Smart Home

Smart plugs are replacing smart appliances, and your decade-old washing machine just became future-proof

Google's long-awaited new Home Speaker is finally launching soon

Amazon Echo Show 8 hits $125, its lowest price ever ahead of Prime Day

I tried to replace every Cloudflare service in my homelab — here's what I kept and what I dropped

Home Assistant's May update finally makes Alexa devices worth integrating, but there's a catch

Claude Code found the quiet problems hiding in my Home Assistant setup, and I've been ignoring them for months

My discontinued Kindle became the best smart home display I own, and it cost me nothing to set up

I love being able to reuse old devices

Home Assistant users are building smarter homes than Google and Amazon ever will

This is what you get when the smart home is decoupled from commercial interests

Apple, Google, and Amazon are deliberately fracturing your smart home mesh

The big three have ruined the future of smart homes.

Home Assistant is way more than a smart home dashboard, and here's what I actually run on it

With the right apps and integrations, Home Assistant is an absolute powerhouse for tinkering enthusiasts

I built a Windows 3.1 dashboard for my homelab, and it's the most fun I've had self-hosting

This Windows 3.1-inspired homelab dashboard replaced my bookmarks, and now I actually enjoy opening my services.

Home Assistant slows down over time, but there's a nuclear option most people don't realize

The best thing for your smart home might be starting from scratch.

Your smart home cameras are choking your Wi-Fi upload pipe—here is the local remedy

It's time to ditch the cloud.

Most smart home failures start with DNS, and nobody notices until everything breaks

The hidden culprit behind broken smart home workflows isn't coverage or hardware; it's often DNS silently breaking everything

Zigbee solved the smart-home battery problem years ago, and Matter still hasn't

Matter is lagging behind yet again.

I connected my dumb appliances to Home Assistant, and it felt like upgrading my whole house

Forget replacing all of your old appliances.

Home Assistant can now see when you use the physical remote, and it changes everything

Making IR great again!

This $20 gadget finally fixed my smart doorbell’s weak Wi-Fi signal

A cheap range extender was the solution to all of my woes

I stopped adding hardware to my home lab when I realized fewer moving parts meant more uptime

I thought my home lab needed more hardware. What it really needed was fewer places to fail.

Your Zigbee mesh is drowning in cheap repeaters, and here's how to save it

Zigbee can only heal so much of itself.

Smart plugs are secretly the best troubleshooting tools you already own

From routers to your dumb home devices, everything benefits from a smart plug.

I automated my lights first, but energy tracking is what actually saved me money

You can dive deep in monitoring energy usage.

ESPHome's Device Builder finally lets you compile multiple devices at once, and it changes everything

Device management for the real world.

I started my home lab with a full-size PC, and now I can't imagine using anything else

A full-fat ATX PC is the ultimate starting point for a home lab

I moved my entire Kindle library to a self hosted server and escaped the Amazon walled garden for good

BookOrbit finally gave me the Kindle experience Amazon should have built, and it costs nothing to run.

Home Assistant's new dashboard editor cuts setup time from 20 minutes to seconds

Create cards to your heart's content.