bionic flood lights

I don't know about calling them 'bionic', but we have solar motion sensitive lights for 2 sheds. As long as they charge, they work well. Dismal day means won't charge much. We've got that are 7 years old, still running.

I've seen them advertised latley, one with 3 panels that point in different directions. They *sound* good buy I have no use for one.

This one

I bought an AC powered LED light for the side of my house and I thought it would only go on when something moved, but it's on all night every night. (I have to find the box or the ad to see if I misread it or not.) That could be especially bad because my next door n'bor has gone to a lot of trouble to fix up his balcony and back yard, to which he invites girls. I told him what happened with the light and he insisted that it was fine being on. I believe him. He's married now so there probably isn't much wooing anymore!

But at least I no longer have to go up 25 feet to change the bulb, which seemed to burn out a lot faster than I expected. (And the fixture wore out twice too. ;-( )

Save your money.

Bionic. Sheesh. There is one born every minute.

Meh. It's manufactured by Bell+Howell. It's "bionic" allegedly because it's solar-powered and motion-activated. FWIW, it gets decent reviews on Amazon.

hah. It's been decades since Bell and Howell was anything more than a nameplate that rents out its name and reputation to that week's highest bidder...

micky wrote on 6/8/2024 5:16 PM:

If your security light has motion sensors, then leaves and trees branches swaying in the breeze can trip themotion sensor. Try to point your gadget at the ground to see if it will turn off when nothing is moving.

Lots of the things advertised on TV will put a 'brand name' on them from years past. That does not mean much. China has bought the rights to some of the names and put out substandard items.

Reviews on products do not mean too much to me unless there are many negative ones. With all the artificial intelligence in use it is easy to over load the reviews with good reviews..

No such firm exists.

That's a licensed name.

The company was acquired by Böwe Systec in 2003. Since 2010, the brand name has been licensed for a variety consumer electronics products.

I've got a motion activated floodlight powered by 3 D Cells. The batteries last for a surprisingly long time, and are easily replaceable unlike sunlight around here during the winter.

It gets triggered by raccoons, skunks, cats, and deer. I suppose the next bionic step will be an AI to sort out the four legged versus two legged critters. I originally got it in an attempt to deter the coon; he thanked me for providing mealtime illumination.

I know about that. That's not it.

I have never had a motion sensor that would be activated by those motions. A wandering cat or dog - yes.

You don't think each review was buy an actual buyer? That Amazon is lying about that?

When Amazon was getting started they alm ost begged buyers to write reviews. Even now, if you write six, they tell you a joke or something, to encourage you.

Some of the reviews even explain how to use things. I have something electronic, a clock-radio maybe, that I didn't save where I can find it the instructions, and they're not online, and the only place that explained how one tricky part of it worked was an Amazon review. Yes, I know that valid reviews don't mean that the majority are not phoney, but then I bring you back to the first two paragraphs.

The biggest problem with review imo is that people like to write them and tend to do so, I would think, based on myself, in the first week or

Another problem would be with food supplements, not because the reviews are phoney but because who can tell if they are actually helping or not, in addition to the placebo effect. My 82 year old friend, who worked in a health-food store when she was young, seems willing to buy what I think is crap and I was dismayed when I saw that Walmart and Amazon was selling it. And not only that, since she has no computer, she wants me to do the buying. (I think I was here that I asked and the consensus was that it was not immoral for me to do so if that's what she wants.) Fortunately the last time after she asked me, she right away asked someone else who did it. ) I doubt it if it will hurt her but she has little money and some of those things are $2 or 3 a day. I tried to find independent reviews but I forget what I learned.

But that too is a problem, many apparently independent webpages with reviews are not independent at all. they are really advertising. I'd rather go by the Amazon reviews that I believe all come from verified customers. After all it's easy enough to verify, from their own records. But how would one review something he has not bought? There is no apparent way to do so.

I use a battery-operated driveway passive-infrared motion detector outside, with a wireless receiver box indoor, to detect the mailman or delivery person coming to the door. Shrubs disturbed by wind can set off the passive-infrared-sensor. I finally solved the problem by mounting the motion detector on the ceiling directly above the door by sticking a metal disk to the ceiling of the porch outside the door and then a small neodymium magnet to the back of the motion detector. I stick the motion detector to the ceiling, and pull it down every few months to replace the battery. The motion detector's field of view is the ground outside the door. I never had false alarm again.

Passive infrared motion sensor uses very little battery because it does not emit infrared. It detects the change in the infrared intensity in its field of view. Everything emits infrared, including warm blooded animals and inanimate objects like pavement, soil and shrubs. When the shrub is disturbed by wind, the infrared signature in the motion detector's field of view will fluctuate, and the motion detector will treat that infrared fluctuation as moving object.

Outdoor trail camera works in a similar way. It uses passive infrared to detect wild animals passing through the field of view of the camera. Don't point the trail camera at an open area with lots of wind-blown shrubs.

