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Review: Luminoodle
Earlier this summer, I saw a deal on Woot.com for an LED strip light called Luminoodle. The strip lights are powered by USB (which as people that have been around me know is basically a requirement for all devices that I take camping or on trips), but don't include a battery (unless you purchase their battery). There are a ton of knock offs on Amazon, but I figured I'd get the one that is considered the original.
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Review: Woodmark Hotel - Kirkland, WA
This past summer, my family visited Seattle. I have a cousin that lives in Kirkland and offered to help us find a place to stay. She found a deal on Groupon for a local hotel that is highly rated, the Woodmark Hotel. The Groupon deal was decent and the hotel looked a step up from the normal places we stay, so I booked a garden view room for 4 nights.
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Fixing the Vizio SB36512-F6 Soundbar
For a number of years, I've had a Vizio 5.1 soundbar which worked reasonably well. It was connected to my TV via an optical cable. The only real issue I had with it was that I had to use an IR remote to control the volume. Luckily the Apple TV remote has the ability to send IR commands to control the volume. This worked OK, but always required me to aim the remote at the soundbar and press multiple times if I wasn't aligned with it. Last year when Apple said it was adding Dolby Atmos to the Apple TV 4K, I was intrigued. While the room my TV is in isn't ideal with Atmos, I wanted to give it a try. My current soundbar, of course, wouldn't handle Atmos. I saw the Vizio SB36512-F6 on sale at Costco and picked it up.
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All In with Home Assistant
I've spent parts of the last 9 months playing with Home Assistant and have written about some of my adventures. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to go all in with Home Assistant and ditch my Vera. I bought an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle and starting moving all my devices over to it. Within a few days, I had all my devices moved over and unplugged my Vera. Everything was running great on my Raspberry Pi B, but I noticed that the History and Logbook features were slow. I like looking at the history to look at temperature fluctuations in the house.