Smart Home

How to Make a DIY Smart Home Security System (No Monthly Fees!)

We no longer live in a time wherein order to have a security system at home, you have to call the likes of ADT, Brinks, or some other giant security conglomerate to come and install expensive cameras, alarms, etc. and then charge you a ridiculous monthly fee to “monitor” your home for you. Instead, there are a ton of smart home devices that can easily be used to create a smart home security system that […]

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If You Have a Google Home Device at Work, This Setting Should Really Be Turned Off

Every time I walk into my WeWork office, a notification pops up on my phone. It’s from the Google Home app and it tells me that a device on my Wi-Fi is casting Spotify. Funny thing is, I don’t have a Google Home device at my office. Essentially, the office I work in has a ton of different companies all under the same roof (it’s called WeWork, I love it, you can check it out

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6 Super Easy Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy

There’s a lot of talk about protecting your privacy online lately (big thanks to Facebook for a good portion of that coverage). And even though it’s a buzzy topic right now, it’s not without some merit. There is more and more data being collected on you and me every day, and while advertisers are using most of it, some of it is being collected for more nefarious reasons. Because of this, I figured maybe I’d

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How to Make Your Home a Smart Home

If you’ve ever wondered how to make your home a smart home? Or maybe wondered what a smart home was in the first place? This video can help. It’s the new year and my sister and her fiance just bought their first house. A fixer-upper in the town of Poughkeepsie (about 2 hours north of NYC). So I figured, while they’re fixing the baseboards and taking care of the mouse situation, I’d come in and

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This Small Box Can Protect Your Entire Home from Malware Automatically

Bitdefender sent me their latest security hardware called the new Bitdefender BOX. Apparently, it’s a device you can plug into your home router and it’ll magically protect all the devices connected to the network from viruses, malware, and any other type of nasty electronic attack. Sounds like a neat concept frankly and thankfully the BOX itself looks pretty cool too so I figured I’d check it out and see how well it did. What is

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How to Make a Phone Call Using Google Home (& Use Your Actual Phone Number)

Google has finally started rolling out their new Google Home feature that allows you to call someone. As in, actually call their real cell phone, not just ring their Google Home app if they happen to have one installed. The feature only works in you are in the US or Canada at the moment and requires that you speak English (sorry, my French Canadian friends) and although all of the things you need to make

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How to Create Custom Commands for Google Home or Amazon Echo (Video)

Voice assistants are pretty convenient. You can ask them the weather when you get up in the morning, have them set timers, even put them into infinite loops for your own entertainment, but despite these things, they definitely have a limited number of commands you can issue. Now, short of developing an app using the voice assistant APIs, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to add your own custom actions and triggers to

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How to Enable Netflix Casting from Google Home

When Google Home was released, it was able to cast videos from YouTube directly to any Chromecast device you had installed on a TV. All you had to do was say “Hey, Google. Show me a Casey Neistat video on the Living Room TV” and viola you’d be thrown into watching the popular YouTuber’s latest videos. Frankly, the ability to cast things to the TV is one of the differentiators that Google Home has over

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