I've been tinkering with my smart home for well over a decade, so it's rare that I come across anything that feels truly new. Sometimes, however, I find ideas that I've not seen before, and it's always a breath of fresh air. Quite literally, in the case of one of these projects.

What I want from AI is for it to take the boring and mundane jobs off my hands and free me up to do more fun stuff. Reading my emails before starting work each day is time-consuming and dull, so I decided to hand the task off to Claude.

One of the strongest arguments for buying physical media in a digital world is the unwritten rule that "the disc is always the true version." It's long been the case that buying DVDs or Blu-rays allows access to original edits or missing episodes that aren't available on any streaming service. However, for one of my favorite shows, streaming has now become the version that's more faithful to the original.

My phone is constantly bombarded with notifications. I try to limit them as much as possible, but even so, they quickly become easy to ignore. Sometimes, Home Assistant needs to alert me about something important, such as a water leak being detected, and these are notifications I really don't want to miss. There are several methods I use to make notifications almost impossible to miss.

Tablets are great. You can use them for anything from browsing the web to watching your favorite shows. They're incredibly versatile, but that versatility can come at a cost. There are plenty of things that a jailbroken Kindle can do better.

Pi-hole is one of the simplest and most useful things you can set up on your home network. It acts as a DNS sinkhole that blocks requests to domains associated with known ad servers or trackers. This gives you a far better browsing experience, but if you're only running a single instance of Pi-hole, things can go wrong.

The way to use a chatbot is given in the name. They are designed to be used by having two-way conversations with the LLM using natural language. You type something into the chatbot, and it replies. In some cases, continually typing stuff into a chatbot isn't the most efficient way to do things, so I set up a system that does it for me.

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.

Smart features on a TV can be very useful. You can stream content using apps such as Netflix or control your TV remotely with your smart home. You need to connect your TV to the internet to use some of these features, and doing so can expose a lot of your data.

Life is busy, and I don't always have time to sit and read articles when I discover them. Pocket used to allow me to save these articles and read them later, but it's sadly long gone. I decided to set up a Pocket replacement using a mini PC and my Kindle.

When Brave first appeared on the scene, it built its reputation on being a fast, lightweight, and privacy-focused alternative to Chrome, without any of the bloat. Sadly, over the years, Brave has become bloated itself, adding features such as AI, crypto wallets, rewards, and news feeds that users never asked for. Brave Origin is a new stripped-down version of Brave that removes the bloat, but there's a pretty significant catch.

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.

If you look at the back of your TV, there are many ports that you probably never use. Some older TVs include an RS-232 serial port similar to those that you'd find on the back of old PCs. While the main uses of this port include professional diagnostics and servicing, there are several ways you can use your TV's serial port for other things.

When I first installed a local LLM, I expected to use it the same way that I'd been using ChatGPT. It soon became apparent that on my modest hardware, this wasn't going to work. By changing the way I use my local LLMs, they've become much more useful.

Home Assistant is, in my opinion, the best smart home software available. It's free, open-source, privacy-focused, works with a huge number of devices, and can make your smart home do almost anything you can think of. Despite all that, Home Assistant definitely has its faor share of problems.

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.

ESP32 boards are popular for home projects because they're small, versatile, and, most of all, cheap. Not only are ESP32 boards affordable, but if you use them for the right projects, they can also help you save money. Here's how.

Popular AI chatbots such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT can analyze data from spreadsheets and other uploaded files. You can upload spreadsheets and ask them to create summaries, find patterns, and more. I wanted to use ChatGPT to analyze my spending to see if it could find ways to save money, but I didn't want to upload my personal information to the cloud. Using a PII-detection tool and a local LLM, I was able to strip away the personal information before I uploaded my files.