New tool in the kit

Yesterday the idea popped into my head to buy a cheap GoPro knock-off for recording video of my bike rides. That idea grew from reading Terence Eden's post, I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C. There are good enough smart watches and good enough wireless earbuds—surely the same can be true for action cams! I found some options on Amazon, several for $80 or less. The ones I had my eye on were around $50, and the reviews were mixed. Either people loved it for the price they paid, and some complained about the poor image stabilization1. That's not so good for my use-case. So I looked around for low-budget alternatives, and the Akaso brand came up. This was a brand new company to me. I'm familiar with DJI and GoPro but "Akaso" sounds like one of those cheap-o knock-offs just as much as any of the others I found on Amazon. Yet the folks at /r/ActionCam thought highly enough of it to suggest it as a decent alternative so I went looking on FB Marketplace. I was lucky enough…