For quick blog posts telling you about any new videos that I have posted on the Smart Home Point YouTube channel.
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
The Echo Show is a great touchscreen-enabled product from Amazon, but it also makes it a little bit too easy for children to freely surf YouTube – potentially accessing inappropriate videos. Therefore I went looking for makes on how to child-proof the YouTube installed on the Echo Show, and this video covers everything you need … Read more
In the market for a new Ring camera? Simple: just go to Ring’s website, and choose from their… wait, what? They offer FOURTEEN cameras? Who even needs FOURTEEN cameras? If you’ve ever felt like this, worry not. This video walks you through everything you need to know to make your purchasing choice a little easier. … Read more
When people think of smart lighting, they usually think of the obvious: full color (RGB) bulbs. Setting rooms to bright green, or dancing to strobe lighting effects. But I actually prefer a less discussed smart lighting feature: motion sensitive lighting. This is simple to set up, and it feels like something out of sci-fi. I … Read more
Smart homes are great, but sometimes it’s not always clear how to use smart devices to make your home more Christmasy. This video covers five simply ways that you can use common smart devices to smarten up your Christmas. The individual sections of the video are at the timestamps below: 0:00 – Intro 0:19 – … Read more
Reolink recently got in touch with me, asking if I wanted to review one of their cameras. I opted for their RLC-810A, a 4K, 8 megapixel smart camera which records with MUCH better image quality than Ring does. This video compares the Reolink 4K footage with my Ring Floodlight Cam Plus, that records in full … Read more