Category Archives: News

I saw the Amazon Echo online and thought that it looked like a cool device, it’s essentially a smart blue tooth speaker. How is it smart you ask? Well, it can understand some of your spoken questions/commands. Take a look at the Amazon page here Amazon Echo

Or simply search for Echo on Amazon.com – I was intrigued by the capability and wanted to see how hard it was to build an “Alexa” skill so I researched a little and it turns out that you build a skill from a template. Although that sounds simple, it’s anything but simple. There are several parts to the creation and publishing. I decided to create one that could provide some car insurance facts. The template gives you all the code that you need you just need to carefully follow the instructions and replace the key words and facts with the data you want to share. Having done that I was able to successfully publish my first Alexa skill and it is now available from the ever growing skills library on Alexa.

You can ask Alexa things like, “what’s the weather today?” or “give me an update” and it will give you whatever it can. You can also ask it to add things to your shopping list which can see on your phone when you are at the store. It’s very cool that way. Where it really falls down is it’s not linked to a regular search engine so if you ask it something that you think Google can answer you may stump Alexa! It is improving daily, there are more “skills” being added daily. I am very interested to see where this technology goes. I suspect that Amazon is going to integrate Alexa into many other devices.

One of the other cool features of Amazon Echo involves home automation. You can use “Alexa” to automate things at home check out my page on home automation.

Last night we were able to see Monday Night Football on our Verizon NFL Mobile, now my phone doesn’t have an HDMI output so I have ordered a cable that converts the USB to HDMI and gives you access to a charger, when that arrives we may have another solution for our football woes. – It’s interesting how many services you have that you pay for but you really don’t need. I would estimate we are watching cable tv about 5% of the time we are watching TV. In fact, we have pretty much stopped recording TV, that has to tell you something.

Well cord cutting can be painful. Part of the attempt at reducing my ever growing cable bill was to cut back to the basic cable package. That worked but we lost ESPN and with it, access to Monday Night Football. – That bites so we came up with a solution, sling tv. Sling is an all streaming offering by Dish TV that provides a handful of channels. It cost $20/month so it’s quite expensive unless it hits the mark on several channels you want/don’t have. So we tried to watch Monday night football on Sling (a channel on the Roku) – Man that sucked, it was choppy and went blank many times. It was basically unwatchable. This was a free trial so we expected that was the end of that story however, after calling them it appears you can access the Watch ESPN channel on the Roku as part of the subscription to Sling Tv. So we watched last nights MNF and sure enough that was a sweet experience. I think the ability to stream channels will only grow and that will become the delivery vehicle of choice.