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Review: LED Headlamp
I've written in the past about having a variety of flashlights and when I came across this headlamp, I had to give it a try. I actually stumbled upon it from a spammy ad for a similar product; given that there were a number of products that looked identical, I decided to purchase the cheapest with the idea that they all came from the same factory and I was probably correct.
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Relying on the cloud for home automation and monitoring
When I started getting into home automation 9 years ago, I decided to go with Z-Wave devices as it had the largest range of devices I could integrate into a system. Z-Wave communicates locally with a hub for automation and doesn't rely on the cloud to work. At the time I made this choice, there weren't many options let alone ones that relied on the cloud or apps to work. Fast forward a few years and there are a number of proprietary systems and apps that won't work without a connection to the cloud. This, of course, causes problems when the Internet is down, the provider is down, or the provider has gone out of business. Luckily my setups have never relied on the cloud (they have had some integrations for notifications and such, but the basic automations have been local).
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Eating my own words (again)
I've spent a little less than half my career self employed and the other half working for companies, so I'd like to think I know something about the pros and cons of both types of work. In the last two companies I worked, I said at the end of my tenure that I'd never work for anyone again and would always be self employed. That didn't work out for a number of reasons causing me to eat my words.
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Fixing Battery Drain in Kwikset Locks
Almost 10 years ago I installed Kwikset Z-Wave locks on our doors. They had been working well for years, but I noticed that the batteries drained faster than I had expected. I attributed this to buying refurbished or b stock locks and just tried to get batteries that lasted longer. Last December I decided to replace the locks with new ones that hopefully drained the batteries slower.