Leaving the (Google) Nest

I bought my first Dropcams back in 2014, right around the time Nest (which had acquired Dropcam) was acquired by Google. Then I added the Nest Thermostat in 2016 (which was later replaced in 2021 with a Z-Wave one during an HVAC system upgrade), the Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors in 2018, and finally a bunch …

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Goodbye LastPass, hello Vault(Bit)warden

Unless you’re not interested in tech news or have been under a rock for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard about the latest LastPass breach debacle. Two days before Christmas, every LastPass customer like myself received an e-mail informing us that, in a nutshell, back in August 2022 an unauthorized third-party had acquired LastPass …

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Node-Red (with Ring and HomeSeer)

“Even with my tendency to tinker, adding yet another system on top of Homebridge seemed like too much to me.” – me, two months ago Yeah, I said that back in late May (in reference to Scrypted) after getting Homebridge set up and integrated with my HomeSeer home automation system. But here I am, two …

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Putting it all together – Ring, HomeSeer, and Alexa integration

2021 Home Security/Home Automation Re-Design [ Part 3 of 3 ] A lot of my old Pulse automations were based on my ADT alarm sensors: open the door into the garage, turn on the garage lights; alarm armed in Away mode, randomize the indoor lights to make the house look occupied; burglar alarm goes off, …

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Ring Alarm security system

2021 Home Security/Home Automation Re-Design [ Part 1 of 3 ] I’ve been an ADT customer for almost 20 years. When we moved to Florida in 2001, our house already had a hard-wired alarm system put in by the previous owners so subscribing to ADT’s monitoring service was one of the first “utilities” we set …

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Home automation and security re-design

Ok, enough sports posts, let’s get back to some tech! I’ve been distracted from tinkering with my 3D printer lately because for the past two weeks or so I’ve been going through a re-design of my home automation and security setups. After an almost two-week outage of the ADT skill for Alexa (during which I …

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Going all-in with Nest cameras

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 …

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Ubiquiti Unifi Switch 8 POE-150W

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 …

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Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X

“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 …

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Let’s Encrypt! Switching to HTTPS …

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 …

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