. If not, you can probably put the one you don’t need on Ebay and get around $80 back. If you can’t get $80 back, then the real deal is just to wait and pick up a new one on Ebay for $75. Oh and if you use my Echo link, I may make a few dollars from Amazon at no cost to you.

The second deal is from Aldi. If you don’t have that chain of grocery stores near you, you have my sympathies. Also, you might still want to read on, I predict there might be a flood of these on Ebay.

Aldi has a Crofton Expandable Salad Storage Box and a Crofton Expandable Bento Box each for $3.99. What are these things? Crofton is an Aldi-owned brand. In this case it looks like Crofton bought a bunch of product from Cool Gear and stuck a new label on it… oh and GREATLY lowered the price.

For example, the *cough* Crofton Salad Storage Box looks exactly like this Cool Gear one. Same color and everything. You could pay $13.02 for that product which everyone seems to love, but I’d rather pay $3.99 for something with a different label.

The *cough* Crofton Bento Box looks exactly like this Cool Gear one. There aren’t as many reviews on this one, but if you are at Aldi, you get to hold it in your hand and try it out. I did and may have bought one or two (or maybe not if my wife is reading this). Again, I’d rather pay $3.99 than $15.

What I like best about these is that the middle is a freezer tray. They claim it will keep your food cold for 4 hours, which should be long enough to get to work or for a kid’s lunch. They are both dishwasher safe (top shelf only) and microwave safe (just in case you are the type to microwave your salad).

I’m trying to be more conscious of how much single use plastic I use. I’m hoping that the Bento Box will help me send the kids to school with a lot less wrapping to throw out. We’ll see if it works out.

Deal: Pick Up a $95 Amazon Echo Today…

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This will be another quick article since I’m on vacation.

If you use an Amazon store card and use promo code “ECHODEAL” as described here an Amazon Echo is only $95.

If you don’t have the required credit cards, you can probably get one and buy the Echo at the same time. If you do a lot of shopping at Amazon, you’ll probably want to get one of those cards for the cashback anyway.

I bought one when it first became available. I’ve written a Amazon Echo Review and even revisited Amazon Echo. For those too lazy to read the reviews, it’s best described as Siri or Cortana, but always on, always plugged in, and not very mobile. Sounds useless, right? I find it is very useful to play music, especially from Amazon Prime, Pandora, or even my favorite radio station.

It’s good fun for the kids too. Just ask it to spell words. If you really want to put it to work, ask it to spell a a long word from Mary Poppins.

It does a lot more things. In fact, I get so many emails about new features that I can’t keep up with trying them all.

Usually, the Amazon Echo is a lot more money… it’s been as much as $200. So to get one for $95 is a sizable discount. I think that’s a fair price for my use. If I ever figure out how to use those extra features, it could be worth a good deal more.

Finally, (and this is unrelated to the article), raise a toast to veterans who help protect our freedom. I like to make a donation to the USO.

Amazon Echo, Revisited

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Last year (by a few hours), I reviewed Amazon Echo (read the review).

The Echo is an odd device that doesn’t seem to sit any existing category of consumer electronics. It is a digital information assistant like Apple’s Siri, Google’s “Okay Google”, or Microsoft’s Cortana. However, it isn’t designed to be portable. It also wasn’t released with a large base of knowledge. It is still far, far behind of the those Big Three phone platforms.

Instead of being portable it has very good speakers and microphones. It’s always listening for the key word, “Alexa” that tells it to pay attention to the next command. I’ve had it work from over 30 feet away when there are no other distracting sounds.

When I last reviewed the Echo, I was one of the first people to receive it. It couldn’t do too much more than play music. And the music was mostly limited to Amazon’s Prime library. It has Bluetooth, so I could pair it with my phone and run music through that. It works fine, except when you do that Alexa (the Echo) becomes kind of dumb. I can’t tell it to find the Aerosmith MP3s on my phone and play them.

You could do a few other things such as tell Alexa to set a timer or add an item to a shopping list. (Unfortunately, the shopping list wouldn’t work with Wunderlist, where I keep my lists).

In short, the Echo could do quite a few different things, but nothing particularly great. I bought in because I liked the concept and put some faith behind Amazon’s engineers being able to expand what it can do.

Since that review, Amazon has sent me regular updates of what they’ve added. Here’s a few of them:

  • Sports scores – This was kind of a no-brainer. I’m almost surprised it didn’t launch with them.
  • Traffic information – You have to set up your standard commute online first, but then you can simply ask, “Alexa, what is the traffic like?” Since I work from home, this isn’t particularly useful to me, but it could be handy for a few people.
  • Link Your Pandora account – This was a big one for me because I listen to Pandora more than my own music collection of MP3s.

I want to expand on that last one a bit. It is so much easier to ask Alexa to “play my Pandora” station than in it is to use any app. When I use the Amazon Fire TV Stick in my bedroom, I have to turn on the television, switch the source to the TV stick, and then navigate to the Pandora application. While the Fire TV stick has other advantages, score a win for the Echo for playing my music as soon as I can think about it.

