This month, I cut the cord, cancelled my Spectrum cable TV service, and switched to YouTube TV, which meant I needed a way to watch YTTV on, well, my TVs! There’s a dizzying array of devices for the cord-cutter (Roku, Apple TV, smart TV apps, and more), but since I’m already an Amazon Prime subscriber, …
During our recent cruise to Hawaii, my three and a half year-old Canon PowerShot SX710 HS started having lens issues. Just what I needed in the middle of a 10-day trip to the most exotic location in the United States: a super-zoom camera that wouldn’t zoom. The lens would make a clicking noise as it …
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 …
When I installed the ADT Pulse system in 2011, it came with monitored smoke/heat and CO2 detectors. Since then I’ve been paying the monthly monitoring fee to ADT and have had to deal with inexplicable false alarms (usually in the middle of the night and ADT’s answer was always “just change the battery”). This was …
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 …
Earlier this month while visiting my in-laws I helped my father-in-law connect his Rainbird ESP-Me sprinkler controller to his wireless network and then showed him how to use the mobile app on his Android phone. After doing this I realized: I’m the techie/networking/home automation/IoT guy in the family … why haven’t I installed an internet-enabled sprinkler controller …
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.
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 …
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 …