Tristan Perry 
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
The Ring Alarm is there to protect you and your house 24/7, right? After all, it’s an alarm system so it should be built to withstand a range of basic security attacks… which includes obvious attacks (e.g. a window being smashed) but also the less obvious attacks: someone jamming the WiFi signal of your house, … Read more
Our neighborhood has quite a few outdoor cats that come out at night. Most of the time they just walk around, but sometimes they chase each other… or lick themselves! So I rounded up a month’s worth of footage of the local cats, captured by my Ring Doorbell Pro: I’ve included every single cat clip … Read more
Amazon regularly do bundle offers on smart devices, such as smart plugs with an Echo or Echo Dot. But why are they often included as a bundle – can you effectively use smart plugs with an Amazon Echo? Whilst you probably won’t want to plug your Echo into a smart plug (unless you have privacy … Read more
I live in a town called Cwmbran, but yet when I ask my Echo device for “the weather today”, I get the weather forecast for Caerphilly – somewhere I haven’t lived in over 3 years. Why?! Equally, the weather forecast I get from Alexa (who use AccuWeather) seems to contradict the one I get from … Read more