Home Automation with SmartThings and ActionTiles

ActionTiles Smart Home Automation - Information Panel

Do press the shiny red (ActionTiles) button! Moving further down the road of my smart home automation insanity, I’ve started looking for a panel to control things around the home. The paradigm I was looking for is not very different from a home security alarm control panel. I wanted a wall mountable or tabletop touch […]

Home Automation Solution Mapping

Home Automation and Smart Home

Home Automation, or has my house become self-aware? SkyNet Be Damned! I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and SmartHome IoT technology for a couple of months and went searching for a way to map out all the connections, dependencies and devices in the house. I tripped across SmartHomeDB on my twitter feed and gave […]

Image Optimization – ShortPixel for WordPress

ShortPixel: Of course size matters - nobody wants a small cup of coffee (or large images)

ShortPixel – (Image) Size Does Matter The majority of this website is related to my photography obsession hobby. I’ve always walked a fine line on image optimization – trying to get the smallest images with the best quality and retain the EXIF/Metadata of the images. Until recently, I have been using a mix of  EWWW Image Optimizer […]

Thoughts on Alexa and SmartThings Smart Home Integration

Smart Home Automation and IoT

What’s in a Name? Ok, while I may have a Smart Home, my brain is getting fuzzy so I am writing this wall of text more for my own head than anything else. If things here help you in any way, all the better… In my last post I went into some of the bits […]

A Somewhat SmartHome or Where’s the Light Switch?

All this modern SmartHome Technology and I still cant turn on the damn lights!

My SmartHome is supposed to be smarter than me, right? I’ve avoided a lot of the SmartHome push, but finally gave in over the past week or so. My caving in was not really due to laziness or really needed to automate anything. It was more out of an intellectual curiosity, and to see what I could […]

The more things stay the same …

Amazon Web Services Lightsail logo and robot

The more they change … In the previous post I vented a bit about how Microsoft was starting to seriously eat Apple’s lunch … I have used the same shared hosting service for over ten years now, and while they are amazing people and always have gone above and beyond for me … I needed […]

Albrightsville Pennsylvania Weather Station

weather station image

Albrightsville Pennsylvania Weather Station UPDATE: Due to reasons beyond my control, the weather station is down until further notice … One of my hobbies/interests outside of photography is meteorology and weather tracking. Living in Albrightsville Pennsylvania up in the Poconos we have many microclimates. It is so bad the weather reports on the news are hardly ever close to accurate […]

Testing New Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Half Speed Ahead by RyanRenaissance - Used with permission Creative Commons License http://ryanrenaissance.deviantart.com/art/Half-Speed-Ahead-128867293

CDN (Content Delivery Network) and the Need for Speed So, I host my blog and other websites with Hosting Matters, the folks have been great to me over the past decade and prices I have locked in are absolutely phenomenal (seriously – they are great). As with anyone who is on a shared hosting plan, […]

Site Upgrade – WordPress 4.6, Plugins & More

Upgrade: Maintain Speed

Upgrade – Maintain Speed! Installed the WordPress 4.6 upgrade, as well as a couple other changes and tweaks this evening. Firstly, updated the backend to the current version. This caused its share of issues with a couple plugins – so I chased down a few more updates and re-applied further custom tweaks I’ve made to tie a few […]

Budapest St. Stephen Statue – Plotagraph

Saint Stephen at Sunrise

Budapest, St. Stephen Statue – Plotagraph Here’s another Platograph I threw together in under 10 minutes while having my morning coffee. The original image is an HDR shot from my stay in Budapest last year. I did this in the morning before heading out to work and wanted to toss it out there quick 🙂 I […]