Feel free to share this article TinkerTry.com/lowerbill with your friends and family. Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post or video. I do not have any financial affiliation with utility companies, and I don't make any commissions from you using the electric rate shopping link featured in this…
Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post or video. Both are intended to highlight the benefits of SPAN by featuring a SPAN representative's technical presentation, two of Connecticut's SPAN customers, and an electrician who installed them. Presentation (PDF) Tap the image above to open up the full…
Official Passive House certification takes at least full year of operation and monitoring to become official, but it's a pretty safe bet that Hotel Marcel will meet that goal. Read onward and watch the video to learn how! Photo courtesy of beckerandbecker.com. Notice the large solar canopies…
Here's Matt's popular new video with over half a million views in its first week alone. It features a wonderful set of animations that really drive his points home in a powerful way, in a small amount of your valuable time. Feel free to leave your comments below this article or his video. Enjoy!…
On April 14 2022, Insteon ceased all sales and service operations and shut off their cloud, as was first covered by Stacey on IoT here. Contrary to some very dire looking headlines, this cloud service suspension didn't actually brick all existing devices, and many simple devices like light switches…
It's already been 5 years since my article about the first generation Ring Video Doorbell Pro: My Ring Video Doorbell story starts a new chapter with Ring Video Doorbell Pro Apr 29 2016 and it's been in daily use on my home ever since. After moving from a 16V to 24V transformer when first…
Correction, it's important to read what eero says about their built-in speed test: If you'd like to run a speed test on your client devices (phones, computers, laptops, etc.) to test your network speeds, there are many available resources, including www.speedtest.net. We typically check more than…
Unfortunately, the mFi line got to the end of the road back in 2017, see is MFI dead?. That doesn't mean it doesn't mean it stopped working, but support sure is gone. This is unfortunate, and the Ubiquiti name is still generally beloved, it's just that this particular product line has run out of…
Image from Palo Alto Online, click/tap to view the excellent source article. December 2022 Update - For folks buying one of the more recent models that are unfortunately quite a bit louder than my 2019 unit's 49dB specification (which I verified in my video below), I have a very helpful article for…
This article is a work-in-progress, please come back and refresh. Shop for the Ring Stick Up Cam on Amazon. If you find value in the article and/or video below, please consider using one of these links when buying your own Ring Stick Up Cam, available in black or white with wired, solar, and…
If you find value in the article and/or video below, please consider using one of these links when buying your own Ring Alarm Home Security System, available now on Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from (non-affiliate-link) ring.com. My first Ring products were the Ring Video Doorbell and the Ring…
This article was originally intended for my audience at The Greater Boston Network Users Group at their July 11th meetup. Until I'm able to do a complete configuration walk through, this spot in a recent "Network Enthusiast" EdgeRouter video I created gives you a good look at how DNS is…
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite Available at Amazon, B&H, and Newegg for under $90 USD. Which EdgeRouters? There are other members of the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter family that use this same v1.9.1 firmware, so this article likely applies to those folks as well, including: ERLite-3 and ERPoe-5 ER-8,…
The information in this article is subject to change through year end. Press Ctrl+F5 to refresh your browser, to be sure you're viewing the latest info & images. Most of the on-sale items featured in this article are about products I've blogged about extensively. None are perfect, but they are…
In case you hadn't spotted this yet, Ring made an announcement on their blog: #AlwaysHome, Even from Your Desktops May 02 2016 by Yul at Ring featuring a nice functionality overview of the free apps, and download links for the Windows and Mac App stores. I've been using the Windows version on…
The eero 3 Pack is available at Amazon, Best Buy, or eero for ~$500 USD. The Luma 3 pack is available at Amazon, Best Buy, or Luma for ~$400 USD. Backstory It's been 3 years since my family moved up to 802.11ac with the careful decision to go with the Linksys EA6900 AC1900 Dual-Band Wi-Fi router.…
Ever wonder if there's an affordable power strip that you could add to your home network that would give you insight into the power usage of up to 8 devices, and allow remote power on/off operations? If you're willing to tolerate a bit of initial setup pain that requires a back-level Java and a…
There's a lot of great content coming up soon. To keep up to date, subscribe to the TinkerTry Weekly digest. My home's ecobee3 smart thermostat, 1 year later After Nest, what came next? The ecobee3 thermostat, with remote room motion and temperature sensors. Here's my latest updates on my 1 year…
It's been a bit of a rough week for IoT. On a recent Home Gadget Geeks podcast, I was lamenting the fact that home WiFi routers don't yet have a way to isolate all your cloud connected IoT gear off onto their own subnet, since such consumer tech tends to eventually succumb to various firmware…
April 20 2022 Urgent Update - Insteon ceased all sales and service operations abruptly in mid April of 2022, as covered by arstechnica here. Their abrupt closure left customers without access to their hubs to change any settings, myself included. While smarthome.com hasn't been taken offline yet, I…
Updates to this article appear below. Order The ecobee3 with homekit is available at Apple Store, Amazon, Best Buy, ecobee shop, Home Depot, and Lowe's. Review If you have multiple members of your household that are home at various times of the day, then you likely have some familiarity with…
April 20 2022 Urgent Update - Insteon ceased all sales and service operations abruptly in mid April of 2022, as covered by arstechnica here. Their abrupt closure left customers without access to their hubs to change any settings, myself included. While smarthome.com hasn't been taken offline yet, I…
April 20 2022 Urgent Update - Insteon ceased all sales and service operations abruptly in mid April of 2022, as covered by arstechnica here. Their abrupt closure left customers without access to their hubs to change any settings, myself included. While smarthome.com hasn't been taken offline yet, I…
April 20 2022 Urgent Update - Insteon ceased all sales and service operations abruptly in mid April of 2022, as covered by arstechnica here. Their abrupt closure left customers without access to their hubs to change any settings, myself included. While smarthome.com hasn't been taken offline yet, I…
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. So far, Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh looking a little better for 2024. More cores, but still just PCIe Gen4 and DDR4. Looking ahead, I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm. I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when Pat was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
