Every once and a while you encounter a device that delivers on the "plug and play" promise. Circle is a parental control device that requires no changes to your network. You plug it in to power, ethernet and install a mobile app and you are on your way to protecting your children and gaining insight into their device usage.
Read MoreWifi has been with us for a very long time now. I'm fortunate that my house is wired for ethernet, which means I have generally had a glorious blanket of high speed internet everywhere... well almost.
For my family though, that's another matter. Wifi is infuriating to get everywhere in the house. These days with printers, and tablets and Alexa, Sonos and other devices, it's really critical that you have Wifi signal everywhere in your house.
However, the standard tech out there does not solve for this. I have tried every kind of wifi range extender and other things to solve this problem over the years and only been frustrated by the results.
Being away from their homes, and being "tech support" further complicated this.
To make matters worse, my own wifi needs have grown to require wifi to blanket the outside of my house to power things like my Ring Doorbell, Outdoor Dropcams and Sprinkler System. Heck, I also needed wifi in my garage for the Tesla! In addition, wifi has gotten faster over the years, and I also wanted the best / fastest Wifi everywhere. 802.11ac is the newest wifi standard, and with my 120 MBps internet service, I want all that data speed to get to my devices.
To date, the gold standard in simplicity, reliability and ease of use (manage from your phone) is Apple's Airport devices. But no more. Enter the new kids on the block, eero and luma.
Read MoreIn the category of stuff you never think about are your measuring scoops. A few years ago, I found these cool magnetic measuring scoops that I love.
Read MoreAs I write this on Vashon Island I am enjoying a great cup of coffee. If you have read my post on how I make coffee, you'll know that I like pour over and when traveling will take a Hario V60 cone withs some paper filters. On this trip I brought a Chemex 6 cup pour over to satisfy the coffee needs of 3 people. I greatly prefer pour over than french press for producting a cleaner, less gritty cup with easier clean up (just toss the filter and grounds into the compost or trash).
The key part of any pour over system is a digital scale. This is because a pour over uses very simple weight measurements to dose the right amount of coffee and water.
The math is very simple. 55g of coffee for every 1000g of water (or 1000ml of water since water volume and weight in metric is the same).
So for 3 cups of coffee, I will use 50g of coffee and 900ml of water in the Chemex 6-cup, or half of that if I just want one large cup for me.
Recenly I purchased a great little travel scale, the Joseph Joseph TriScale.
Read MoreIn my quest to make everything in my home "smart" I recently got a smart sprinkler controller, the Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller.
Read MoreOne of the things I love about my Cook's Illustrated Magazine Subscription are the product reviews and recommendations. This past month, they reviewed a really interesting product: a Chainmail Scrubber.
Read MoreI'm going to start a series of app reviews. My first post is on a Journaling app called DayOne. Lora and I have been using DayOne for a few years now to document our kids growing up. We also document our travel and a few other things. The reality of our photos these days is that they are incredible tools for photographing and documenting life's memories and moments, but the easy of capture means that are camera rolls are a jumbled mess of pictures mixing things, people, places, documents and so on. No one wants to organize this and we are a few years out from amazing AI to clean all this up for us. Even if we did have that amazing AI, I find that I like adding a few bits of text here and there to augment memories, places and events.
DayOne is an absolutely awesome app for doing all this stuff and I really appreciate how it gives us a diary of our lives.
Read MoreI previously reviewed the August Smart Lock and gave it 3 stars. Back in that review I mentioned the following issues with the lock
In the time I owned the original August, issues #1 and #2 were solved through better software. In that time the software has really matured a lot.
But August released a new version of their lock, and this review is about that.
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