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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I recently needed to run a small set of Windows-only apps on a Chromebook for a...
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I put the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Apple AirPods Pro through the kind of...
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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...
Why I care about offline-first smart home hubsI’m always testing gear with a practical question in mind: can this product do the useful stuff reliably when the internet drops out? For me, privacy and resilience go hand in hand — I want...
Switching from the Apple ecosystem to Android felt like a small leap and a mini migration project the first time I did it. I remember juggling cables, cloud accounts and the nagging fear of losing years of messages and photos. Over several moves...
I've spent a lot of time testing smart cameras across brands, and one of the most common — and frustrating — issues people bring to me is the Google Nest camera showing a black screen. I’ve seen this crop up during lab-style tests and in real...
I use a Sonos Roam almost every day — at home, in the garden, and sometimes when I’m away from Wi‑Fi. Balancing the desire for best‑possible sound with a limited mobile data allowance is a challenge: the Roam is a brilliant tiny speaker, but...
I’ve been testing continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices and their companion apps for years, and getting notifications right is one of those small-but-crucial tasks that can make life dramatically easier. The Dexcom G7 is a great sensor, but...
I spent several weeks living part-time in the Meta Quest 3 ecosystem to test a single question that keeps coming up in inboxes and community threads: can the Quest 3 actually replace a laptop for productivity tasks — with a keyboard and...
I travel a lot for work and leisure, and one of the constant challenges is keeping my Apple Watch alive for multi-day trips without giving up the features I actually rely on — notifications, step and sleep tracking, occasional GPS for walks, and...
I’ve been shooting with the Pixel 8 as my everyday camera for several weeks now, and given how much attention Google’s phones get for computational photography, the question I keep hearing is: Is the Pixel 8 still the best value for mobile...
When I take my workouts seriously, the last thing I want is earbuds that give me great noise cancellation at rest but fall apart the moment I start sweating. AirPods Pro are a fantastic all-rounder — great ANC, very good transparency mode, and a...
I’ve spent a lot of nights wearing both an Oura Ring and a Fitbit Sense so I could see firsthand where each device shines — and where they struggle. Sleep tracking isn’t magic; it’s a combination of sensor fidelity, algorithms, and how you...