Author: Adam Fowler

AUTO-VOX W7 Wireless Backup Camera Kit Review

The team at AUTO-VOX kindly sent me out this kit to review. It’s a reverse camera for your car, with a wireless connection between the camera and display unit.

Here’s what you get in the box:

5″ LCD Monitor
Monitor holder suction cup
Camera with connector cable
Car Charger Line (3.5m long) – this goes from the cigarette lighter to the LCD monitor
Power box with antenna (this goes from the camera cable to power)
Manual (which was clearly written and easy to follow)

The kit works in two parts – the display just goes into a cigarette lighter and shows the camera feed whenever the camera is on.

The camera however, needs a 12v power source – which is of course what your car runs off of. The way this works is if it’s wired into the same area as your car’s reverse lights, then it’ll come on when you’re in reverse and stay off at other times. Of course you could wire it to something always on when the car is running and always have it on. The camera mount has double sided tape and a moving arm, so it’s pretty easy to find the right spot/angle for it on the car.

The screen has 3 buttons on the side – left, right, and enter, to control the menus. ‘Pair’ will pair the unit with the camera but I didn’t need to do this, it just worked out of the box. ‘B/C Control’ is brightness/contrast so you can have a picture suited to the light in the car. The ‘Mirror/Normal’ option flips the image depending how you mounted the camera. ‘Guide line’ lets you adjust the guide lines if the default setting isn’t quite right, and of course ‘Reset’ will reset the device.

The picture itself was clear enough, reasonable resolution but not 1080p – but more than clear enough to see what’s behind you.

The entire kit is easy to set up overall, with the only tricky bit getting the wiring sorted for the camera. Depending on your car you may have a hole you can feed the camera through behind the license plate.

One of the ideas I had for this unit was to put it on the front of my Tesla to make up for the inability to use the front camera when parking – but the wiring requirement made this a bit tricky. For that scenario, AUTO-VOX do have a different product available on Amazon.com that has hte same idea, but instead of requiring wiring for the camera, it has built in solar: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Y5MVFN4?th=1.

This unit is more suited to being a reversing camera only.

The AUTO-VOX W7 Wireless Backup Camera Kit is available to buy on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com.au/AUTO-VOX-Wireless-Monitor-Transmission-Suitable/dp/B07Q85NVV7

Meal Kits in Australia

Living a busy lifestyle, dinner time can be a bit of a pain – especially if you aren’t prepared and don’t have your plans ready to go. I’ve been diving into different Food Box options in Australia and thought I’d share my findings so far. I’ll keep this page updated as I try out more, and have my pick of the best (in my opinion) premade meals, and meal kits around price, value, and tastiness.

Premade Meals

Being able to quickly heat up and eat a pre-prepared meal sounds enticing, but if you’ve tried to do this with a frozen meal from the supermarket, it’s normally disappointing. These companies make fresh premade meals which is great for a busy lifestyle – but they need to be tasty enough to stick with them.

– The Rustic Kitchen (recommended #1)

These are my new favourite pre-made meal, beating out YouFoodz (although YouFoodz you can get cheaper with discounts). They are the most tasty of everything I’ve tried, a good variety of meals and they didn’t leave me feeling like I needed more food afterwards. Very fresh and reasonable use-by dates 1-2 weeks on the fresh options, they also have a frozen range.

Price Guide – 10 meal packs ranging from ~$110 to $125
No affiliate/discount deals, just go to their website: https://www.therustickitchen.com.au/

– YouFoodz (recommended #2)

Lots of meal options, change weekly, can pick amount you want. Food is individually portioned and heated in the microwave for a few minutes. Fresh and reasonably tasty (maybe a bit bland, but out of everything so far this is still the least bland!), but mix up your options when ordering and you can always add your own bits on top (sauces/egg etc). Useby dates varied from 1 – 2 weeks.
Price Guide – 12 meals per week | $9.99per serving before discount
Affiliate deal – Enjoy a total of $137 OFF throughout your first 3 boxes + Use/Activate Cashrewards first
Referrals – Easy, sign up and share links

Macros

A huge variety of meal options, but after trying, all were quite bland and the quality of the meat wasn’t as good as YouFoodz. The packaging seemed cheaper too, and all meals had a standard ‘2 1/2 to 3 1/2 minutes’ heating time where YouFoodz had the specific heating time for each meal (which varied). Feels like it’d be an even healther than YouFoodz too. The meals are fresh and had decent useby dates, all 2 weeks.

