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Amazon Luna’s Free Prime Tier

When I reviewed the Fire 7 tablet the other day I said I did not test Amazon’s Luna game streaming service because I did not have a subscription to it. As it turns out Amazon recently added a “free” tier for their existing Prime subscribers. We take a look at that free offering in my latest video, testing it on the Fire 7 tablet, a FireTV stick, and a PC.

Luna works on just about everything except TV devices that compete with Amazon’s Fire TV line. So while you’ll find clients for iPhones, iPads, and Android mobile devices you won’t find Apple TV or Android TV apps. It also runs inside of a web browser.

At the moment there are four games that can be streamed from Luna at a maximum resolution of 1080p at 60 frames per second. Games are rotated in and out on a regular basis so unless you move to one of the Luna subscription tiers you won’t be able to continue your progress.

Overall it runs pretty nice. The games load quickly and latency feels pretty minimal using an Xbox bluetooth controller. Amazon also sells a controller for the Luna service that connects directly to their servers to minimize input lag.

Extra’s Video: Unboxing and Initial Impressions of the Steam Deck

After almost a year since I put down a deposit my Steam Deck finally arrived in the studio! You can watch me unbox it and hear my first impressions in my latest Extra’s channel video.

Valve has attempted a number of different hardware products over the years including the Steam Machines, Steam controllers, VR headsets, etc. Their devices have always been a little hit and miss to me, there was always something lacking. It feels like all of what they learned from past mistakes resulted in this product. It’s great.

The performance is excellent although as pointed out by my friend Metal Jesus Rocks having only a 1200×800 display vs. something higher resolution helps there. But the overall software interface and hardware quality feels on par with anything we’ve seen from Microsoft and major PC manufacturers. The fact that Valve is controlling the whole stack here including the OS is impressive, especially given how polished it all feels.

It also corrects some of the wrongs of past SteamOS iterations insofar as Windows compatibility is concerned. Thanks to its Proton layer most of your Steam library is likely runable although some games not verified “on deck” might have some issues. Valve does a pretty good job pointing out what to expect on those.

In a livestream I did yesterday I was able to get Windows working through an external drive. I’ll have a little bit more on that topic soon.

New Video: Amazon Fire 7 Tablet

Some of the most popular hardware products from Amazon are their Fire tablets. Their new Fire 7 tablet is the subject of my latest review.

Fire tablets are stock commodity Android hardware running with a forked version of Google’s Android operating system. Because they’re a gateway to digital purchases Amazon makes these things super inexpensive. But even though they are running a version of Android they don’t work with the Google Play store or its apps.

To get the best price on this you need to put up with lock screen advertisements. The ads are getting more aggressive now with some of them featuring video in addition to still images. Amazon does sell versions of the tablet without ads for a little more money.

This new tablet is about twice as powerful as the prior model, with the same guts now as the more expensive 8″ HD tablet. It has double the RAM of the previous model (2GB vs. 1GB) and 16 GB of storage on its base unit vs. 8GB before. Its SD card slot will accommodate up to a 1TB microSD card for additional storage. Even though it is faster it’s much more sluggish vs. an entry level iPad or Samsung tablet. But it’s also half to a third of the price of those devices.

The new Fire 7 has the same look and feel of prior models with large bezels and a plastic casing. But it’s pretty rugged and I would argue more-so than an iPad even without a case on it.

If you’re happy living in the Amazon app ecosystem or just mostly stick to web browsing and media watching (Prime, Netflix, etc), the Amazon tablets are fine. But I’ve found a number of apps where the Amazon version lacks features found in their Google equivalents.

For example the Xbox app does not support GamePass streaming even though the Google Play version does. And because this doesn’t run Google Play services you can’t run any official Google apps like Gmail, Chrome, or YouTube. The Youtube “app” Amazon offers is just a web wrapper of the YouTube website and lacks features found on their android app.

All in this is more of the same from Amazon with a little more performance. If you’ve had good experiences with prior Amazon tablets you’ll like this one. But tablet enthusiasts will feel a bit more restricted unless they hack Google Play onto their device – a process that is not supported by Google or Amazon and comes with some security concerns.

iPhone at 15 – Original Box and Shopping Bag

The iPhone started shipping on June 29, 2007. I can’t believe it’s been that long. Incidentally I also got married that year so it’s easy to remember how many years I’ve been married based on the age of the iPhone :).

I posted this video on the extra’s channel the other day in recognition of the iPhone’s 15th birthday. It’s kind of a re-run as I made this short on the main channel a little while back.

Those of us suckers who bought an iPhone on release day also got a cool shopping bag to take it home in that you’ll see in the video. I called it the “mug me” bag as it clearly gave away its contents as you left the store. My original receipt was still in there too:

June 29, 2007!

