I’m going to walk you through how I built a fully local smart home voice assistant that controls Zigbee lights while keeping cameras and other sensitive devices offline. This isn’t about a single-brand “plug-and-play” solution — it’s about combining reliable open-source pieces so the...
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How-to
I get this question a lot in comments and DMs: “How can I get multi-room,...
Wearables
I often get asked whether it's realistic to build a home monitoring setup that...
How-to
I’ve been building and testing smart home setups for years, and one thing...
Wearables
I’ve spent multiple multi-day trips wearing both a Garmin Epix and an Apple...
I’ve been building and testing smart home setups for years, and one thing keeps coming up: you can have a convenient, voice-controlled home without handing every event, camera feed, or sensor ping to Big Tech. In this guide I’ll walk you through...
I’ve spent multiple multi-day trips wearing both a Garmin Epix and an Apple Watch Ultra, and I still get asked: which is the better choice for adventure tracking? There’s no single answer that fits everyone, but from the perspective of someone...
I’ve been testing the Anker Soundcore Space A40 for a few weeks now and I kept asking myself the same question every time I switched from phone to gym to gaming rig: can these truly stack up against the Apple AirPods Pro when it comes to low...
If you’re hunting for a phone under £300 that can actually produce convincing night and even basic astrophotography shots, you’ve probably noticed the market is noisy. Flagship phones have tall claims and huge budgets for computational...
I’m often asked whether you can get real, usable night and even astrophotography shots from a midrange Android phone without relying on heavy computational processing. Short answer: yes — but only if you choose the right hardware and adopt a...
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...
I recently needed to run a small set of Windows-only apps on a Chromebook for a client project. The catch: I wanted the whole workflow to work offline, be as secure as possible, and not kill battery life. After testing multiple approaches, I settled...
I put the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Apple AirPods Pro through the kind of real-world tests I care about: sweaty runs, high-intensity interval training, and phone calls where latency and clarity matter. I wanted to know whether Samsung’s latest...
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...