Product review: Farm Innovators Model CC-2 Cord Connect Water-Tight Cord Lock

I purchased this lock to protect an extension cord which I need to power my heated outdoor mat. After 100+ inches of snow last year I am hoping it will make it easier to deal with all the snow. We have not had snow yet but so far the lock is keeping the connection dry during the rain.



I got the green lock, which looked bigger than the orange one. What I did not realize is that this lock is adjustable in size I can make it bigger or smaller as needed. Nice!



You can find farm Innovators Model CC-2 Cord lokc on Amazon by following this link



AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: FUNOC Leather Women Wallet Purse Credit Card Clutch holder Case

I have been using this wallet for a few weeks and I love how it looks and having a large number of compartments. The wallet has 8 card holders, 3 cash slots, 2 dividers and 1 zip pocket. In addition to 8 card holders there is also a pocket which can be used to hold additional 4 credit cards, so I actually carry 12 cards.



The wallet is made out of leather and has relief embossing.  Amazon description refers to it as genuine leather in one place, and as synthetic leather in another.  If it is synthetic it is a very good imitation because I thought it was real until I noticed the word Synthetic as I was publishing my review.  I selected Black Peony color. It is black with subtle coloring, the colors are less bright than in the stock photo and I like how it looks in person even better than the stock photo.



The wallet is 7.7" long and 4.5" wide. When I stuffed it with all my cards it became 1" thick.



It closes with a gold colored heart charm. Also enclose a 7.5" leather loop. Both have a clasp so you can choose to have both or just one attached to the wallet. I removed the gold charm and attached the leather strap to the zipper.



This wallet is provided by ArcEnCiel for evaluation and review. I like it! It is a very attractive looking wallet with lots of slots.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.







AshopZones review ★★★★★

Book review: Large Print Adult Coloring Book by B. Paulson

This coloring book contains a nice variety of designs birds, butterflies, dragonflies and flowers. The designs are pretty and done with large clear lines. There is a total of 31 different pictures and 65 pages. For each images there are three pages of text. I like the designs, but I did not like that back of the image is not a blank page but the text with an inspiration saying which are visible. If you want to transfer the design to another piece of paper with a lightbox to keep the book clean or to use designs as a templates for other crafts (stainless glass or quilting) the text makes it difficult.



The paper take pastel pencils very well. Wet markers do bleed through a bit to other side of the page. The designs are well suited to coloring - they do not have a lot of shading of their own (if there is a lot shading it makes difficult to color). None of the design are too small to introduce coloring.



I like the templates for the bookmarks with designs at the end of the book. The page on the the bookmarks also had writing. So if someone wanted to cut the bookmarks out they would have a pretty design on one side and cut up text on the other side.



Overall, beautiful designs. The change I would make it leave the back of each design blank and have less text overall.



I was provided a copy of this coloring book for evaluation and review.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.









AshopZones review ★★★★☆

Product review: ADATA USA SP550 480GB 2.5" Sata_6_0_gb III Solid State Drive 480.0

I own a couple of SSD drives and always run the same tests on each new ssd so I can compare their performance. The ADATA has an excellent READ speed performance and fairly good WRITE speed performance. There are more expensive SSDs available that have write speeds that are about 15% faster than this one, however in real world use such small differences in write speeds have no impact on system performance.



I tested the ADATA SP550 SSD on an Intel iCore 7 Haswell system running Fedora 23 with 32G of memory. The Adata SP550 SSD has read speeds that are limited only by the SATA 3 interface (excellent results). It has good but not industry leading write speeds. The manufacturer specifies read speeds of 530 Mbytes/second and write speeds of 480 MBytes/second which I confirmed using two bench marking tools, Gnome Disks and Sys_basher.



I took three sets of measurements with Gnome Disks, a set with a 1 MByte sample size, a set with a 10 MByte sample size and a set with a 100 MByte sample size.



Average Read

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Mbyte sample:______407.5 MBytes/second

10 MByte sample:_____525.5 MBytes/second

100 MByte sample:____534.5 MBytes/second



Average Write

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Mbyte sample:______230.2 MBytes/second

10 MByte sample:_____359.4 MBytes/second

100 MByte sample:____433.5 MBytes/second



Average Access (latency)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 MByte sample:______0.13ms

10 MByte sample:_____0.13ms

100 MByte sample:____0.15ms



Another interesting measurement is to measure transfer rates for different file sizes. At small file sizes (less than 256K) the overhead of the operating system has a large impact, as file sizes grow larger the SSD approaches it's maximum transfer rates. Because of the limitations of the SATA 3 bus no SSD has faster read transfers than the ADATA SSD.



' Read performance

Size__________Transfer Rate

KWords___________MBytes/Sec

4__________________21.56

16_________________64.00

64_________________143.09

256________________344.93

1024_______________465.83

4096_______________512.31

16384______________530.49

65536______________545.45



' Write performance

Size__________Transfer Rate

KWords___________MBytes/Sec

4__________________2.42

16_________________10.13

64_________________40.18

256________________100.44

1024_______________191.49

4096_______________254.52

16384______________409.05

65536______________443.47



I am using this SSD drive for SSD caching using DM-CACHE which is part of Linux logical volume manager. This is a perfect use for SSD because the write do not go to SSD when the files are created, they only go to SSD after a read occurs, which means it is used only for files that I am actually using to make access to them faster. I am seeing a noticable speed up in i/o operations



Overall, this is an excellent SSD drive and my tests confirm the benchmarks provided by manufacturer.



