Standby mode is both a blessing and a curse. Fast startup times and background processes are convenient, but have you ever stopped to ask how much these services are worth to you per year?

Smart bulbs are a common gateway into the world of smart home devices. Setting one up is as simple as screwing in a light bulb, and you get instant results with the ability to turn your lights on and off remotely, change the brightness, and even use different colors with the right bulbs. Smart bulbs aren't always the best solution to every problem, however.

If you don’t have sensors hidden all over your house, do you really have a smart home? These devices make it possible to use all sorts of useful automations and alerts, from turning on lights to avoiding thousands of dollars worth of damage.

Ring video doorbells are a popular choice as they're relatively affordable and simple to set up and use. The problem is that to use the best features of a Ring doorbell, such as accessing your video history, you need to pay for a subscription. If you don't want to keep paying to use a device you already bought, there is another option.

I spend a lot of time at my desk in my home office, and I use my smart speaker multiple times during the day. I wanted a more reliable way to interact with my voice assistant, so I decided to go old school and add a phone to my desk.

Water leak sensors are the smart home upgrade for everyone. Whether you live in a house or apartment, own or rent, these tiny devices can save you money and hassle.

I have a lot of smart home automations that can sometimes feel like magic. I still get a small thrill when I sit down in the reading chair in the living room, and the lamp next to the chair turns on automatically. While some automations can feel like magic, there are plenty of Home Assistant projects that can replicate actual magic.

I use local LLMs for multiple purposes, including stripping personal information from documents before I upload them to Claude or ChatGPT and generating a daily RSS digest for my Kindle. Despite the slow performance of even the smaller LLMs on my hardware, I use them for a number of things in my smart home.