Price Guide – 15 Meals Per Week $10.95 per meal
Affiliate deal – Enjoy a total of $137 OFF throughout your first 3 boxes + Use/Activate Cashrewards first
Referrals – Hard, needs to go through third party application

– Lite n’ Easy

I found Lite n’ Easy meals to be too bland, but not quite as bland as Macros. They are more targeted at weight loss so may be a good fit for someone trying to achieve that goal rather than looking for the tasty/healthy mix of food. The meals I had were already frozen, so that may be a factor. Bonus that they came with actual ‘dry ice’ to play with – don’t let the kids touch that though.

Price Guide – 10 Dinners Only Pack $12.10 per meal
Referrals – Monthly cycling code from URL https://ww2.liteneasy.com.au/app_Rewards.aspx – Oct 2023 = RAF30%

– Chef Good

This one I would rate as the second best behind YouFoodz, but still found the meals a bit bland again. There is a wide variety to choose from, and worth trying if you want something a bit different than what YouFoodz offers. The meals were fresh and had good useby dates on them, but did seem a bit more mixed together in each individual container than other options.

Price – 10 Dinners $11.50 per meal
Affiliate Deal – Use code HONEY50 to get $30 Off on the 1st order and $20 off on the 2nd + Use/Activate Cashrewards first

Meal Kits

Meal kits are generally a nice way to not have to think about ‘what am I going to make’ or ‘what ingredients will I need to make something’ as both of these problems get solved. You don’t pay too much of a premium to have easy to follow recipes and matching food ready to go, compared to going to the supermarket. They are a great way to learn how to cook. Generally, these companies have good discounts to get you signed up, and I personally recommend jumping between them all and following the discounts. Once discounts are over, cancel and wait for the next discount offer to come in (you won’t be waiting long) and get back on board.

Usually, the meals take 30-45 mins to prepare and cook, and often need a few food staples at home – salt, pepper, oil, eggs, sauces etc. If you’re not used to cooking dinner every day, buying 5 meals a week and only having 5-6 days to cook them in before they expire may not work to your personal lifestyle and is something to consider due to the price per person per meal dropping the more you order weekly.

Hello Fresh

Hello Fresh is the most popular meal kit option by far in Australia (and the US) based on https://www.statista.com data for Nov 2022 (their most recent at time of writing). Marley Spoon and EveryPlate were distantly behind, but at similar market shares.

Meals are selectable on size – usually 2 or 4 people. The more meals and the more people (size), the cheaper the bundles are. The food is packaged into individual bags so it’s easy to get the ingredients required for each meal. Freshness can be a bit hit and miss, usually expiry dates on items included end in ~5 days. Meals can be chosen beforehand and the variety changes drastically each week.

Price Guide – Classic Plan example: 5 meals for 4 people $8.25 per serving before discounts
Affiliate deal – Claim Your Free Box + Use/Activate Cashrewards first

– EveryPlate (recommended)

Similar to Hello Fresh (and owned by them) but a bit more of a budget option. Meals also selectable on 2 or 4 people for size, and different amounts per week. Food options vary and quality is pretty much the same as Hello Fresh, but not portioned out for each meal. Meals are also a bit more simple – less ingredients and less involved to make.

Price Guide – Classic Plan example: 5 meals for 4 people $6 per serving before discounts
Affiliate deal – N/A, signing up should just give you a discount visible on the first screen + Use/Activate Cashrewards first

– Marley Spoon

Marley Spoon seem to have ingredients that are a bit fresher than others, but the website/pricing is a bit harder to use. It can be hard to tell what costs are coming from where, what meals have different portion sizes etc, and a lot of the premium meals sound good but it gets quite pricey very quickly.

Price Guide – Standard meals 12 portions – ~$12.66 per portion
Affiliate deal – + Use/Activate Cashrewards first

– Dinnerly

TBC! They never used to deliver to Adelaide but now do, so I’ll try them at some stage.

Other Food Boxes I Like

Our Cow

A company that connects farmer’s meat straight to you, so really is just an online butcher trying to cut out middle men. The quality of the meat I had from here was quite good, but ordering $199+ of meat meant a lot went in the freezer and took a while to work our way through. I’d definitely order again when I need a bunch more meat. They have some good deals on trying to get you to keep an active order cycle going, which works if you want a bunch of meat options available.