Mine is similar to this (but not exactly the same):

I bought a motion sensing camera in about 2015 to help keep an eye on my driveway but I ended up returning it. Everything triggered it, from a falling leaf to a butterfly. It came with software that allowed me to mask off multiple sections of its field of view, but that wasn't a good solution in my case.

When I was researching that purchase, the most common complaint across all of the cameras that I researched was false positives, either like I experienced, or simply a tree branch that moved slightly in the breeze. Perhaps it was a generational thing with cameras from that era, a decade ago. Things could be better now.

There's no requirement to buy an item from Amazon before you can review it. Just try it for yourself. Go to any item, click the review section, and you're greeted with the text:

"Review this product" "Share your thoughts with other customers" "Write a customer review" <-- this line is a link

The implication is that you're a customer, and you might well be, but you could be someone who purchased this item, or a similar item, somewhere else. Or, you could be someone who simply has an opinion, unrelated to an actual purchase anywhere.

Speaking of "similar item", in order to inflate the number of product reviews, Amazon likes to group reviews of similar products within the same product family. Sometimes that's OK, but frequently it's not because the items are different. There's a way to weed out the 'similar items', but I forgot how to do it.

To drive home the point that you needn't purchase an item on Amazon before you can review it, check out this text that appears on every product page:

How customer reviews and ratings work

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. <unquote>

I draw your attention to the text, "our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon"

Nope.

See above.

Jim Joyce wrote on 6/9/2024 7:56 PM:

I think the kind of motion sensing camera you bought is not passive infrared (PIR) trail camera or PIR driveway camera. Your kind of camera is constantly comparing the present frame with the previous frame to find if there are any changes in the field of view. If you use it indoor, a sudden change in lighting will also trigger it, like turning the lights on and off (or a car's headlight shining into the room through the window), without anything actually moving in the field of view.

By golly, you're right. I never noticed that area.

There have been one or two items I bought elsewhere that I wanted to complain about. If I remember what they are, I'll do it!

Sometimes it's only color, but it might be more significant.

I've noticed that might the case sometimes and wondered which they were doing. At least once, the number of reviews for 2 of them were different. bit that doesn't prove that ratings ware not ocmbined.. Sometimes the review specifies which of the several listed is the one the person bought, but I don't have the impression they do this all the time.

So anyhow, Ralph could well be right. OTOH, stubborn as I am and unwilling to give up too easily, they do mark which ones are verified purchases and I still believe they do that accurately, and one could ignore the reviews that don't have that label, at least when reading them, if not the 1-5 rating.

Maybe I'm easy to please but I've only bought 2 or 3, maybe 4 things I was disappointed in. The last one, that I still have not reviewed, was

I ended up playing it through another radio so I gave up the stereo part. Plus they've ignored my two suggestions of how to make the programming better -- since it's internet, they can and do sometimes update the software -- and recently they ruined what shows when the radio is off. But get this, now it goes back and forth every day or 12 hours from one format to the other. I figurred if I waited people would complain and they'd fix it, but no luck . I think they are understaffed.

And the worst part is not their fault but in 2 or 3 of the stations I wanted to listen to, the advertising is so much louder than the program that when I'm almost asleep, it scares me awake. A guy I met at a hamfest told me the same thing. Even if I were awake, I'd have to adjust the volume every time the advertising starts and stops. Broadcast TV was never this bad, but decades ago the FCC put an end to smaller similar problem. I don't think webradio is regulated, except by their common sense which they don't seem to have.

It was a lot of money and I'm really disappointed, but there are not many other choices of internet radios with presets.

thanks for the correction.

I read this paragraph years ago but either the part about maybe not bought on amazon wasn't there then, or I forgot it.

So I looked the reviews again, and their annoying AI-it-seems summary before the reviews had 8 sections one of which is sound quality, an dwhen I clicked on that, it said 15 customers mention it, all 15 positive, none negative. But I know before I bought it, 2 or 3 said the sound was muffled. So maybe the AI isn't good enough, or some other problem. this item only has 49 ratings. When I have time I'll read them again, find the ones that say muffled sound, and try to figure out why that wasn't considered bad by AI. Maybe they're treating it like a luxury car, where muffled exhaust sound is good. ??

The problem is, iiuc that for AI they have to program each word, like muffled. If no one got around to entering the meaning of muffled, AI won't be able to figure it out, because articificial intelligence is not intelligence at all.

I'll try to post back here.

Meahwhile Google said it was going to cut back on its use of AI. Come to think of it, the day a couple weeks ago that I read they were going to use it, I saw 2 examples of it, and none since then. Not counting the questions that come almost at the top, which usually have on ppoint answers but once in a while have missed the point

I've done that a couple of times with books I've gotten through the libby app. They are delivered to my Kindle although I didn't buy the book. However I 'borrow' quite a few books through Prime and don't buy thise either.

I hit that last week when looking for green coffee beans. They were all from the same vendor but the opinions were some selections were really good and others were subpar. As the reviews were mixed so unless the review explicitly said Nicaragua, Costa Rica, etc there was no way to tell which they were praising or complaining about.