For quick blog posts telling you about any new videos that I have posted on the Smart Home Point YouTube channel.
I recently had a smart meter installed, which tells me in real time exactly how much energy my house is using. When I put the dishwasher on, for example, it tells me that I’m using £2 per hour – which is good to know (and expensive – bring back lower energy bills, please!). However after … Read more
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I purchased the Philips Hue PC Gradient Lightstrips in the end. I love how easy they were to setup, and how they make gaming – and music listening – much more immersive. This is a quick 1 minute video looking at this awesome new product from Philips Hue: … Read more
On 1st November 2022, Amazon announced an “upgrade” to Prime Music. Instead of giving you 2 million songs, instead they would give us 100 million songs. AWESOME, right? Well, not really. They nerfed a big feature: the ability to pick and choose songs or albums. Instead, everything on Prime Music is like Spotify Free: shuffle … Read more
This short video explains that Philips Hue’s indoor Lightstrips are wider than normal, meaning that they do NOT fit inside standard diffuser channels: This is frustrating if you have just purchased loads of diffuser channels. Hue’s Lightstrips are around 14mm (⅗”) in width, because they are 6-pin. Many other LED light strips are 8-9mm in … Read more
This in-depth video compares five well known smart indoor cameras, from Ring, Eufy, SwitchBot, Tapo and Blink: The exact models that I compared are: I do a range of image quality tests in this video, but I also do a deep-dive into each camera’s pros and cons. I also look at each camera’s sound quality. … Read more
Alexa routines are quite powerful, and they include turning smart bulbs on/off – and changing their color. But it wasn’t possible to dynamically change the color… until now! Recent support added by Philips Hue means that you can kick off Hue Lab Formulas within Alexa routines, allowing you to setup some really awesome smart home … Read more
Smart homes are great, other than the fact that there are hundreds of devices from dozens of main manufacturers – leading to various incompatibilities and integration issues. While ‘smart hubs’ can help with this problem, they can only do so much. That’s why the Matter project is so important, which this video explains. I also … Read more
The Ring Protect Basic used to be pretty good value – for £2.50 (or $3) per month, you had cloud-based recordings and a bunch of extra features. But on 1st June 2022, Ring announced that they were hiking the price of this plan by up to 40%. Why did they do this? Are there any … Read more
I love Ring products, but sometimes I wished they added some key features. After all, many of their products cost hundreds of dollars (or pounds), but the recording quality is stuck at ‘full HD’ and there’s a often issues with missed recordings due to the lack of Ethernet support and 24/7 recording support. So today’s … Read more
Conspiracy theory: Jeff Bezos HATES music! Check out these (rude) song requests, and what Amazon Echo plays in response. Video Transcript Hello, I’m Tristan. I think I’ve uncovered a conspiracy theory. Jeff Bezos hates music. There, I said it! What am I talking about? Well, just listen to some of these song requests. Basically Amazon … Read more