March 2017

Wizards of the Coast to Release Digital Toolset

Growing up I played Dungeons and Dragons extensively. The original D&D, Advanced D&D, 3rd Edition, you name it. Really from about 1976 up until the early 90s I was a big fan. Still have most of the books, boxed sets, modules, dice and a crapload of full notebooks where I created my own stuff. Anyway,…Read more

Five Free Home Automation Tools

So you’ve spent all your money on a crapload of smarthome devices and don’t have anything else to spend on software, or you just like tinkering with stuff and discovering how and why they work, or maybe you’re just a fan of not supporting developers for their hard work and want something for free. Actually…Read more

Today’s Home Automation Deals

Funny that I wrote about these earlier but Homecontrols is currently having a sale on a few items including Vera. You can pick up the VeraEdge for $69.95 and the VeraPlus for $119.95. That’s a $30 savings over Amazon’s price for the plus. The Zipato Z-Wave RGBW LED Light Bulb is on sale for $39 (that’s…Read more

Home Automation Hubs and How to Pick One

As far as home automation hubs go, the sky is the limit… as far as cost anyway. There’s a pretty large range in what they can do and it all depends on what you want to do and how technical you are as well. If all you want to do is control a few items…Read more

How to get into Home Automation on the Cheap

Unless you’re like me and spend the next 17 years picking up odd bits of equipment here and there and slowly build up your Home Automation system, one of the biggest barriers to getting introduced to Home Automation is the cost. It’s most definitely not a cheap hobby. If all you want to do is…Read more

Ten Things You Can Do With HomeSeer Home Automation

I’ve been a pretty loyal HomeSeer user for the last 17 years or so, ever since I got into Home Automation. While there are plenty of pros and cons about it, mainly because it’s paid and everyone wants free beer, that’s not what this is about. I’ll touch on that later. One of the things…Read more

Why Your Home Automation and IOT Shouldn’t be in the Cloud

Updated 3/12/17 – It was mentioned that the Nest Thermostat does not work without Internet connectivity. That’s not entirely true. The thermostat does continue to function as normal, it is the remote control features that won’t work without Internet. Last week’s little “hiccup” with Amazon AWS servers and a large portion on the web basically…Read more

Google Wifi Update

SO I’ve been using Google Wifi for a couple of months now and wanted to sort of update my initial review. I picked up the Google Wifi two-pack from the Google Store back at the beginning of December. Overall I was very pleased, at least initially. Setup is easy and without getting into benchmarks or testing…Read more