Automation and Routines
Smart Home Alerts Need the Same Discipline as Work Chat
My phone used to buzz with smart home notifications constantly, a door sensor, a motion alert, a routine confirmation, until I...
I drove eleven miles back home once, certain I had left the garage door open, only to find it closed exactly as it should have been, purely because I could not actually remember closing it and had no way to check without physically...
Recent
Automation and Routines
My phone used to buzz with smart home notifications constantly, a door sensor, a motion alert, a routine confirmation, until I...
Plugs and Switches
I plugged an energy monitoring smart plug into my table saw purely out of curiosity, expecting a boring confirmation of what I...
Home Security
A neighbor's basement flooded while they were away for a long weekend, a sump pump failure that would have been caught within...
Buying Guides
A budget smart plug I bought for eight dollars during a flash sale worked perfectly for four months, then began randomly...
Home Security
A locksmith friend of mine, someone who has picked more locks professionally than he can count, still runs a traditional...
Automation and Routines
My thermostat automation quietly stopped working for three weeks last winter, and I did not notice until a genuinely cold...
Sections
Archive
Three people who actually live with the gear they write about: a reviewer who buys new devices the day they launch and keeps a running list of what has failed him, a former security systems installer who now writes about what cameras and sensors actually protect against, and someone who builds absurdly complex home automations for fun and then writes the simpler version everyone else actually needs. Every article carries a byline, and nothing runs that the writer has not set up themselves.