I bought some “Drive Accesories” hubcaps on Amazon, quite a difference. They’re decent for under $30 a set. 

As an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission from items purchased through a link on my site. This costs you nothing and gives me money to spend on alcohol, gadgetry, and car parts.

So yeah, instead of doing a shit load of little videos about every little thing I do, I've decided I'm going to do a vlog that covers the whole week and all the stuff I've done. Of course, I will still do individual videos for big stuff, but I'm not going to do a dedicated post for every little thing anymore. 

Anyway, here's the first vlog. This week I talk about buying some insanely cheap tires on Amazon, using the Twelve South AirFly Pro, and the struggles of getting my NB on the lift to get the engine installed. 

This episode has some weird audio ducking issues, I will try and get it straight before the next episode. I think LumaFusion's auto ducking has some delay when starting a new loop. Hopefully it's not too distracting. 

As an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission from items purchased through a link on my site. This costs you nothing and gives me money to spend on alcohol, gadgetry, and car parts.

I have to admit, this was a total impulse purchase. As you might imagine, I drive a lot of different cars. Most everything I buy from the auction gets driven home at least once before it's put up for sale. I don't like selling a car only for the buyer to discover some little issue that I could have easily repaired had I noticed it. 

Anyway, because of that, and my addiction to podcasts, I REQUIRE a good bluetooth to Aux adapter. Something I can throw in any car with an aux in and have music and podcasts from my phone. I have been using the Anker Roav F0 since May, and while it does have some benefits (mainly it has an FM transmitter in case I buy something without an aux port), it's been acting weird lately. It seems like it's not making a good bluetooth connection even though it's like 24" away from the phone. I'll be driving and suddenly my podcast or music will start to sound like a phone call when you're down to one bar, breaking up and losing half of the audio at random. It's infuriating!

I figured I would post this because it's super rare these days that a company actually does the right thing. A couple of weeks ago I powered on my Rode Wireless Go mic setup to shoot a video, and the receiver wouldn't power on. I figured the battery had died and plugged it into power. It showed that it was fully charged, but the power button did nothing. It wouldn't power it on. I started a warranty claim with Rode, and though they took about a week to get back to me, they did send me a prepaid shipping label. I sent the mic setup to them, didn't hear a damn thing for like two weeks, and yesterday a whole new mic setup was delivered. 

Not great at communication but hey, they came through and replaced a defective product. Yay! 

The auction yard Hyundai had a pretty gross rear seat cushion. Best I can guess, someone let their kid live back there and never cleaned it. It looked and smelled pretty rough. I pulled it out after I put the door on and stuffed it in the back of my beater Prius (Where I learned of it unpleasant smell btw), and took it to my house to use my upholstery cleaner on it. I did a video of the cleaning mostly as an excuse to use my Hero 8 Black to do a time lapse. Still, pretty neat to see it go from absolutely disgusting to, well, to kinda passable, but still. Here's the video. 

If you've been following my recent posts, you already know I picked up a Hero 8 Black through GoPro's trade in program. I've determined that it's a nice little package, especially when paired with GoPro Plus to store all your pictures and videos and also half price on most accessories.  Since I could get it for half price, I went ahead and ordered this sleeve with lanyard.

One of the duties I'm using the GoPro for is auctions. I go to at least three auctions a week and take lots of pics and videos to determine what I'm going to bid on, how much, etc. 

I don't like carrying around multiple phones, and I don't like filling my iPhone's camera roll with endless pictures of cars, most of which I don't even end up buying for one reason or another. The Hero 8 with GoPro plus is perfect. I take pictures and videos all willy-nilly like I just don't even care about storage, then connect the GoPro to power and it automagically uploads them all. I can pull down the ones I need for sharing or my records and just leave the rest alone. I can format my SD card with reckless abandon since everything is backed up in full resolution on GoPro's cloud. 

Anyway, I figured this sleeve + lanyard would be great for that. I can have it around my neck instead of taking up pocket space, it's always close at hand, and I'm less worried about my dumb ass leaving the camera in a car at the auction. It seems like it will be perfect for that. As you would expect from a first party accessory it feels well made, and everything lines up correctly. The lanyard is long enough to put around your neck but has an adjustable little clasp on it should you want to use it as a wrist strap while shooting, which I imagine will come in handy for the more precarious shots GoPros are subjected to. It has a window in the bottom so your mounting prongs can still flip out. It also comes in a variety of colors. 

The only downside I have found is that there's no concession for charging. If you want to charge your camera, you have to take it off and put it back on again. It's not difficult to get in and out, but I am worried about stretching over time, as I take it out every single time I need to charge or transfer photos via cable or anything that requires I access the battery, power port, or SD card. 

