Ford B-Max owner review - 2 years on

I bought my B-Max from a Ford dealer in Kent just over 2 years ago and I've now done 38000 miles in it.  I thought I'd share why I bought it, and hope my insights are useful to others.

Size:

The car had to be a certain length to fit with the other car on the driveway, so anything too long was immediately out of the question.  There's not a huge amount of cars in that bracket that can fit a family of 4, but the extra 6 inches of length and headroom over the fiesta makes a big difference in rear legroom.  It means there's enough room for my 18 year old daughter to sit comfortably.

The boot is just about big enough for two suitcases, as there is a board that comes out, to give a level loading surface, or a slightly deeper boot space.  It's packed full for a week-long family of 4 holiday but it's just about enough.  We wouldn't survive if my youngest still needed the baby paraphernalia.

Spec:  

I bought the Titanium edition, as a key requirement for me was that I wanted cruise control.  I commute for 2 hours every day, and you end up with a sore foot otherwise!  The Sony stereo is really good quality and I can plug a 128GB USB stick  and have all my MP3s in the car, with voice control to select the artist or album.  There's also a second cigarette lighter plug in the centre console which is ideal for powering chargers for the kids in the back seat.

Engine:

This was one of the most important decisions for me - I wanted an automatic transmission, but that was only offered on the much older 1.6L engine, and the EcoBoost 1.0L engine was more important too me, both for fuel economy and the fact it has start-stop engine technology.

I went for the 120bhp Ecoboost engine option to give the car a little bit more oomph (the standard engine is 100bhp), and I'm happy to say that unlike my old 1.2L Honda Jazz, I can keep it in 5th gear and still accelerate up hills!

I use the Android app Fuelio to track my fill-ups, and I'm getting an average of 44.3 mpg.

Servicing:

I bought a service plan from the dealer for £24 per month, but as I've done more mileage than the salesman put down for, I've exhausted it after 2 years (rather than 3).  It was nice to have while it lasted.  The only thing that's gone wrong with the car is a brake-light bulb which was spotted and replaced at service.  The garage also send you a YouTube video of your car being inspected, which is a nice touch.

What next?

I'm on a 36 month PCP, and ideally when I get my next car it will be electric or at least hybrid-electric, which sadly with the current range rules out a lot of Ford models.  There won't be a new B-Max and the closest two cars - the Fiesta Active and the Ecosport - are both SUV-style, which doesn't really float my boat.  I'm keeping a keen eye on the new Nissan Leaf.

Asus MB169B+ USB Monitor

Now I'm doing everything on my laptop (coding, reading, betting) in the evenings, I started to miss the screen real-estate I enjoy at work (4 monitors!), so I started looking into a laptop-friendly way of extending my desktop without peppering the lounge with extra monitors.  I came across this product, and I've been using it for a few weeks now. 

It's a standard Full HD 15.6" non-touchscreen display, but it's really thin, fairly light and best of all, it takes all it's power and display signal through a single USB port, so you don't need extra plugs or power bricks around.  The display is bright, clear and there's no real lag if you're just using it for 2D windows applications and web browsing.  I haven't tried it for 3D gaming but you're probably better off with a full-blown HDMI monitor if that's your use-case.

It comes with a faux-leather slip case, and you're supposed to be able to prop up the display in the stand, however I haven't found it to be the most stable solution (the monitor is prone to falling backwards).  This is the only downside and I've ordered a tablet stand to try to prop it up a bit better, but a plate holder/stand would probably do the same job.

You can Buy the MB169B+ here

Matched betting with OddsMonkey

Late last year I got introduced to a new concept, that of matched betting.  Initially I was disbelieving but after watching a friend make hundreds of pounds in quick succession, I had to give it a go myself.

How it works

Matched betting or bonus arbitrage is the process of taking advantage of a difference in odds between a bookmaker and a betting exchange, or where a bookmaker will offer risk free bets or bonus money for betting on an event or outcome.  There are actually dozens of these offers every single day across the 100+ UK bookmakers.

A basic example is the odds of tossing a coin, they should be 2/1, so you've got a 50% chance of winning if you choose (for example) heads.  Matched betting works because often a bookmaker (trying to get more business) will offer enhanced or boosted odds, so they might offer odds of 3/1 on heads.  The actual odds haven't changed however, so if you place a bet at 3/1, and place the opposite bet (a lay) against heads at 2/1, you can make make a profit no matter what the outcome is.

