One of the pain points on our smart home journey has been allowing visitors and children without i-devices to control the lights. So far I’ve installed two different solutions, and one of them actually works. The one that doesn’t work is due to the construction of my home, the device itself seems fine.
Better still, the one that works is easier to install and cheaper to purchase.
Continue reading “More smarts for an old house”Not so much hidden really as trick the brain to ignore the power cords for the rear speakers.
Finally, six months behind schedule, my living room wall is finished.
Continue reading “It is Finished”As much as we love the ger, it’s too cumbersome for shorter trips or space constrained sites. I decided we needed a modern family tent, because the wee ones are too wee for separate tents.
It’s been bugging me for a while that there is rust visible around my tow hooks, so I decided to try to make my first (of many {Never buy an East Coast truck}) efforts at rust repair.
Project creep (and my parts still aren’t in the country)
I’m sitting with the wife one evening talking about the wall. She mentions that a friend had a deep red accent wall and it looked great.
The entertainment center is going on the only wall in the room that works as an accent wall, now I have to paint it. Of course, the other walls in the room are a pale yellow and they will look terrible with red, so I have to paint the entire room.
Continue reading “Living room update (part 2)”We are an unapologetic Apple house. Phones, tablets, computers, even an AppleTV in the family room. When you use Apple products in the manner which they are designed they really do just work.
That being said, when you start to do things that the folks in Cupertino hadn’t planned on, it gets challenging. This is also probably true for Windows environments, but Mac users are really accustomed to things that just work.
Continue reading “Cleaning up the (music) library”Lots of curse words and money thrown about unexpectedly.
It seems that my wireless router had reached its effective end of life, or at least the end of my fault tolerance.
Whenever my wife and I watched television, the router would go for about five – ten minutes and then require a reboot. This didn’t happen to the kids. It may be because our shows are high def, and theirs are cartoons. It is about six years old and doesn’t support all the latest protocols, so I decided to upgrade.
Continue reading “Happy New Year. Happy New Network.”I’m not even sure.
I’ve got some lights that turn in when my alarm sounds in the morning. I’ve got some lights that turn on when the sun sets, and others that turn on when it rises. My thermostat knows to adjust the set point when no one is home, and my front door unlocks when I pull into the driveway.
Does that meant my home is smart? I’m not so sure
Continue reading “What makes a smart home?”A place for the grownups
The new house has both a family room and a living room, where the old house only had one, so I’ve been one entertainment system short since we moved. Also, my wife and I like to watch some things that a bit too adult for the wee ones, so it will be nice to be able to watch an episode of Vikings while they are playing on the Switch in another room
When I bought the seating last Christmas (we got volunteered to host and had ZERO furniture in the room) I decided that I was going to decorate this room.
I don’t believe there is a single room in the house that doesn’t have hand me down (or road side found) furniture. I want a room that looks designed & planned.
This is going to be a room for the grownups.
Continue reading “Living Room Update (part 1)”
Modern Anachronist 