Having said that, I don't actually know how it could include charging access given that the new design uses an entire side of the camera for a battery door. I'm still pretty happy with it for $9, and honestly it will probably last a year at which point I will likely upgrade anyway. Here are some pics so you can get an idea of how this thing looks and fits. 

I'm a car dealer mostly for the family rental fleet business, but I also buy stuff on the side to resell. I picked this thing up at auction a couple of weeks ago and just got around to messing with it. Gonna try to make it a decent little beater again then it can go on to be someone's first car. 

I purchased it with some heavy damage to one of the back doors, but lucked out with a same colored door in a local junkyard. Yesterday I put it on and figured I would try out the Hero 8's timewarp mode. This was honestly super easy as the car has manual locks, manual windows, and no speakers in the rear doors, so basically four bolts hold the door on. 

It's currently getting that flat tire repaired over at the tire shop, then I'll throw a new battery in it and replace the bumper cover this weekend. That should be about it, and it can go be someone's cheap first car or something and I can spend the money that I get from it to buy something dumb like standalone for the green Miata. 

As an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission from items purchased through a link on my site. This costs you nothing and gives me money to spend on alcohol, gadgetry, and car parts.

I've been messing around with the Hero 8 Black some more. I had initially left the stabilization on High, today I tried it on Boost, and I definitely prefer boost. I'm shooting in 4k30fps in Linear mode. Here's the video. 

Looks pretty damn solid to me, and the crop isn't even noticeable since the field of view is so large anyway. I think I'm gonna stick with these settings for a while. I have a few mounts and other accessories on the way, I'll post pics and my thoughts on them as they arrive. 

I also took a few still photos, mostly trying out the HDR. I don't think this is ever going to be my primary stills camera, but it's honestly pretty solid and actually great for the auctions. The wide angle lens allows me to get the whole car in the shot even if it's close to another car or I'm trying to get a shot of the interior or something that most cameras wouldn't be able to capture. It's definitely coming with me to auctions. 

Maybe I'm just still in the honeymoon period, but I REALLY like this camera. The improvements over the Hero 7 Black seem minor on paper but really do add up to an overall better experience. I'm really looking forward to the media mod, I'll be preordering that when it's available. 

As an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission from items purchased through a link on my site. This costs you nothing and gives me money to spend on alcohol, gadgetry, and car parts.

So like I mentioned before, I bought the Hero 8 Black via GoPro's trade in program. It showed up on a Monday, which happens to be my day off, so I decided to take a bunch of sample video with it. Before we get to that, let's look at the new Hero 8 as a physical object. 

The main difference in the 8 vs the few previous GoPros is the mounting tabs being moved to the camera itself from the "cage". This sounds like a small difference, but actually makes quite a difference in how small it feels and how easily it travels. It's one less thing in your bag and it gives the camera a smaller footprint in a way that seems to defy the story the physical dimensions tell.

The other new change is not as nice, the battery door is now on the side. This is cool in some ways, as you no longer have to remove the camera from a mount to swap the battery, but on the downside, there's now very little holding the battery in with the door open or removed, and you have to remove it or open it to use the camera while connected to power, for say, a long time warp video of a road trip. I'm hoping GoPro's mods, specifically the Media Mod, will basically solve this problem. It will replace the battery door and includes a power connector as well as cold shoes and a shotgun mic. I signed up to get notified when preorders are available, so I'll follow up once I have on in my hands. 

Speaking of Microphones, the Hero 8 now has a front facing mic which sounds really damn good for a built in mic. I'm very pleased with it. I will still totally buy the mod with the shotgun mic, but I don't even think a lot of people will really need it, and that shotgun mic is gonna have to be REALLY good to make it worth it over the already very good built in mic. 

The new GoPro includes new views like linear mode when shooting in 4k. I like that a lot. I feel like the linear mode is best for most non-sports stuff because it greatly reduces lens distortion. The Hero 8 Black is fast and the video quality is pretty good. I still wish they would bump up the sensor size for better low light performance, but it is first and foremost an action camera, despite their recent pivot to appeal to the vlogging world. 

GoPro's ecosystem does work pretty damn well for vlogging (have I mentioned I hate that word? I really do.), especially with GoPro Plus. GoPro plus enables auto uploads to their cloud service when you plug it in and you're near wifi. They are stored in full res and you can pull them down to edit or share, then delete them from local storage and just leave them there. It does a lot to solve my storage anxiety, and it works really well with an iPad Pro. 

I'll stop rambling now and let you just look at the footage, watch it on youtube and turn the quality up as high as it will go.