So what is a betting exchange?

A betting exchange is a special type of bookmaker which allows you to not only 'back' an outcome (e.g. Arsenal to win) but 'lay' or bet against an outcome (e.g. Arsenal not to win, which seems more likely these days).  Whereas a bookmaker makes money by offering odds on an event that add up to more than 100% (their 'overround'), a betting exchange makes money by charging a small commission on each winning bet (between 2-5%).

Expected value and casino offers

In addition to sports betting, a big part of matched betting is casino offers, e.g. "deposit £10 play with £20".  These offers often require you to wager your winnings a certain number of times, for example a £5 bonus might have 20x wagering requirements, so you'd have to spin/bet £100 to release the bonus.  Some offers are +EV, others are not.  EV or expected value is a measure of long term outcomes, i.e. if you did the same offer 100 or 1000 times, you would expect on average for this amount to be won.  If the wagering requirement is too high, the offer becomes -EV and you would expect on average to lose money completing the offer, so we ignore those.

What is Oddsmonkey?

To put it simply, OddsMonkey is a website that explains all of this better than I can, has a daily list of all the available offers, and exactly how best to complete them.  It has dozens of guides and calculators, and a rich and active community of helpful people all doing the same thing.  Their customer support is outstanding, even at 10pm at night.  It's only £15 per month, which you can make back in a single day without breaking a sweat.

Expected earnings

During the first month it's very easy to make money just by signing up to several of the bookmakers and taking advantage of their new customer offers, you should easily be able to make over £750 in the first month.  In subsequent months, you can make as much as you're willing to put into it, there's a great deal of offers and techniques available that can bring in anything from £500 to several thousand each month.

Downsides

The only downside is that the more bookmakers you sign up for, the more text messages, app notifications and emails you'll get every day.  However on the flip side, if you didn't get the notifications you can risk missing out on a decent offer.  In the long term, you are likely to get restricted by several of the bookmakers - matched betting isn't illegal, but bookmakers like making money, and if you consistently make money, then they don't.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.

Milight Smart LED bulb review

I've just bought a Milight bridge, 9W RGBW bulb and 2.4Ghz remote.  All from Amazon Uk (from sellers Datawize, BatteryLogic).  From researching online it seems there's at least 5 different names for these bulbs (milight, easybulb, led logic, limitlessled, etc).  The seller of the bridge/hub/controller/box/thingy assures me it's version 4 (there have been 5 versions) but I can't see how to tell without taking it apart.  

I downloaded the android app 'Milight 2.0' by 'Sunny' which seems to be the official app. The instructions actually refer to 'Mi.light' app, which seems to look and work exactly the same (i.e. not very well).  I managed to use the app to find the bridge by connecting to it's own Wifi network.  You can then go into configuration and "AP configure" which allows you to join it to your own Wifi network.  The inbuilt wifi then seems to turn itself off.

Now at this point I repeated the above steps several times, because I couldn't (or rather the app couldn't) see it after it had been configured.  You can re-set the thing by holding in the hidden reset button with a pin until the lights flash rapidly.

I also at this point went into my router settings and made sure DHCP would always give it the same IP address (based on its MAC address).

After a few attempts I went back to the Play store and found the Wifi RGB Led controller app by Cold-Core which actually recognized the bridge and allowed me to pair it with the bulb (to do this, turn on the bulb at the switch and press "on" on one of the zones (1-4) within 3 seconds - the bulb will then flash 3 times for success.  The pairing process is identical for the plastic remote control.

Now that all worked I configured the openhab binding by following this page https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/Milight-Binding - substituting my newly assigned static IP address and putting port 8899 and using channel number 6 rather than 1 to reflect how the new bulbs/bridges work.  I can now turn bulbs on/off and change colour both remotely and automatically (e.g. when home is unoccupied, or when i stumble downstairs in the middle of the night).

With that all working, overall I'm impressed - for a fraction of the price of Hue/Lifx they seem to do the job.  The only downside I can see is they don't report status, so sending messages is "fire-and-forget".  I haven't had any problems so far however.

There's some detail on development and versioning of the APIs, bridges etc on www.limitlessled.com/dev/