My then fiancé was on a trip with her family and I was bored. So I drove up to the Apple store and bought the phone. There were no lines and they had plenty of stock. Of course that would soon change in future iterations. AT&T’s activation servers that were set up specifically for the iPhone were so overloaded I couldn’t actually use the phone until the next day.

Back then it only worked on AT&T’s network and I had to switch from Verizon. What a mistake that was – the phone part of the iPhone didn’t work anywhere in my house! I had to get a “Femtocell” in order to receive phone calls which barely worked. As soon as Verizon got the iPhone on its network I switched back.

The phone had pretty slow data speeds.. 3G networks were prevalent at the time but the iPhone only supported “Edge” which was about a 135k bits per second – not much faster than a dialup connection. There was no front facing camera and the rear camera was pretty lousy.

I think I traded in my old iPhone at one point to save money on a new one. I regret that now. It sure would look nice on my gadget shelf!

Today’s Links

The tiniest Raspberry Pi gets a new version with built-in Wi-Fi – ARS Technica

FCC authorizes SpaceX to provide mobile Starlink internet service to boats, planes and trucks – CNBC

Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000 –ARS Technica

‘Cryptoqueen’ allegedly defrauded investors of billions – FBI

New Video : Plex HTPC Overview

Each month Plex (affiliate link) sponsors a tutorial video on the channel covering one of the many, many features of their personal media server and streaming service. This month’s video is about Plex’s recently released an official Home Theater PC (HTPC) client for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can see my review of it here.

This app runs full screen right when loaded and replicates the living room interface experience found on smart TVs and set top boxes. Notable in this release is full support for lossless audio passthrough, client-side “tone mapping” to convert HDR content to a SDR color space on non-HDR displays, and the ability to switch a television into HDR mode for content that supports it.

HDR is a tricky beast with PCs and unfortunately the HDR here is more of a generic profile vs. one based on the metadata of the individual media files. It also does not support Dolby Vision.

Here’s a little more technical detail from the Plex team as to how HDR works:

HDR10: This works when using Windows. MPV creates a Rec.2020 swapchain in D3D11, which outputs to the display. There is a switch in HTPC’s settings to switch the display from SDR -> HDR when you play HDR content.

HDR10 with Static Metadata Passthrough: One of the users in the forums has done a writeup on how to use some of the more experimental features of MPV to do HDR10 with static metadata passthrough. So the maxCLL and maxFall values from the content are sent through to the display. See https://forums.plex.tv/t/hdr-metadata-passthrough-plex-htpc-for-windows/794358 for more information.

So for the best experience I’d still stick with the most recent Nvidia Shield Pro (the 2019 version). But it’s nice to see Plex showing some love to their most technically inclined users looking to build out their own home theater PC experience.

Wrapup Feedback & Shorts Experiment

I want to thank everyone for their comments on the wrap-up ! I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do with it just yet but we’ll get there soon. I do have a great topic for next week that I think will do well and after that we’ll figure out what to do next.

One idea I heard from those who liked the wrapup was to maybe have it live on its own channel. If I do that I think I’ll have it live on my Snippets channel where I used to post clips from the longer wrapups I used to do. Those clips still get decent traffic depending on the topic.

Another thing I’m experimenting with from a wrapup perspective is testing out using YouTube shorts to preview the week. I posted one as an experiment yesterday – they are super easy to put together.

Shorts are supposed to help drive subscribers but this one cost me 2 of them. So the juries out on this one :).

Tonight’s video will be my monthly sponsored Plex video! We’ll be taking a look at the official release version of Plex’s HTPC client. This supports HDR in a limited fashion along with lossless audio passthrough.

Time to Talk about the Weekly Wrapup

This week’s Weekly Wrapup Video is about the Weekly Wrapup itself! As mostly a commodity content creator I’ve long struggled with the best ways to engage my subscription audience which grows slowly and steadily each and every day.

8 years ago I uploaded the first Weekly Wrapup that received some great comments from viewers at the time. In the video I went through the videos I had posted earlier that week and previewed what was coming next (very similar to my weekly email today). Over time the Wrapup evolved to work in viewer Q&A which is what sparked the topical nature of the show.

That’s when the wrapup started exceeding 30-40 minutes in length and viewers noted that the week in review stuff was eating up about a third to half the total run time. So I cut that stuff out, stuck to the topic, and found that viewership improved.

But even though viewership improved it’s still a fraction of what my regular videos get. And from a revenue perspective my mainline videos run at about 10 times the performance of the wrapup even on the most watched wrapup episodes.

So the show is at a cross-roads. I find myself struggling some weeks to come up with a topic to talk about and many times pick a topic for the sake of picking a topic to fill the Monday timeslot.

