I’ve been using Google Photos since it was announced back in 2015 as a belt-and-suspenders second cloud backup of my photo library (my primary backups are still in SpiderOak). I was using the “High Quality” setting since most of my photos are less than 16MP and didn’t want to pay for the extra storage required for …
Continue reading ‘Moving from Google Photos to Amazon Prime Photos’ »
My two-year old FitBit One started having a problem last month where I would find it just off. Holding down the button would cause it to “boot” (showing “FITBIT 6.60”) on the screen but while it was off it wasn’t tracking any activity. It wasn’t a battery issue as far as I could tell as the app …
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 …
Right after Thanksgiving my iPhone 6 Plus started exhibiting the symptoms of touchscreen disease: the screen would just stop responding to taps (unless I turned it off and back on again), would scroll erratically (or not at all), and had a slight yellow tinge around the edges. I toyed with the idea of getting a “new” …
I was doing a bit of a network re-org and realized that the old MoCA adapter that connects my home office to the network was only a 100mbps ethernet connection. Since everything else on my network is now gigabit (except for the occasional exception like my PiDP-8), I decided to upgrade to ActionTec’s ECB6200 MoCA adapters. …
“Infrastructures are essential to everyday life, but they are always the supporting player, never the goal. It is only when there is trouble that the infrastructure is noticed …” -Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer There was nothing wrong with my almost 5-year old Buffalo router, but after hearing Steve Gibson talk about the $50 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X on episode #569 of …
Now that I have an Amazon Echo in the house, I wanted to be able to play my music collection by just asking Alexa to do it. Since the Echo relies on the cloud, it can only play local music when it’s paired to a device as a speaker. So I could pair my iPhone …
It’s been three years since I bought my last TiVo and now that I have a 4K TV I wanted to be able to watch some 4K content. Despite Rovi’s purchase of TiVo and the uncertainty of the future of the hardware business, I purchased TiVo’s latest Series6 model, the TiVo Bolt UES (Unified Entertainment System). I went with …
For Father’s Day I got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated smart home speaker. You may know it (her?) as Alexa. If you’ve followed the blog, or even just glanced at it, you know I love tech gadgets and am also no stranger to dabbling in home automation so the Echo has been a fun toy to play …