These are all small changes to things that the Echo could do out of the box.

There’s one more big addition that has come about since my original review. The Echo can actually controlling items in your home.

For example Echo now works with Belkin’s WeMo Switch to allow you to turn on and off appliances. That might not be the most exciting thing in the world, but has been the basic building block of home automation for years.

The other thing that Echo can do is work with Philips Hue Lightbulbs. These bulbs are clearly for the “early adopter” audience. The bulbs change colors and can even sync with shows like 12 Monkeys on the Syfy network (which you should definitely catch). It’s out of my budget for the novelty, but it would be interesting to see my room’s change lighting with the action of my television. The Red Forest on the show was freaky enough without my whole room turning red.

The Echo can’t change the colors of the light bulbs right now. It is limited to turning them on and off and dimming them.

Again, this isn’t super-exciting, but it is baby steps. I don’t think locking and unlocking doors is too far away. If you have a lock that is wifi enabled, I would expect it to be coming down the pick any day now.

What I’m really hoping for though is for Alexa to read my email to me as I make breakfast. (If you are concerned about the privacy risk here, there are ways that it can be implemented without that issue.) I’d like it to work with my calendar. Tell me what appointments I have when I ask and add appointments when I tell it what to add.

If the Echo can work with my Pandora station there should be no limitation to working with my other accounts. Maybe in 6 months, I’ll be writing another review to tell you about it.

Amazon Echo Review

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Late at night on Christmas Eve, Amazon Claus dropped off a mysterious gift at our house. It was raining and the box was a mess of wet cardboard. I opened it up and was pleased to find the box was simply black with no markings of any kind. It was perfect to slip under the tree as it was.

The wife didn’t know what it was… for that I was thankful. She is not a fan of my electronic gadget purchases (remember “You bought a $60 Ball?!?!”). I could only imagine what she’d say about this.

“This”, of course is the new Amazon Echo. This reviewer explains it best as a “Tower of Siri.” It’s not really Apple’s Siri, since it is Amazon, but it is kind of like Siri. You ask it stuff and she answers it or performs the task.

Since this functionality comes for free with any major smartphone, I could only imagine how the conversation would go when I said that I paid $99 for it. I prepared myself with arguments based around how it would help our sons develop speech as he’s just starting to really pick up a lot of words at 27 months.

However, a strange thing happened, something that never occurred to me. My wife LIKED the Amazon Echo. I needed no explanations or defenses.

In my opinion it is perhaps the most interesting technology since the tablet. Quite honestly, I find it more interesting than tablets were when they were introduced. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I have degrees in computer science and linguistics. Amazon Echo combines both of those disciplines with its speech recognition and its syntax and semantic parsing of instructions.

Unfortunately, right now the Echo is very limited in what it can do. It answers simple questions like “What’s the weather?” You can ask it to define or spell words and get answers. However, the most useful thing thus far for me is the access to the Amazon Prime’s Music library. I simply tell her to play Aerosmith and I get Aerosmith. I tell it to play The Doors and I get The Doors.

The downside is that the music is only as good as Prime’s library. I tell it to play Weezer and it played one song before quitting. It would be great if I could hook in other music sources such as a library stored on my computer or even Pandora, but neither of them is available yet.

The technology isn’t perfect either. I asked it to play Liz Phair and it proceeded to look for a music “list” called “fair.” It couldn’t find that. I worked around this by asking it to “Play music from the artist Liz Phair.” That worked much better. When I don’t have the television on, it picks up my voice from 20 feet away. When I have the television on, I can be 5 feet away from it, and it won’t hear me. I’m hoping this gets improved over time.

The Echo has been reviewed by a few technology sites and most say that the speaker is nothing special. I don’t have top of the line JamBoxes or Sonos systems in my house. I’m not an audiophile by any definition, but it sounds good to me. My wife didn’t have any complaints about the sound either.

I’m hopeful that there will be an application that I can run on the computer that controls my television. It would be great to tell Alexa to play certain movies or switch channels. It would also be great if it could control the NEST thermostat in my house. I think this integration will come, but it will take a little time to iron out all the partnerships.

Final Thoughts

I’ve read a number of reviews of the Amazon Echo. They are all over the map. Some say that it is a solution looking for a problem. Others say that it is “a perfect 10” such as the ZDNet review I mentioned above. I think both arguments have merit. Currently, Echo is limited, but what it does, it does extraordinarily well.

As much as I hate to admit it, so much technology complicates our lives. The complexity has seemed to give it more points of failure. Every new gadget seems to require a learning curve. Amazon’s Echo is fairly unique in that it strips away complications. Except in rare cases (such as the Liz Phair one), I don’t have to think about how to get it to do what I want. I simply ask it to pause or resume music. I never looked up whether these commands would work… I just tried them and they worked.

I’m not sure if you should buy it or not. If you are an Amazon Prime member, I say it’s certainly worth the $99. I think you’d nearly pay this for the quality of the speaker itself. If you are not, and it is $199, I’d say that it early adopters will probably like. The general public might want to wait until it can do a few more things.