Price Guide – It seems fairly comparable to a standard butcher, aim for the $199 spend for free delivery.
Affiliate deal – $50 off first order of at least $199

– Tokyo Treat

A Japanese snack food box subscription that contains a bunch of Japanese snacks, usually including some weird KitKat flavour. This is of course indulgent, but a pretty nice way of getting a bunch of random things to try that you’d likely never see locally. Also a really good gift idea for someone. I’ll sign up for this again at some stage as it really did feel like a reasonable price for the variety of stuff you get.

Price – from $37.50 for a single month box to $32.50 per box for a 12 month subscription


Other sources on meal kit information:
Choice (paid) Meal delivery services compared: HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, YouFoodz, The Dinner Ladies and more – unbiased reviews of meal kits and so many other things, worth the yearly subscription fee.

Food Box Mate Your Ultimate Food Delivery Destination – a guy who reviews his food box experiences without any sponsors, so a good source to find what’s out there.

AI Powered Microsoft Q&A vs Bing Chat vs Bing Chat for Enterprise (Copilot)

Update 20th November 2023
Bing Chat for Enterprise has been renamed to ‘Copilot with commercial data protection‘ – General Availability 1st December 2023.

Original Post
Q&A Assist is a new feature Microsoft have launched on the Q&A ‘Ask a question‘ page, where you would normally pose a question to post in the forums and have another human answer for you. Now, backed by the Azure OpenAI Service, you can get AI based answers using data that Microsoft curates.

This is a bit different to Bing Chat (or Bing Chat for Enterprise) where it’s using knowledge from all over the internet, and as per any OpenAI setup, should be tailored a bit more to the sort of questions it expects.

Q&A Assist at the time of posting is in ‘Public Preview’:

I thought it would be worth comparing the two to see how they fare, but it took me down a bit of a different path than I expected.

The Example

Q&A Assist gave a fairly reasonable broad response and expected you to dig more into it only via official learn.microsoft.com content.

Bing Chat however, took me down a bit of an interesting path. It gave a step by step:

But that didn’t scale or have the automation of the above answer, so I tried to clarify:

Not too bad, but not the same answer as Q&A Answers – both valid depending how you buy your Windows 11 Enterprise licenses though. What if I limit Bing Chat to only use learn.microsoft.com content?

Proof that AI doesn’t do everything for you – OK I ask the same question piecing all the bits together:

The same answer as before but only from learn.microsoft.com? This gets stranger when I check reference 1, which is actually a Q&A page with the quesiton “Which Windows 11 version allows multiple remote desktop sessions” and doesn’t have anything about VAMT at all. Reference 2 which strangely tells me to do what I’ve already done on this query, links to another Q&A page which is on topic, but has no content that would have been helpful for this answer. Something wacky going on with those reference links, but I suspect it actually used the information in the same session and then limited the claims on where it could verify those answers to learn.microsoft.com only, which if you only saw this single answer woudn’t be right.

Is Bing Chat for Enterprise Different?

I pumped the same final all-encompassing question in, and received probably the best answer out of everything, great sources and almost only limited to learn.microsoft.com – a Youtube link turned up, but that was from one of the Q&A pages.

Giving Bing Chat another chance, I started a new session and asked the same question again:

Different again, but you can see Bing Chat gives more ‘consumery’ answers while Bing Chat for Enterprise didn’t – I was surprised by this but it does make contextual sense. The references also make sense this time, so this leans towards my theory on using previous answer information in the same question thread – something to be aware of.

Coming back from that tangent, what does this all mean for Q&A Assist? It’s good that it helps define a question and ask in both summary and detailed, needing a category and limiting answers only to trusted sources. You can see the design of it is to hopefully provide a quick answer before someone posts the forum question, or at least supplement their question with extra details on what they might be trying to ask.

Moreso, it’s a good example of what is fairly easy to achieve with Azure OpenAI pointed at a set of data – which could purely be a website. It takes a chatbot to the next level by not needing anyone to give it a set of questions and answers, it’ll work all that out itself. It’s also worth nothing that even in the Microsoft ecosystem there are multiple AI chatbot solutions, such as Power Pages also being able to point a chatbot to a page to do Q&A type work.

The hard habit to break for many people will be years of using a search engine to look up an answer and doing your own work going through it – any AI driven chat system should make this easier and more effiencent to look up detailed questions and follow the sources to get your truth, but it’s something that we’ll all need to get used to while becoming more ingrained with everything we do online.

Cheap Camping Projectors – Worth It?

