Home, Stats and other non-sense

We got up on Monday and looked at the weather, the coming week is going to be pretty chilly. 

As most people know, I do like technology. I have an Amazon Recast at home, it takes the Over the Air TV signal from the antenna on my roof and puts it on my Local Area Network in my house.  Since the Recast is an Amazon device, it talks to any Amazon Fire TV device. The Fire TV is an Android device. The FireTV stick I brought with us refused to power up and wanted to watch on a bigger screen than my Android phone. I downloaded an Android Emulator, Blue Stack, to run on my Windows PC and loaded the FireTV App.  It worked like a charm, as long as my Laptop has Wifi, I can watch all the local channels from my home Antenna. I know most people consider this non-sense...but to me it is cool. In the picture we are watching WCAX, channel 3, from Flemington, NJ using my OTA antenna at home... think about that. 

Given the weather, Monday was just a drive day, we left Flemington, NJ about 8AM.  Since it was Veteran's Day, we assumed traffic on I95 would be lighter than usual....we were correct.  It was a pretty easy drive, we stopped at a rest area just north of Albany, ate left overs and moved on.  We stopped in Ticonderoga for fuel and Port Henry to dump our tanks and were in my driveway by 14:30, an easy driving day. 

We said our goodbyes to Paul and Lisa and they set out for home, Hinesburg, VT.  

As usual, we keep records of every fill-up, if nothing else the following table demonstrates how driving speed can significantly degrade your MPG. 

The data indicates that driving 10mph slower improved my mileage by 2.3 miles per gallon. Said differently driving 62 instead of 72 improved my gas mileage by 14%, that is more than I expected. 

Finally, I used this trip to test out my Starlink. We got fiber at home and I repurposed my Starlink for mobile application. It costs $50/month for 50GB and $1/GB after that, but you can pause the service monthly. It worked better than I expected, download speeds were 300 Mbs.  We used it to stream Thursday Night Football and it worked well. The negative part is that it is clunky to carry and setup.  I plan to repackage the unit and lay it flat on the RV roof, others have done this and it seems to work. 

Overall it was a short get away but we definitely had a great time, the Outer Banks are a special place.