" on Amazon via this link



AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: AFAITH Portable Folding Ultra Aluminum Tripod

I do quite a bit of table top photography and through the years used a large number of small tripods. This tripod has all the features I value:

(1) Sturdy - AFAITH is the sturdiest small tripod I have. Everything tightens nicely, the feet are rubberized. I am using it with 17.1 oz camera. It can support a load up to 6.6 pounds.



(2) Quick plate - FAITH has a nice metal quickplate, because it is metal it will not get distorted if I over-tighten it. A few of my small tripods did not held up for a long time due to quickplate issues when they were made out of plastic.



(3) Quick release legs - AFAITH tripod increases the length of the legs by loosening one knob at the bottom of the leg. They also have a quick release at the top, which allows me to change the angle of the legs. So though this is not a classic quick release lock, this is better than having to extend each joint one at a time. Sometimes I have to fiddle a little with the AFAITH leg knobs to get them to catch but not bad.



(4) Flexible ball head, ability to take pictures at different heights and angles - AFAITH has three knob ball head with a built-in level. It works well. I can extend the tripod to 18". Minimum height is 7" without removing the central column, and 5" with the central column removed. My favorite feature is that I can really tilt it down and take pictures from above.



(5) Light weight - 1.66 pounds.



I received this tripod from AFAITH with a request for an honest review be it good or bad. I have been using it every day for the last two weeks - I like it!



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.





AshopZones review ★★★★★

Product review: FD10 8GB USB Flash Drive Voice Recorder

his is a very simple voice recorder. It looks like a flash drive (2.5" x 0.80" x 0.25"). It has just one button on and off switch. I included several audio clips in my video so you can judge the quality of the recording for yourself.



My video includes four types of clips under different situations:

(1) Speaking right into the recorder

The sound it records has a bit of an echo, but not too bad.

(2) A noisy party

This is a challenging situation. The microphone picks up a lot of ambient noise, many voices, it is hard to understand.

(3) A lecture

During this lecture I was sitting in the first row, about 10 feet away from the speaker. The hall capacity is 330 seats. The voice is recorded at low volume but clear.

(4) The lecture is about music and included musical passages. The recorder is not capable of recording music. The clipping and distortions are severe. The recorder is not suited to recording music.



For simplicity of use this recorder is hard to beat. To start recording flip the switch to ON position, to stop recording push the button into OFF position. To copy the files to the computer insert it into computer just like you would insert a flash drive. The records in are in RECORD directory.



The recorder can be re-charged in any USB outlet. The red light will remain on while the FD10 is charging, and will turn off when charging is completed. It cannot record while recharging or connected to the computer. It runs on built-in 11OMAH Rechargeable Lithium. Full recharge from empty took about 3 hours. The recordings are produced in wav audio file format.



If the battery runs out of juice in the middle of the record the file is automatically saved before it stops. If memory is full before recording is completed it will save what recorded so far.



RecorderGear provided this voice recorder for an honest review be it good or bad. What is the bottom line? I thought it did a decent job for human voice in a quiet environment. The microphone is pretty sensitive so in a noisy environment it picks up a lot of surrounding sounds. It works for recording lectures and presentations where is one clear source of sound. It did a terrible job recording music.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.





AshopZones review ★★★☆☆

Product review: FLIR Systems MR160 Imaging Moisture Meter

This camera works well detecting wet areas as well as heat leaks. This is not surprised because it works by measuring the surface temperature of different areas. Wet areas are cooler than other areas, heat leaks also show up as a different surface area from areas that are well insulated.



One key thing to know about this thermal camera is that it works by measuring the SURFACE temperatures. It cannot penetrate walls. Its imagery shows the differences between temperatures on the surface - the cooler areas are shown in blue. In addition to the over the air measurements, the meter includes an external pin probe. The pin probe can measure moisture to the depth of 0.75".



The package include a thick manual, however the reason it is so thick that it covers a very large number of languages. Only three pages for each language. A more detailed manual is included in the internal memory of the camera itself under "DOCS" directory and "User Guide" subdirectory.



The camera comes with built-in memory card. The memory card is not removable. To get images from the camera you need to connect the camera to the PC using a USB cable (included). The camera does not support wireless operations.



The camera runs on 3.7 V Rechargeable Li-ion polymer battery. Note that to replace it the camera needs to be mailed backed to manufacturer. Seems like a bad idea, but maybe it is because the camera is waterproofed.



The camera takes still photos and produces small files in BMP format. The photos appear under DCIM subdirectory with names that look like this: "FLIR0001.BMP" The photos are pretty low res as you see in my video, but enough to see what is going on. The camera does not take video, there is no timer for lapse photos, each photo requires a button push.



The camera operates at pretty good distance I was able to get reading from 30 feet away.



The camera comes without a case. It has an odd shape and I have not found a good case for it yet and storing it in a nylon bag. It size is 5.75" tall x 2.75 wide x 1,5" thick. It weighs 11.1 oz.



The camera has no screw for a tripod, you have to hold in your hand when taking measurements.



So what is the bottom line? About 10 years ago we had done a professional thermal analysis of our house which helped us add extra insulation in the right areas. When I pulled out the old report I noticed that photos were taken by FLIR system, although a different model. This camera worked almost as well (the other model provided the actual surface temperatures as it was designed to be a heat leak detector rather than moisture detector and had more colors). I looked at the area which we did not fix because it was hard to get to, and this camera showed the same leaks as the professional report. The professional report cost us several hundred dollars, so even though this camera is not cheap using it a couple of time would put us ahead of hiring someone to do the reading for us.



This camera is provided by FLIR.



You can find it on Amazon by following this link.





AshopZones review ★★★★★