I bought a “Mini Outdoor HD LED Projector & Screen” – $59 AU a few months ago because I was interested in finding out if this device had any real world use – particularly if the image quality was watchable. Here’s what I found:

I ordered this from Aussie Traveller, and going back now it’s price really is back up to $199AU so appears that it was a legitimate discount at the time. It’s listed in other places with other generic sounding titles such as “Portable HD LED Projector with Soft Screen White”
This even comes with a “screen” (more on this later) with the description:

The Xtend Outdoors Mini Outdoor HD LED Projector is perfect for movie nights with the family while camping. Easy to use, simply connect to your laptop or phone via USB/HDMI and stream your favourite movies & shows.

The projector has built in speakers, as well as a built-in battery with a wireless run time of 90 mins, a projection distance of up 250cm and enables manual image focusing to ensure you get a crisp image. The included white projector screen features 6 eyelets to safely hang screen at your campsite.

  • HD Resolution: Up to 1920 × 1080px
  • Light: LED
  • Focus Mode: Manual toggle
  • Projection Distance: 90cm to 250cm (40-60” wide)
  • Projection Ratio: 1.5:1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9 and 4:3
  • Colour: 16770K
  • Power: Built in lithium battery (1600mAh)
  • Charge time: 180min
  • Runtime: 90min
  • Inputs: HDMI, USB 2.0, microSD, AV
  • Outputs: Built-in speaker or 3.5mm Audio Jack
  • Screen: Soft fabric 1.3m x 0.7m
https://aussietraveller.com.au/products/projector-mini-rechargeable-aussie-traveller

Although we don’t have a lumens reference to know how bright it is, it does claim actual HD resolution, and even has a built in batter to run 90 minutes without being plugged in. Plus, a built in speaker – so if you plugged something like a Google Chromecast into it, does it become quite a nifty portable/put a screen on any wall TV?

Receiving the box in the mail, it appears the brand is ‘XTEND OUTDOORS’ and I found their official page here with the projector. I’m not going to review all aspects of this device, but more talk about the practicality of a device like this and some considerations on what situations this might be useable.

  • Starting up the device, it is running a fan to cool it down so there’s a small amount of noise, probably similar to a laptop running when it’s working hard. Noise importance: Low
  • The tripod style of this makes it useful for putting outside on uneven ground, but may limit where you can sit the device inside as you’ll need a wide enough spot to cover the 3 legs (maybe 10-15cm). Also if you try to angle the device too much while plugged in, it loses it’s centre of balance and tips. Unit shape importance: Medium
  • There is no keystone correction of any sort. unless you have the projector placed adjacent and at the height of the middle of the screen you’re projecting, it’s not going to be a square. Keystone feature importance: High
  • The included screen is just a thin white sheet with some eyelets. Really, you can project onto anything fairly plain coloured, so it does give projecting locations a lot of options, almost any light wall works fine. Surface/Screen importance: Low
  • The image size is set by the distance of the projector from the surface. No resizing, so projector placement is critical, along with the lack of keystone correction. Roughly, a 2m distance gives a 32″ display size. Size adjustment importance: Medium
  • Focus is manual, but that’s quite easy to adjust and should be set and forget and it’s just a physical slider to change. On this particular device, easy to adjust but hard to make micro changes, so you’ll probably settle on ‘close enough’ Manual focus importance: Low/Medium (as long as it’s easy to do, accurate, and can take tiny adjustments easily)
  • Inbuilt this can support a MicroSD card and a bunch of video formats, but these days I’m not sure people care about this too much. The HDMI port means you can plug anything in, and I tried the Google TV with Chromecast and it worked fine. Inbuilt USB port didn’t have enough power to run it, so I had to use external power. I’m sure a Firestick would be similar. Inbuilt player importance: Low (fixed with cheap addon device)

Here’s the best I could do putting an image on the wall from about 4m away, in a reasonably dark room with the lights off.

It’s watchable in an occasional camping type scenario, but I wouldn’t want this set up as standard.

You can probably tell at this point, I wouldn’t really recommend a projector like this unless it really IS for a camping type scenario, even at this price.

You’d be better off finding a cheap ‘normal’ projector that covers as many of the features in the dot points above, and you’re going to have a better time. There are cheap options out there, and if I find one myself I’ll share my findings.

Eufy Smart Lock – I Installed It Myself!

Home repair and upgrade jobs don’t usually go well for me, so I tend to pay someone who knows what they’re actually doing for anything that’s not incredibly straight forward. Yes I’ll change lightbulbs and put together furniture, but changing a leaking cistern? Last time I tried that, the knob broke clean off the tap that fed water to the toilet right as I turned it off, leaving us without running water to the only toilet we have (I’ve since moved to a house with more than 1 toilet, redundancy helps you sleep at night).

