Tubelox Reviews We've had a Quadro set since this holiday season. It's great for the indoor playhouse/sliding/climbing structures we've made. Tons of fun for us adults to put together. Hoping our almost-2-year-old eventually enjoys construction with it as much as she enjoys playing with it, or as much as we enjoy disassembling and reassembling.
My kid is 5 and she and her dad co-build things. She gets Frustrated with the fasteners when she tries to build by herself. Also, when they build a vehicle she insists that we push her around in it, I haven't found that she can "drive" it by herself.
Do your kids like to build forts, tunnels, and other imaginative creations around the house? Check out our full YouTube review of Tubelox, a fun new building toy that should keep your kids entertained for hours. There is a catch, though, and it’s a pretty big one. Antenna service where you live is either fantastic (if you live somewhere populous and flat), or unusable (if you live in the woods like me). I can occasionally pick up one of the “big 3” stations (ABC, NBC, CBS) if the weather is clear, but it normally requires me dragging an antenna around the room or sitting it up in a windowsill. For me, that makes it functionally useless.
It’s official: the way we watch TV and movies at home has changed for the better. Whereas we used to have to catch the latest shows as they happened live, Streaming services have given us what feels like an almost limitless array of content to check out. If your family is like ours, you probably find yourself wondering if you can finally ditch your pricey cable/satellite subscription. We just made the switch a few months back, and the combination of saving money and adding some extra entertainment to the mix has been well-worth our time.
This is what pushed us over the edge; when we sat down and talked at the beginning of this year, we realized that more than 90% of the content we watched at the time was coming from a streaming service. Our cable subscription existed solely to serve as a DVR for the few shows that weren’t on streaming (or were delayed on streaming), and to watch the news when the world went crazy.
Because we’re not huge sports people, and services like Hulu tend to host a lot of network shows 24 hours after they air, we decided pretty quick that we could do just fine without our hefty cable bill just to have live TV and the related equipment. You will find you can watch so much online these days. Whether thats Netflix, Hulu, or even Twitch streams, there is software to help make it easier to watch! For example with Twitch, if your favorite streamer is live when you are unavailable, use a platform like to download it and save for later! A cable subscription might not be the best option for you.
Once you’ve assessed if your watching habits can survive without cable/satellite, it’s time to decide if you’ll actually spend less money by making the move. A lot of this will depend of the type of internet services that are available to your home from your local ISP. For most people, cutting the cord makes immediate sense on paper. Many programming subscriptions from cable and satellite providers are more than $100/mo, and switching to internet-only packages can result in some serious savings. The only pitfalls can come having to upgrade your internet connection in tandem with this move, or the need to sign up for half-a-dozen new streaming services for the cable you’ve lost. However, I think that most of us already have high-speed home internet and already rely on streaming services anyway.
You can skip ahead if you already love your internet service provider, but if you have slow internet or other limitations with yours, this is a foundational element of cutting the cord that you need to address right off the bat. No matter what internet package you currently have, reach out to your ISP and see what kind of deals they’re currently offering. If fiber is available in your area (something that’s still new to many of us in the US), consider switching to an ISP that provides it.
This is an area where you’ll want to ask your neighbors and do some serious research. Our house actually serves as a bizarre “for instance” in this discussion; seemingly awesome-sounding fiber internet is actually available in my neighborhood, but after talking with my neighbors who told me how unreliable it had been, I decided to stick with cable-based internet from Xfinity. As a side-note, cable-based internet is actually pretty competitive these days (I’m getting 1 gig down!), and even some of the emerging ISP tech from Starlink and Ultrawideband 5G are offering fast internet connections to neighborhoods where that was never possible before. In my experience, if you can pull off home internet that’s at least 50 mbps down and 10 mbps up, you should be able to stream and play online games with little issues.
This is a forgotten detail that many people making this switch will overlook. Long story short, if you’ve been using the same wireless router for a decade, or are renting wireless equipment from your ISP, it’s time to make a switch. Now, ISPs will try to convince you that they have the fastest hardware, or that setting up a wireless router on your own is impossible if you’re not a nerd, those things couldn’t be further from the truth. Modern ISP-provded networking equipment is definitely better than it used to be, but it’s easily outperformed by. Upgrading to your own networking gear is also MUCH less expensive over time than renting.