I’ve been building privacy-first smart home setups for years, and one pattern keeps coming back: you can have tightly integrated Zigbee and Z-Wave devices without handing control or metadata to a cloud service — including voice control. In this guide I’ll walk you through how I build a home...
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How-to
I recently needed to run a small set of Windows-only apps on a Chromebook for a...
Reviews
I put the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Apple AirPods Pro through the kind of...
How-to
I recently wanted to watch a movie with a friend while keeping the noise down,...
How-to
I’ve spent years running hands-on tests on routers, smart bulbs, cameras and...
I recently wanted to watch a movie with a friend while keeping the noise down, and my Windows laptop only likes to send audio to one Bluetooth headset at a time. After some testing and a fair bit of trial and error, I found a few reliable ways to...
I’ve spent years running hands-on tests on routers, smart bulbs, cameras and every gadget in between — and one thing always becomes clear: you don’t have to trade off performance to get a secure home Wi‑Fi for smart devices. In this guide...
I stream a lot from my Chromecast with Google TV — it’s compact, responsive, and the UI makes jumping between apps painless. But I also want my streaming to be private and free from obnoxious trackers and ads where possible. Over the years...
Buying a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S24 can be a smart way to get flagship performance without the flagship price—I've done it more than once when testing phones for Wcetesting Co. But “refurbished” covers a wide range of realities:...
I set out to answer a simple but consequential question: can the Raspberry Pi 5 handle 4K transcoding for a home Plex server? After spending a week building a Pi 5 Plex test rig, pushing it with different source files and client scenarios, and...
Keeping a mixed Zigbee and Z‑Wave smart home healthy means keeping firmware up to date — but doing that manually across dozens of devices is a chore I actively avoid. Over the years I’ve tested setups on Home Assistant, Hubitat, SmartThings...
I test a lot of laptops and tablets at Wcetesting Co, and one recurring theme I keep coming back to is batteries. Modern devices use lithium-ion (or lithium-polymer) cells that are incredibly energy-dense but also sensitive to how you treat them....
I plan a lot of content — reviews, how-tos, and trend pieces — and over time I built a practical workflow that combines Notion as my single source of truth for ideas and editorial calendars with ChatGPT as a creative and execution engine. This...
When I go for long runs in cold, windy weather or push a tempo session up a steep trail, I want two things from my wearable: reliable heart-rate data I can trust in the moment, and SpO2 readings that actually mean something instead of being a noisy...
I spent the last two weeks living with both the Google Pixel Tablet and the iPad Pro M4 to answer the question I keep seeing in inboxes and comment threads: which is better for drawing, note-taking, and—critically—battery life in real-world use?...