Several instances like this, which I claim are not due to any mechanical errors I am at fault on, leave me reluctant to take on these sort of tasks I can sense that will go wrong. This brings us to the Eufy Smart Lock – more specifically the Eufy Security Wi-Fi Smart Lock E110 T8502T11 which I picked up from JB Hi-Fi for $249AU. I did my research and settled on this brand and model, partly due to already being in the Eufy ecosystem with a doorbell and some wireless cameras (and not ignoring the elephant in the room around Ankler, they’ve had some questionable business practises around security), reviews being overall good (although hard to differentiate between the several models Eufy has in some), and at a price point I was OK with.

Promises of ‘Easy installation, set up the Smart Lock on your door in 15 minutes with a screwdriver’ and watching a YouTube video of someone showing a very easy install – although later finding out it was a different model to mine as ‘Eufy Security Smart Lock Touch & Wi-Fi’ is different to ‘Eufy Security Wi-Fi Smart Lock’. I also worked out there were several measurements to check on whether the device would fit my existing deadbolt: everything seemed to match perfectly with the given measurements which gave me a bit of confidence.

After buying the smart lock, I left it in the box for a few days, having future visions of taking the existing deadlock off, that falling apart, not being able to secure the smart lock, and being left without any working lock at all. A locksmith friend assured me it would be easy, so I waited for the weekend to try.

As you can see from the picture above, I managed to take the old lock off and install the new smart lock. It went quite well and I would say the 15 minutes was about how long it took, most of it working out what to actually do, with about 5 minutes of actual work.

Once installed, I had to use the Eufy Security app to sync and finish setup. This must be done with the door closed, so the device can align itself – which appears to just be working out how far to push the latch out. Next was a firmware update:

Once the firmware was upgraded, the device was ready to go. I had to add a 4-8 digit pin and that was it, it was ready to use.

I’ll cover some of the reasons why I picked this lock, and considerations that will hopefully help you choose what device you want.

Battery
This uses 4xAA batteries, claimed to last for a year. Hopefully this is accurate, but it’s very easy to swap them over from the internal side of the door, and a bit less hassle than having to charge the device and put it back like I do with my Eufy doorbell every few months. If the batteries happened to go 100% flat while nobody was home, you can put power into the device from the front using a cable and battery (sidenote – now the iPhone 15 series has USB-C and can push a charge out, I expect that’d be a nice way to cover this scenario).

PIN
You can set multiple profiles with 4-8 digit PINs, and configure them for anytime, or set times. Good if you want to keep a track of who went through a door for some reason, but I don’t see myself caring about this. The best benefit is making sure each person only knows their own PIN, so if something changes you can remove that person’s access along with the PIN, rather than having a single PIN that you don’t know who has, and then need to change/remember a new one.

Fingerprint
There is no fingerprint reader on this device, and retrospectively, yes it probably would have been nicer to scan a print rather than type an 8 digit code. It’s still pretty quick to get in via PIN though.

Key
This came with a keyhole and 2 pretty standard looking keys. I’ve seen reviews on other models that had rather unique key styles that a locksmith probably doesn’t have, but also does this make it easier to lockpick? Probably, but now that I’ve seen what the inside of a lock looks like, I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to smash the entire device off the door and get it unlocked. So that’s a positive on having a key that’s easy to replicate.

Camera
No camera on this either, but I already have a camera based doorbell, and a wireless camera pointed at the whole front door area. Also the smart lock is behind a flyscreen door, so it won’t see much unless the door is opened. Other use cases may want a camera, or even a camera/doorbell built in – but nobody would even know the doorbell was there unless they opened the flyscreen first.

App
For me, not having yet another application to worry about was a big plus. The Eufy Security app is actually well rated in both stores:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oceanwing.battery.cam&hl=en_AU&gl=US
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/eufy-security/id1424956516
Quite easy to set up and use, plus the ability to remotely lock or unlock the door is nice as the device has Wi-Fi connectivity (some don’t).

Other points I’d already covered above – such as the device matching my door configuration and fitting perfectly, letting someone like me be able to install it myself, and the price point being one I was happy with.

Overall the device does what it says on the box, and leads me to not carrying keys around anymore! I do have ONE key for the flyscreen in case it gets locked, but that sits in my wallet. I will no longer have my phone lightly scratched from keys being pressed against it in my pocket, which in itself was worth the price of going doing the smart lock path.