This week’s video dives into the analysis and seeks your input on where to go next. I posted a poll with some of the most mentioned ideas which you can find here.

The Week Ahead

June was a blur! Here in the United States kids get the summer off from school before they start in the next grade level. I used to LOVE summer vacation as it gave me time to hang out with my friends, ride my bike, and of course play around with all of the cool 80’s and 90’s tech I grew up with. It was always a bit sad for us neighborhood kids when those summers came to an end.

My two girls, however, miss school and can’t wait to get back in August. I love that they love school more than I did!

This week will begin with a Weekly Wrapup as usual. But we’re going to talk about the Wrapup moving forward as I’ve done some analysis on its performance.

That will be followed by my monthly Plex sponsored video where we’ll explore the new HTPC client. After that I’ll have my review of the Beelink Mini S PC that I livestreamed the other day here. I also got in a new affordable HP Gaming Laptop and a smart smoke alarm with air quality sensors. We’ll probably have a few livestreams in the mix too.

Stay tuned and set your notifications!

Will Valve Deliver my Steam Deck in June? YES!

Last year I put in my $5 deposit for a Steam Deck. Valve was so overwhelmed that day that I couldn’t get my order to accept until late in the afternoon. That put me at the end of the order queue and I’ve been waiting ever since.

Valve has promised me Q2 availability which ends in 3 days. Will they make it? The answer is yes!

A few hours after I tweeted about this I got my confirmation!

Great Photo of the ISS HAM Station

There’s an amateur radio on the International Space Station. Usually it’s configured in repeater mode which is how I was able to contact a fellow HAM in upstate New York. I communicated through this ISS radio in repeater mode which received my signal and re-broadcast it out.

Sometimes the astronauts talk to people on the ground too. This weekend was the National Association for Amateur Radio‘s annual Field Day event where amateurs around the world make contacts out in the field using battery or emergency backup power. Astronaut Kjell Lindgren was participating in the event making contacts on the ground. You can see a list of stations he received on his notepad in the photo.

Dispatch Video from the June, 2022 Pepcom Show!

A company called Pepcom puts on mini-trade shows in NYC for the media every couple of months. As with everything the pandemic really disrupted indoor gatherings like this but they are now getting back to a more normal cadence. My latest video is from the Pepcom event that took place on Thursday, June 24th.

The June show is usually the lightest of the year but there were a few things that interested me. From a gadget perspective the Drop Keyboards were the standout item. These are super high quality artisanal keyboards designed for people who like typing. Their flagship keyboard weighs over 10 pounds and is hand crafted in New Jersey! I also picked up a sample of a Kidde smart smoke alarm and air quality sensor that I’ll likely be looking at this week.

The highlight of this video is catching up with my friend Dick DeBartolo who has co-hosted the Gizwiz podcast for the last sixteen years but also had a long career at Mad Magazine where he was known as Mad’s maddest writer! Dick also appears regularly on ABC News and I grew up watching him on Nickelodeon back in the 80’s.

This is the first of these shows that I shot “one man band style” with my GoPro. I think it worked out pretty well but I’ll probably attach a light to the rig next time. Here’s a livestream I did the other day setting it all up.

You can see all of my previous dispatch videos here. These are always fun to do.

New Video: MeLE Quieter3Q Mini PC

I picked up this fanless Mini PC on the suggestion of a viewer for review. You can see my full review here. It is powered by an Intel N5105 Celeron chip (part of the Jasper Lake family) along with 8 GB of DDR4 RAM in dual channel mode. This model also came with 128GB of eMMC storage as its boot drive.

While it’s not possible to upgrade the RAM you can add a M.2 2280 NVME SSD. It also has a microSD card slot on the back. It supports dual 4k 60hz displays and would work well as a Plex server, but I do not recommend Windows PC as home theater devices these days. The Nvidia Shield is still the best choice for media consumption IMHO.

A few other value-adds here is its built in Wifi 6 radio which performed quite well in my testing along with a fully licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro. In my testing I also found it to be compatible with the latest version of Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux. Just note that right now Linux based browsers do not seem to decode 4k video from YouTube very efficiently.

Performance-wise this is a nice bump from prior Gemini Lake PCs in graphics and CPU performance making this a good choice for old games & emulators along with game streaming. Performance is light years beyond what you might get out of a Raspberry Pi 4 for light server and desktop usage.

The only real downside on this one is their decision to not follow the USB-C PD standard for charging and making the USB-C port only for power. You will need to use its included AC adapter to power it. Other Mini PCs at or around this price point have full service USB-C ports that work with docking stations.

Other than that I can’t find much to complain about here. This is a nice PC that can do a lot of basic PC and server tasks silently with great performance.