(This newsletter was sent on 26th August 2022, to the first 50 subscribers to our newly-launched newsletter.)
(* Do you feel honored to be one of the first 50 subscribers?!)
Today’s newsletter will be shorter-than-average – it is mainly a ‘hello’, and to say thanks for subscribing to this newsletter!
Before diving into some recent smart home news, I wanted to mention that a new YouTube video is out. You can now trigger Philips Hue lab formulas through Alexa routines, which opens up some potentially awesome home automations, which I walk-through this in today’s video:
Smart Home News – LIFX Is Saved
A couple of months ago, I did a short YouTube video and blog post covering how LIFX (the smart lighting company) looked to be on shaky financial ground.
This is because their parent company – Buddy Technologies – filed for bankrupcy over in Australia.
Luckily, Feit Electric (an American company) purchased all LIFX assets on 3rd August 2022 – and they seem fairly positive about this purchase. (Well, I guess they would say that, wouldn’t they? They aren’t going to buy another company then say that they suck… but that’s besides the point).
For the full history, I have updated our blog post on this topic:
Recent Blog Post – How To Turn Off The Amazon Echo Show’s Screen At Night
The Echo Show is an awesome device, but I find its screen on/off behavior a bit… confusing. In-fact, I have two Echo Shows (both 8″ versions, but one was 1st gen and one is 2nd gen) – and both behave a little differently.
As a result, we recently published a guide covering all the different ways that you can get the screen to go off automatically. Whether you want to save on energy (a little), or you’re just curious, feel free to check out our guide below:
Wrapping Up
And that’s a wrap for today. Wait, what? Well I did say that this would be a shorter-than-average newsletter!
I mainly wanted to ‘hit send’ today because I was excited to see a bunch of newsletter subscribers (~50 in a week: that’s awesome, thanks for your support!).
Going forward, I’ll probably be looking to send 1-2 newsletters a month. It will feature a round-up of the latest smart home news (including any big new features affecting products like Alexa/Echo, Philips Hue and Ring), and it’ll mention a couple of blog posts and/or YouTube videos that we’ve published recently.
Until then – thanks for reading this far, and speak soon! Feel free to hit reply to say “hi” if you’d like – I’m a real person.
If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about this article, please leave a comment below. Please note that all comments go into a moderation queue (to prevent blog spam). Your comment will be manually reviewed and approved by Tristan in less than a week. Thanks!