“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 …
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 …
Last week at work we received a pair of Netgear ProSafe gigabit managed click switches (the 8-port GSS108E and 16-port GSS116E) to outfit a conference room. I was impressed with the mounting options and after seeing the 8-port one was less than $50 on Amazon, I decided to get one for my home office. The GSS108E replaced …
After over 11 years of faithful service as our primary family room TV, my 42″ Panasonic plasma died last week. Time to do some TV shopping! It’s hard to believe we’ve been using an ED (that’s right, 480P) television as our workhorse display for the past 11 years. When we bought it, we couldn’t quite …
You may notice something different about ‘chmod 644’ today … a green HTTPS padlock in your browser’s address bar. That’s because my domain is now using an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. The Let’s Encrypt project is a certificate authority (CA) that aims to bring free and open encryption to the web. I first heard about …
I’ve been wanting to try the Nest learning thermostat since the first one was released back in 2012. At the time, though, I had just installed my ADT Pulse and Z-Wave home automation system. Putting in the Nest would mean using a separate app to control my home’s temperature outside of Pulse with no integration …
Since getting my standing desk at home last last year I’ve been thinking about getting a new, smaller PC that would fit on top of my desk instead of under it (like my old Dell Inspiron from 2008), eliminating cable clutter. With the upcoming release of Windows 10 I had been thinking more about this and also replacing …
Our family laptop (an hp Envy 14 Beats Edition) has taken a beating (no pun intended!) over the past few years and recently (thanks to be carried around by the screen by my daughter) the LCD has gone wonky, requiring a bunch of futzing to get the display to work properly. The recent tax-free weekend here …
More cameras as my replacement project continues! I’ve been using the TRENDnet TV-IP422W cameras inside for the past few years but really hadn’t been using their pan-tilt-zoom features. Rather than replace them with fixed, high-resolution PoE cameras like the TV-IP572PI and continue to possibly overload my ZoneMinder installation, I decided to give the Dropcam Pro a try.
My security camera re-org project continues as I upgrade my old indoor cameras to newer HD (and PoE) versions. I replaced the outside ones earlier this month and next on the list was my four year-old TRENDnet TV-IP121W which I replaced with the very similar, but newer TV-IP572PI.