Voice Assistants
Voice Assistant Profiles for Every Family Member
Ask a shared smart speaker for "my calendar" in a house of four people and there is roughly a one in four chance it reads out...
Last December I counted four dead outdoor smart plugs in my neighbour's recycling bin. Each one had spent a single season behind a hedge running string lights, and each one had failed the same way: water got in through the socket cover,...
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Voice Assistants
Ask a shared smart speaker for "my calendar" in a house of four people and there is roughly a one in four chance it reads out...
Smart Lighting
A flickering smart bulb is one of the more annoying faults in a connected home, partly because it feels random and partly...
Games
Spend an evening in a modern open-world game and watch the light. Clouds roll in and the whole scene cools and flattens.
Plugs and Switches
Every winter someone asks me the same question, usually with a photo attached: a portable space heater plugged into a cheap...
Voice Assistants
A client asked me to look at her Echo after her teenage son played back a clip of her arguing on the phone.
Games
Gamers talk about ping constantly because a delay of even a fraction of a second between pressing a button and seeing a result...
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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.