I seem to go through technology re-orgs every four years or so. To start off 2019 I decided to re-do my security camera setup. My first cameras were installed in 2010 (Foscam outside, TRENDnet inside). In 2014 I switched my indoor cameras to Dropcams but since Dropcam (now Nest) didn’t have an outdoor solution at the time …
We’re finishing up hurricane-proofing this summer by finally replacing all the exterior entries with impact-rated doors. We had our impact windows installed back in 2008, and replaced the overhead garage door in 2015, but last year’s close call with Hurricane Irma reminded us we still needed to replace the doors. Since we’re getting new doors, we also …
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About two weeks ago I started experiencing some strange network issues: Nagios kept reporting devices dropping off the network and reconnecting, the TiVo Minis would lose their connection to the Bolt, etc. I eventually traced it to one of my TRENDnet TPE-TG44g switches (specifically the one in the closet that most of the home network …
For the past few months our family PC (the Dell XPS 18 all-in-one) had been giving my daughter fits. It was time for a change. I looked at the latest Dell all-in-ones but wasn’t able to find one that acted like a tablet like the XPS 18. It was pretty convenient for my daughter to …
After using three generations of Microsoft’s Surface tablet line (the original Surface Pro, the Surface Pro 3, and the Surface Pro 4) at work, this past week I got a new Surface Laptop.
There’s no shortage of retro dedicated gaming consoles in today’s marketplace: the Atari Flashback has been out for years (in several iterations) and more recently the NES Classic and SNES Classic have made headlines as they fly off the store shelves. I’ve owned two Flashbacks (both gifts), bought a few Virtual Console games when I was still playing …
I just got back from a trip around the solar system via the Oculus Rift. I’m no stranger to VR: I bought and read a lot of VR-related books in the early 90s, owned a Nintendo Power Glove (which I connected to my PC for some basic homebrew VR), ran a VR-themed BBS, and my first …
I’ve been pretty happy with my UniFi UAP, but it never quite reached to the far corners of the house, and the fact that it only had a 100mbps uplink kinda bothered me. So this weekend I replaced it with a new Ubiquity UniFi UAP-AC-LR.
Over Christmas vacation I had a network outage that left me without remote access to my home network for a week. While I was at my in-laws, unable to connect to my server or cameras, I started researching options for out-of-band management of my home network. I started with cellular devices like this, but they all …
There’s no shortage of Bluetooth trackers out on the market. These are small devices you can attach to your car keys, wallet, pets, etc. and then pair to an app on your smartphone so you can presumably find them when they’re lost or misplaced. I recently picked up three TrackR Bravos (one for my keys, one for …