Ring’s devices can be linked together to provide closer integration, and it’d be nice if motion detected on a Ring camera (especially an outdoor one) could trigger the Ring alarm to sound. But is this possible? I’ve always been curious about this so I wrote this article to find out. It’s not currently possible for … Read more
It’s quite common to be listening to music on your Echo in one room, but you need to move to another room – and so you want to continue playing that song on the other room’s Echo. Google Home offer this with Stream Transfer, but what about Amazon? Amazon released a “transfer music” feature late … Read more
The Ring Doorbell can work with a separate Chime device which plugs into your wall socket and works over WiFi, playing a doorbell sound whenever someone presses your Ring Doorbell. What some people don’t know, however, is that you can customize the sound that gets played on your Chime so I wanted to shoot this … Read more
I purchased my first Echo device back in 2016, and I’ve always found it quite useful, although my wife wasn’t convinced at first. But over time, as we’ve discovered more Echo features – and also purchased new smart home devices – we’ve both come to appreciate smart home technology a lot more. At the same … Read more
Google’s smart voice assistant – the ‘Home’ range – is great. It can play music, search (and read back) the internet, read your calendar entries, and a whole lot more. So logically, since Google also produce email (via Gmail) and mobile phones (via the Google Pixel range), Google Home can also read emails and text … Read more
The Ring Chime is a useful device in many cases – it plays a chime or doorbell (‘ding-dong’) sound to notify you when your Ring Doorbell has been pressed. This is useful if you got rid of your old doorbell chime unit as part of your Ring Doorbell install, or if you want to put … Read more
Ring’s cameras and doorbells tend to film in full HD (1920x1080p) with a few exceptions. Whilst this is good, Ring cameras also use a wide angle lens that pick up a lot of footage – at the sacrifice of overall detail quality, that is. Whilst you can zoom in on Ring recordings by doing a … Read more
I love most of the features that Echo provides… apart from the weather forecasting, that is. That’s because I moved house a few years ago, but it still gives me the weather forecast for my old town. Also, Alexa uses AccuWeather which – despite its name – isn’t always the most accurate. As a result, … Read more
You wake up in the middle of the night to a sound outside your front door. You check your phone and see that you have a Ring motion alert. You check it… only to see a burglar stealing your actual Ring Doorbell! Wait, what? The Ring Doorbell is meant to prevent burglars, not actually get … Read more
When talking about the benefits of smart plugs, I usually give the example of being able to turn your slow cooker on from work, so that you come home to a perfect meal. This relies on a key benefit of smart plugs: being able to turn them on and off whilst you’re away from your … Read more